READERS' FORUM:Have your say
Poor Annie West has been driven to near distraction by Apple in recent weeks. Her daughter is studying in the Institute of Art and Design in Dún Laoghaire and is “up to her ears in work” and “student-broke”. Not the best time to break her Apple MacBook Pro, then? Annie went to the Apple website and saw refurbished Macs selling for cheaper than new.
“They were being sold by Apple so I assumed all would be well,” she writes. She bought one. “It arrived. It didn’t t work. No power, nothing.” She says customer support tried to help but couldn’t so they agreed to take it back and issue a refund.
“Four days went by and nothing happened so I rang Apple who then told us that collection had never been initiated.” It took another four days for a courier to arrive to collect it. “I don‘t live in the middle of an ice floe,” she writes. The refund took another five days to process after which she rang Apple to complain. She explained that the service was far from what she had come to expect “and after boring the man to tears about it he agreed a goodwill gesture of a €100 discount off the purchase of a new MacBook”.
The order for a new computer was put through. The price quoted was €1,126.51 from Apple’s educational site. While her daughter was doing the order, Annie thought to herself that she had seen MacBookPros cheaper than that.
“So off I went and had a look and sure enough I saw cheaper on other sites. So we called Apple back and pretended to be a new customer. Asked for a quote on the exact same item, educational discount, no bells, no whistles, same as before. Quoted €1,079 by Apple.”
She e-mailed the company again and told the person who had offered her the discount of the price discrepancy. “At which point he sighed a virtual sigh of exasperation and reduced the total yet again. So what we should have been paying was, if my calculations are correct, €979.” Apple then took the full amount out of her bank account, all €1126.51 of it.
“Only when I contacted them yet again did they say ‘oh well, it’s common knowledge that discounts are added after the item is delivered’. News to me. We’re told it will take ‘three or four business days’. Is this normal procedure? And the tin hat: There’s still no sign of the Mac.”
Costly insurance details
James Carroll bought car insurance online through bestquote.ie last week. They require written proof of his named driver experience which was on his fiancee’s policy with its4women.ie.
“I just called them and they are looking for €5 to issue the letter. This is ridiculous!” He says he was even told that the charge would apply if it was e-mailed to him. He sent us a subsequent e-mail saying the company had relented and agreed to e-mail him the letter free of charge.
He is waiting to see if bestquote.ie will accept the e-mailed version.
UPC’s loss of channels spoils a reader’s viewing
Colin Rogan is just one of several UPC customers who contacted us in connection with UPC’s recent dropping of several channels.
“I was surprised that on April 1st UPC dropped ITV2, ITV3, and ITV4 channels without notice,” he writes. “They say that they were in negotiations with ITV to renew the contract on these channels when it expired on March 31st but these failed.”
Several programmes on these channels, such as ITV2's Kerry Katona: The Next Chapter are not available elsewhere.
He said it is “very unsatisfactory” that many series that were in the middle of being watched on these channels are now not available and he says it is “a concern that other channels that are currently part of the UPC service may also similarly be dropped without notice”.
