Apple Charging Policy

shortchanged_2

The problem is that you never own an Apple product, they own you.

Big_Graeme

shortchanged wrote: »

The problem is that you never own an Apple product, they own you.

Wrong. Again.

shopbot

thescouselander wrote: »

I think everyone has lost sight of the fact the drive is the Op's property. It should be returned to them no questions asked.

Setting aside the fact it's an Apple product and contains data (accessible or not)...

If you take a faulty product to a shop you don't generally get to keep the product. I am pretty sure legally that the drive isn't the OP's.

It's the reverse of the sales process. He gave money to receive a product from Apple. If that item is faulty he can have his money back in exchange for the drive, a repair, or a replacement. The word replacement is literally that. Apple replace a faulty drive with a new drive.

The OP paid for one drive. If he wants two drives (the old and new one) then Apple will want to charge him for the second drive.

SB

securityguy

shopbot wrote: »

Setting aside the fact it's an Apple product and contains data (accessible or not)...

If you take a faulty product to a shop you don't generally get to keep the product. I am pretty sure legally that the drive isn't the OP's.

To be fair to the OP, if you go into a store with an out of warranty product and ask for a repair, "can I have the broken bits?" isn't on the face of it unreasonable. To return to the garage analogy, if you were vaguely nervous that Kwikfit were up to no good you might ask to have the brake disks that they assured you were down to the wear limit chucked in the footwell, so you can reassure yourself they were worn out. When parts are done on exchange (common examples are steering racks, struts and particularly gearboxes and engines) it's made very clear to you that that is the deal, and that (a) you don't get to keep the broken bits and (b) what is being fitted won't be new (although the distinction between a new gearbox and a rebuilt gearbox is somewhat nuanced anyway).

What seems to be happening here is that Apple's price for a disk swap is on an exchange basis, and they put the failed drive back into the distribution channel for some reason. I confess I didn't know that: I've had Apple swap drives under warranty (when I wouldn't expect to get them back) but whenever I've done out-of-warranty swaps I've paid an independent to do it, and either taken the failed drive myself to dispose of or to RMA.

What further complicates it is that the normal reason you want the failed drive back is security, and these days (surely?) the solution for any data more more than passing sensitivity is to have been running disk encryption in the first place. Indeed, that's a major part of the reason why disk encryption is used on secure systems in locked data centres: it makes disposal of failed drives easier because, commonly, properly sued encryption is regarded as reducing the impact level by two. But the OP's problem is in not having backups, so they want to feed the disk back to a recovery company.

Apple should be transparent about how the pricing works. The OP should either pay up and regard it as a lesson in why backups are a good idea, or go to an independent who won't change as much for the labour. C'est la.

shopbot

securityguy wrote: »

To be fair to the OP, if you go into a store with an out of warranty product and ask for a repair, "can I have the broken bits?" isn't on the face of it unreasonable.

Apologies I'd missed the update mid thread that said it wasn't in warranty. I'd was confused when the OP said that Apple wanted £ to give him his old drive back. I had thought it was in warranty.

So if he is buying a new drive and installation from them then I would think that it's not unreasonable to ask for HD drive back. However it sounds like the price includes agreeing to some T & C that preclude that if I'm reading the thread correctly.

SB

stuart07970

Listen up OP

Backing up is ridiculously easy on the Mac, it's beyond me when people don't bother.

First there's Time Machine (which is built in to the operating system for gods sake) which is an automated INCREMENTAL type back up. Then there's SuperDuper! (Or CarbonCopyCloner) which is a BOOTABLE CLONE type.

YOU NEED BOTH - AND THEN KEEP AN OFFSITE CLONE ASWELL

Here ends the lesson!

Copey1977

Just as an update to the original post:

Picked the repaired Mac up Friday with the old harddrive. Questioned why it wasnt listed on the repair quote (the price of the new hard drive had increased) im guessing the response will be it was orginally subsidised based on the return of the old hard drive - however thats not how it was originally positioned to me.

Secondly i took the old drive to a friend who works in IT to have a look at the disk. On plugging into a PC the drive was immediatley visable and all my data was there and now retrieved FOC. (thanks for all the reminders on backing up) he also ran some basic diagnostics on the drive - all of which came back healthy. Now as you can tell im not a massively technical, but is there scope that they may have misdiagnosed the problem?

bod1467

Does the computer work OK now?

Perhaps it was just a MBR issue (or whatever the Mac equivalent is). If yes then it does sound like a misdiagnosis, or at least a lazy diagnosis.

gjchester

Copey1977 wrote: »

Secondly i took the old drive to a friend who works in IT to have a look at the disk. On plugging into a PC the drive was immediatley visable and all my data was there and now retrieved FOC. (thanks for all the reminders on backing up) he also ran some basic diagnostics on the drive - all of which came back healthy. Now as you can tell im not a massively technical, but is there scope that they may have misdiagnosed the problem?

If the drive is accessible on another device, then the issue may be elsewhere in the system, possibly power supply or the motherboard and a failing controller. I'm guessing they did some SMART checks, they given indications of health but that all, an early warning, drives can (and do) die without warning)

Drives not being seen are 99% of the time down to a drive failure, its one of few moving parts in any system and more prone to failure than the actual circuits, and generally the first step is to replace the drive (as its the usual culprit).

Its possible its just one of those things, but watch the mac carefully, if there are any odd signs it may be the macs system boards or PSU is on the way out.

securityguy

Copey1977 wrote: »

Just as an update to the original post:

Picked the repaired Mac up Friday with the old harddrive. Questioned why it wasnt listed on the repair quote (the price of the new hard drive had increased) im guessing the response will be it was orginally subsidised based on the return of the old hard drive - however thats not how it was originally positioned to me.

Secondly i took the old drive to a friend who works in IT to have a look at the disk. On plugging into a PC the drive was immediatley visable and all my data was there and now retrieved FOC. (thanks for all the reminders on backing up) he also ran some basic diagnostics on the drive - all of which came back healthy. Now as you can tell im not a massively technical, but is there scope that they may have misdiagnosed the problem?

It's possible. it's also possible the drive was on its way out, and will work for a while after being powered off for a while, but will stop working fairly soon once it warms up. A common trick for recovering data from suspect drives it to put it in the freezer for a few hours, then fire it up: often they work for a while, long enough to read the data off. That'll be especially true in a Mac as although the disk bay on an iMac is perfectly within the specifications for the drive it is at the upper end thermally, so drives which are unhappy in an iMac might work for a while laid out loose on a desk hung on the end of test cables.

You might like to use something like iStat Pro to look at the drive temperatures; it's also possible that you've got a slow/dusty/whatever fan.