The sad transformation of a we company to a they company
: Isn’t it ridiculous that Apple had to settle a class-action suit on its crappy iPod batteries, treating customers as enemies.
18 responses to “The sad transformation of a we company to a they company”
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I have had a 500MB MP3 player for a year and a half nnow. It uses 1 AAA battery and gets 10-12 hours per battery. If it goes dead on the plane, I can replace it.
I was recently given an I-Pod. Twelve hours? Yeah, right. I get, under optimumly perfect conditions (I turn it on and let it play, no changing from album to album) I get 8.
If I had paid for my I-Pod, I would return it.
As it is, I’ll use it in my car with a charger and continue using my MPIO for anything that requires portability.
I think the problem with I-Pod is the same problem as with the rest of Apple. A closed system. My God, we can’t have users actually chaning their own batteries, can we?
And don’t get me started on that steaming pile of crap I-tunes, either. Why should an album that I download cost as much or more than a hard CD?
Why can’t I download it in MP3? I can certainlty convert the song/album to an MP3 by burning a CD then ripping the CD. So why make me go to the trouble?
I bought 1 song from I-Tunes, just to see how it works. That’s it.
They treat me like this on small stuff like I-Pods and I-Tunes and expect me to shell out big bucks for a computer? I don’t think so.
I have no love whatever for Apple.
John -
my comment has nothing to do w/ the settlement itself, it has to do with the premise of the post.
Apple has been settling suits like this for over a decade.
Talk about misleading headlines. -
OMIGOD john Henry!
Dl’ing AAC instead of MP3!
A crime!
Jeez,if you don’t like AAC format don’t buy from itunes store.
Buy your CD and rip it into MP3, then you have best of both worlds. It’s called choice.
Ipods do load mp3’s. -
Yes, of course I-Pods load mp3’s. I have several thousand on mine.I even know how to convert Apple tunes to mp3s as I said in my comment. My question was why does Apple make me jump through these hoops?
I might even buy from I-Tunes if 1) They downloaded as MP3’s and 2) the
price were a bit more reasonable. Say about 1/2 what I pay for a physical CD in a
store.
John -
I agree with Stev – why is it rediculous for a company to settle a class-action lawsuit? This isn’t a new thing for Apple, and just a cost-of-business. What do you mean they “had” to settle – what other course of action would you suggest to Apple? Do you hold their stock? If so, what would be in your best interest as a shareholder? How exactly is it treating their customers as enemies (customers who so dearly want to be treated as “us” not “them” that they chose to sue Apple)?
Geesh. -
Tony: They should have dealt with customers’ legitimate complaints with a faulty product. Simple.
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But how could they have dealt with those complaints? It’s not really a faulty product. Yeah, the battery life isn’t as advertised. Show me a laptop that gets the advertised battery life, or any other rechargable product for that matter. And iPod batteries are user-replaceable – I replaced mine with ease (did it myself) for $30 and now get 15+ hours at least.
Besides, isn’t settling the lawsuit better than fighting it tooth and nail? They definitely could have won the lawsuit — it would have cost them two arms and a leg in legal fees, but they could definitely have won. If you take a brand-new iPod, load the right files on it, it will run for the advertised life. But like any other battery-powered device, entropy sets in after that first time, and the battery gets weaker and weaker. That’s not Apple’s fault.
Apple is a lawsuit target because they are popular and profitable. Not because they deceive customers. -
I bet Apple turns a profit. How many people are going to just spend $50? And it isn’t like it is redeemable at your local Save and Gay.
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RE: Apple forcing AAC on iTunes Buyers.
Is anyone really that stupid today? Apple wasn’t the force behind AAC and DRM, it’s the RIAA. Given Apple’s move to open source, and since the iPod came before the iTunes music store and AAC, it’s pretty hard to blame them for the being required to sell DRM music. Imagine how much more music and players they would sell if the RIAA would let them sell MP3’s instead of DRM’d music?
As for being a “closed system”, Dude, it’s a fucking hard drive. Takes more power than a flash chip. Have you ever compared battery life on a digital camera that uses AA batteries? Try using alkaline batteries in it, instead of NiMH. You’ll get about half the life, if you are lucky.
So, continue using your little flash drive unit that runs on a AA battery. And I’ll keep using iTunes and my 5th iPod and live with the fact that I can “only” carry a few thousand songs around with me.
Oh, and lest we forget, the market came through with a replacement battery. $29 if you want to do it yourself. And it has twice the capacity of the original.
Anyway, this is what we get for having more lawyers than engineers. Engineers understand that batteries will eventually fail, lawyers are only looking to make a buck off a stupid class action law suit that should have been dismissed. But, the judge was once a laywer too. Start dismissing stupid lawsuits and eventually, you don’t have any judging to do. It’s all a great scam that allows lawyers to profit from “somebody’s to blame” society. -
And the lawyers get a cool 2.5 million for this settlement.
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Wow looks like apple has lots o’ battery info on its site these days… :)
http://www.apple.com/batteries/ipods.html
http://www.apple.com/batteries/
“Coincidence? I think not.” -
“Coincidence? I think not.”
dude, those pages have been there 4 a long time.
your point is? -
Well apple was originally sued in 2003 and the pages appeared around June 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.apple.com/batteries/
so… my point is Apple has done like a good corp should and put up some user-friendly info so future buyers aren’t shocked by zer new toy’s batteries dying. (admittedly not a very important point… :) -
1) Every online music store only lets you download in a format that will only play on their own player. iTunes uses AAC, RealPlayer uses their own, Musicmatch uses WMA which you would THINK would play anywhere, but it can only be played on (up to) 5 machines you have REGISTERED with Musicmatch. I don’t know if it’s because of the RIAA, but it sucks no matter who you deal with.
2) All of the iPod users saying: “Ooh, big inconvenience, I had to replace my battery for $30” obviously don’t get the point. You shouldn’t have to shell out $500 (or whatever) for an iPod AND later another $30 for a battery to get the advertised playing life of the original. Is it simple to fix? Yes. Should you have to fix it? No. Is Apple making money by charging you $30? ABSOLUTELY. -
It’s one reason why I absolutely refuse to buy an iPod because of this battery issue. And I still won’t buy one until they change the design to use easily reaplaceable batteries that I can get off the shelf at any hardware store.
And I have to agree that this was not a “frivolous” suit. This was a very faulty product (and still is) and people were being ripped off big time. I have a dimmer view of Apple because of this. -
> Is Apple making money by charging you $30? ABSOLUTELY.
Uh, Apple doesn’t sell replacement batteries. Mine came from a 3rd party.
I still don’t understand what Apple did wrong here. Do you all think they have some super-secret nuclear power plant for the iPod that they’re hiding away and refusing to sell? Do you think that they have fuel cells ready to do? They put the best damn battery they could find in there, and they advertise the maximum possible life, just like every other device manufacturer. Batteries fail. It’s unavoidable.
If you don’t like it, don’t buy one. That’s fine. But I don’t understand the attitude of people who buy something and then sue because it doesn’t live up to their unrealistic expectations. If the battery fails completely within the warranty period, Apple will replace it. If it’s outside warranty, no company would replace it.
If the iPod used “easily replaceable batteries”, by which I assume you mean AAs or something, it would last about 1/2 an hour on one set. The battery they used is the best trade-off between cost and capacity. -
The original Ipod battery crapped out completely about 18 months after purchase. They fixed that, and now have what seems like a fair replacement policy. What I don’t like is that they don’t actually fix your ipod and send it back to you: they send you some random “refurbished” ipod that you then have to put your songs back on. With the inability to move songs from the ipod to the computer easily this is a huge pain in the ass. I mean, sure, I can muck around in the hidden directories on the ipod in windows, but I still don’t like it. Plus the ipod uses a weird naming/sorting convention.
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Apple sucks.
All you folks that have drunk deeply of the I-Pod Kool-Aid, have fun spending too much for batteries. Y’all don’t even know when you’re getting screwed.
