Day 37 - A letter to Apple

Dear Apple,

Now, I am a fan of your products, I have the set, customs officers who search my bags can often be heard to cry Apple Bingo when they sort through my bag - pad, pod, phone and Mac, bingo!

Don’t get me wrong I’m not some kind of Mac bore. I won’t witter on endlessly about how great Apple is compared to Windows, I won’t try to make things seem like an advantage when they clearly aren’t one. (‘Having no print screen button is an advantage because there are fewer buttons on your keyboard’, yes but having to nearly dislocate my fingers every time I press ctrl shift and 3 to take a print screen is slightly more inconvenient than having one more button on my keyboard.) Anyhow my email to you is not about that. My email today concerns my iPhone 5.

I bought my iPhone 5 in December 2012 and right from the outset it had the battery power of a super value battery you buy in a pound shop. You know when you buy 4000 of them for £1 that each battery is probably not going to last very long. But when you buy a phone for 600 pounds you expect a longer life than a may fly. My phone was like the first drumming bunny to die in the Duracell ads, powerless and weak, it was exhausted before I had even had chance to tell my Facebook friends about my new phone. 

This meant that you would often find me in airport toilets, or sitting on the floor in Starbucks, using the only socket I could find to charge my phone. (I once even unplugged a Samsung user when he wasn’t looking so I could charge my feeble battery.)
In December 2013 I took the phone back to the iStore in Cardiff and asked if there was anything they could do.

No - they said. There is no problem - they said. You are imagining it – they said. Upgrade to the latest iOS and it will all be fine - they said. 

Hmm imagining it was I.

So why is it that another 17 months later Apple have announced they will change the battery in my phone? Imagining it was I?

Now I still have that model, I stuck to it gravely, braving the strange looks as I tried to find somewhere to plug it in Tesco after it plummeted from 75% charge to zero in a blink of an Angry Bird’s eye. So I will belatedly benefit from your tardy admission of culpability. But I guess many people won’t, I guess many people gave up and bought a new one. Probably a new iPhone because once you’ve had an iPhone tearing yourself away is difficult. iPhones are like cocaine, expensive, easy to use and impossible to wean yourself off. If addiction means loyalty, you have the most loyal customers in the world. 

(Android phones are a bit like speed, cheaper, it does the job but there isn’t the wow factor of an Coke sorry Apple phone).

But will you compensate those who traded in the phones that you sold not fit for purpose?  Will you compensate me for the inconvenience of sitting on a tram with my computer open so I can recharge a phone that was fully charged just three games of Candy Crush and one hilarious selfie of me in a Fez earlier.

No of course you won’t, it is likely that you will say my phone is too damaged to have the battery replaced but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.

So thank you Apple, thank you for admitting your guilt. I just wish you’d done it 27 months ago.

Yours 

Gareth Davies 

Being Grumpy Professionally for 20 years. 

P.S. I am enclosing the photo of me in a Fez for your enjoyment.