No, no sarcasm sadly.
The EU has very strict laws too and Apple post them very clearly — https://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/.
The laptop was purchased in the UK (still in the EU at the moment!) and my ‘local store’ was a Spanish store (in the EU). It didn’t make any difference.
The same EU laws cover both countries (although sometimes parts of the statutory EU laws are wrapped up in local laws), and Apple even post a link on that page to ec.europa.eu/consumers/ecc/index_en.htm
But despite that, I was told Apple Spain wouldn’t deal with the laptop under consumer laws. And if I needed to do that I’d have to go back to the UK.
Of course, you would presume that is nonsense for two reasons. Firstly, why would they do that when it’s the same EU law? And secondly, given the fact they knew there was a problem, why force me to take it to another store at all? Just tell distribution to ship a new one. I know they have telephones.
This is the same store, the Spanish one, where I was told ‘there is the law and there is Apple policy’. And he didn’t mean that in a good way.
They really played the ‘we’re a different company’ card. It’s true of course, from a legal point of view. Apple stores in Spain are run by a company called ‘Apple Retail Spain S.L.’ and Apple stores in the UK are Apple Retail UK Limited. I haven’t gone to the trouble to check the ownership of those companies, but I think we all know they are owned by, er, Apple…
They either think I’m stupid and/or they have no respect for the law or customer support.
But even Alasdair, the very good senior telephone advisor I was dealing with, told me if I wanted to ‘try’ to have this handled under consumer law I’d have to take it back to the original store in the UK.
And this was when they fully accepted there was a manufacturing/design flaw with this model. There was no question at all they had sold me a brand new £3,300 machine that was faulty from day one. That was accepted by Apple. But if I wanted to exercise my UK/EU legal entitlements they were going to force me to fly back to the UK and start the discussion again.
As I’d just had my first child, the last thing I wanted to do was fly back to the UK, leave my wife and baby, just to have to argue with another Apple store (and having dealt with that store before, I know that is what would happen).
I’m glad Apple in Australia seem ok, but in this case they haven’t been in Europe.
