Monday, December 20, 2010

dear Apple; fuck you

i have an iPhone 3Gs. i've head this one for about 1.5 years (after cracking the screen on my first on by dropping it on a marble floor in mexico).

i dont update the thing very often - there's not much point because i steam all my music, so theres no real need to sync the thing ever.

on saturday i finally update to iOS 4.2 or whatever - the one with multitasking. i had been putting this off for awhile because while its annoying not to be able to use a music-playing application like Rhapsody while also checking email, that frankly doesnt happen that often, and updating is a hassle. as soon as i updated, my phone stopped working.

if it goes idle for more than a minute or so, it just turns off. if its on, and being used, its slow, almost unusably slow. if its on and playing music, once the screen goes off, the music will start skipping. it is, in short, not usable for anything a phone or media player should be used for.

now remember, before update, everything is just fine, after update, no worky worky.

so i make an appointment at the genius bar, and go. about 10 minutes of waiting (no big deal, they run the place well), and i'm being help by my "genius". she's pleasant enough, i explain my problem, she sounds like she already has a few suspects in her head, takes my phone off to the back corner to run some diagnostics. so far, so good.

now the bad. she comes back and tells me that this is actually a hardware problem - something with the RAM. presumably some of the RAM is no good, and the phone is constantly trying to access it, etc etc and just shuts off. this didnt cause any problems before with the old version of the OS, but with the new software the problem is exacerbated and we get an unusable phone as a result.

reasonable enough. now i'm under contract with AT&T until march, and i have my eye on switching to Sprint with their version of the Samsung Galaxy phone - this one does 4G and has a real keyboard. hot stuff. so my ideal solution to this current problem? rollback the goddamn software update and give me my phone back, the way it was, for another months.

but thats not the way Apple does things. this is apparently impossible in Apple-land. I'm out of warranty. my options are:

a) spend $200 to get a refurbished phone, same as my old phone.
b) spend $200 to upgrade to the new iphone, attached to a new 2 year contract with AT&T.

so, to boil that down... their software update kills my phone, and i have to spend at least $200 to fix it.

i understand that the software problem is actually caused by an hardware problem - however that hardware problem was completely unnoticeable before the software update, and may have occurred AT ANY TIME, from when the phone rolled off the factory floor, all the way through the year i was under warranty, or any time after. i'd have had no way to notice the problem and get it fixed when it happened, until this software update, which renders my phone rather useless.

this from the company that has built a reputation on customer service (actually the customer service is quiet good, but this particular policy fucking sucks) and things "just working".

so, i'm pissed, and this is more than i needed to abandon apple forever.

i'm not entirely sure how to proceed. my current though is to get a Galaxy Tab, which i kinda want anyway, and have that fill in for all my non-strictly-phone functionality until my contract is up, at which point i'll get the Galaxy S as well. or perhaps i'll break the contract, i need to figure out which option is better financially. but one thing i do know? fuck. you. apple.


edit: oh, also, actually said by some apple guy to a customer while i was waiting: "well, physical damage to your ipod isnt covered under the warranty, but i'm gonna give you a new one anyway". and you fuckers cant kick me a refurbished outdated model for less than $200? fuck you.