As you are all aware of, I own an iPod Touch. What you may not be aware of is that it was one of those that had serial numbers starting with 9C737. If you don’t know what that means, google can help. This is quite a problematic issue, and so I’ve been harassing Apple [NASDAQ: AAPL] since pretty much as soon as I got it. However, due to lack of Apple Store near me (I can either go across 3 hours time zone difference to visit the one in country; or hop the border for the one down in the states), it was never resolved.
Well, that all changed.
Today, May 24th, 2008, Apple opened a new Apple Store location near where I live. Well, I say near, but it is actually about 1.5 hours public transist spanning three transist zones… Let’s just say its a lot nearer than any other locations ;)
Anyways, so I walked in today, and tried to locate an iPod Touch in store… this wasn’t hard at all considering I’ve counted at least 30 of them on display (not an exaggeration)… the hard part was to locate an open one because there are so many people in the store, almost all of them were being demo’ed / played with at the time. So there I was, looking puzzled and lost for a bit, a sales quickly approached me and asks if I’ve been helped.
I told him that I’m in today to see the iPod Touch — without telling him my true intentions, of course — and if he could locate one for me. He was a nice guy and guided me to one of the iPod Touch further back in the store which I’ve missed. I asked if I could play around with it for a bit, and of course, he answered “Yeah, go for it”.
I loaded up the preferences, and max’ed out its brightness, disabled auto brightness detection / adjustion, and loaded up Safari. By now, I think he knows I had a purpose, and so he asked me if there’s anything particular I’m looking for. I smiled, and pulled out my iPod Touch from my pocket, and started to explain “… well, you see, I have an iPod Touch, too. heh. And I’ve actually had this since launch”. He seemed puzzled as I continued “… the unit works great, but it has one issue, and I haven’t been able to get it sorted. It’s a bad contrast issue with all the 9C737 batch… it’s kind of hard to explain, but just wait, I’m loading up a webpage with some images on it”. And that’s when he understood the reason of my visit.
I loaded up the famous LCD Test Images and showed him their unit and my unit. The difference was very obvious… any untrained eye can identify the difference between the two displays in a matter of seconds, if not lesser.
He told me that while he wants to help me replace it, I’d have to speak to an “Apple Genius” about it, and in order to do so, I’d need to book an appointment. I told him that I have no plans for today (which is true), and so we went ahead and booked an appointment — the first one available was 3:00PM. Great, now where am I gonna go kill 3 hours’ time?
Let’s fast forward, as where I went to kill the three hours is not what this story is about… leave a comment if you really want to know where to kill 3 hours in downtown Vancouver.
3PM rolled around and it took them a bit to finally get to me. I talked with a great Apple Genius (name witheld for privacy reasons), after I explained the issue to him, he was very skeptical about the issue. He played around with the home screen and looked from several angles, and told me it looked fine. I told him that it is not so visible when you are just looking at the home screen, is best identified when comparing two iPod Touches, and that since there are so many in store, we can just go to one of them and compare there. He pulled out his iPod Touch from his pocket — heh, seems like everyone likes to hide one of these things in their pocket — and started to compare the home screen again. I then told him that it is not so easy to tell even as is, but with special test images, it is very obvious; and so, we made use of the public wifi in Apple Store, and tried the test screen on our devices… the result was clear, and he instantly saw the difference.
Moral of the long story? If you purchase a device, found it to be defective, and bring it in to Apple after 8 months of use, they’ll replace you a new one (assuming you can prove it). The whole exchange took no more than 1/2 hr to complete, and now I’m very happy with a brand new iPod Touch after 8 months of use. Thank you Apple!
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