iPhone update

Well, the day of the iPhone price drop, I talked to someone at the Apple store (Okay, I know someone who works there, who, like many of the Apple employees was in the same boat as I was). That night he was somehow able to swing a refund of the $200 price difference. I think it was helpful that this all happened on the day of the price drop - the Apple stores were bombarded with people just like me, all wanting a refund. They didn't quite know how to handle it, and they gave a number of refunds that night. I think it helped if you were nice to them, as is true of pretty much any other case where you are a customer trying to get something from a company - a lot of people were not! Anyhow, so I ended up getting the refund on Wednesday night.

On Thursday, Apple announced that they would give a $100 store credit to others who had bought iPhones before the price drop.

While I was certainly super annoyed about the whole thing and felt a bit betrayed by the company, I don't know that I really felt like they OWED me something. I mean, as I said, when you buy technology soon after it comes out, you are going to pay the highest price for it. You know the price will go down, but you don't expect it to go down so much, so quickly. This sort of drop was pretty much unprecedented for Apple. I did feel though like they took advantage of their most loyal customers, which sucked. They basically confirmed that they were totally taking us for a ride with the original price of the iPhone.

So, even though the $100 credit is sort of nothing to them (if anything, it will bring in more money to them because what can you buy for $100 or less?), it was nice of them to quickly make an attempt to smooth things over. From a customer service standpoint, they did pretty well.