In And Out The Apple Store

My wife’s 18-month iPhone 4 didn’t age well. The microphone was shot, meaning she had to shout at the top of her lungs on every phone call, and it was suffering from the dreaded ‘sticky’ Home button.

Hearing all of these “Apple replaced my iPhone free-of-charge” stories on a daily basis, I figured we should at least speak to someone at our local Apple Store to assess our options.

When we arrived, we immediately spoke to someone who asked about what was wrong with it, how long we had had it and whether it was backed up. Upon sharing the answers, the assistant took the phone out back to perform ‘tests’ to see if he could replicate the issue.

Three minutes later, he returns. “The tests are coming up fine and it’s not worth running a software test as the problems you have described are hardware issues.”

The assistant asks whether we have insurance. We say its covered on the house insurance but we are loathed to claim as the phone is old and we are also due an upgrade from our operator.

He then mentions that we can swap the iPhone 4 for a like-for-like replacement, for a fee of £120. You don’t get the box, or a charger, but you walk out of the store with a new (tested and refurbished) iPhone, free from any hardware issues.

Knowing the new iPhone is months away and that we were likely to upgrade to the new device then, it took seconds to accept.

I made sure we utilised the Apple Store’s Wi-Fi connection to back-up all of my wife’s data and media to iCloud, two minutes later I had a brand new one in my hand connecting to the same network to pull that very same backup.

Six minutes after that, we left the store. Easy.

The £120 price point is a good one, it means we aren’t having to use our upgrade to get a new device that we don’t want, and it only takes 10 minutes to complete.

It’s completely different to the T-Mobile store we visited next. We were told that our upgrade would cost £150 for an iPhone 4S or a Galaxy S III (the latter I was told was a superior phone) and told that my wife’s original iPhone 4 was registered to someone other than her.

A phone call to customer service sees our monthly tariff reduced as a ‘sorry’, oh and a free upgrade to a Samsung Galaxy S III offered.