Earlier this year, the ACCC got Vodafone to agree to offer better conditions for phone warranties. Now it has struck a similar deal with Telstra, ensuring that customers who buy a phone on a two-year contract have warranty coverage for the life of the contract.
Telstra plans to offer two-year warranties on all phones sold under two-year contracts (it already does so for BlackBerry, HTC and ZTE models). The ACCC is now trying to negotiate a similar deal with Optus.
There’s one big exception to the rule: Apple. The ACCC says it “continues to have concerns” about iPhone warranties — Apple won’t let carriers undertake any iPhone servicing and only offers a 12-month warranty as standard, a situation the ACCC has said it “tolerates/” but which isn’t necessarily legally defensible. (Apple’s behaviour this week regarding daylight savings alarm faults is a reminder that it doesn’t always place customer issues at the top of its priority list.)
I would argue this is unfair to other phone manufacturers, Apple must be included in this rule.
Why should HTC, RIM and others be required to keep spare parts around for 2 years when Apple is not?
This exception to Apple is, in my mind, giving them an unfair competitive advantage – they don’t need to spend money to keep parts around when the competition does.
Or… considering the nature of the Aus. Govt. they could put a tariff on Apples phone and roll that money into spare parts/repair services for iphone users.
simon: we get all our blackberries directly through telstra, and they come with a one year warranty.
If they had this ‘two year’ option running two years ago, we would have returned about 40% of our bold 9000’s for external speaker issues. as it happened, we only returned half that.
(note: I’m generally happy with blackberries, but the bold 9000 had some incredibly frequent issues.)
$1000 for a cell phone, i expect it to work for 4 years, statutory warranty all the way, Apple be damned.