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So we all had a good old chuckle last week about the woman in the US of A who bought an iPad in a parking lot … and it turned out to be made of wood. Ashley McDowell paid somewhere in the region of US$180 for the hunk o' junk after some gentlemen informed her that they had bought too many. While we feel for her — no one likes to be made a fool, after all — there are so many points at which this could have been averted.
• You realise that if someone tries to sell you something in the parking lot at McDonalds, it's probably, at best, stolen.
• You figure out that if they're trying to sell that something at half the RRP, something dodgy is going on.
• It dawns on you that if they are overly ready to knock that already ruinous price down to whatever you have in your wallet, they have more to gain than you do.
If all these steps pass you by, there is one final step: open the box on the spot. If you open it to find a block of wood, then congratulations! You now know, 100 per cent for sure, that you are being scammed and can politely request that the two gentlemen return your dollars.
Even buying an item in-store isn't a guarantee that you get what you paid for. Back in April this year, an unknown shopper bought what appeared to be a Samsung 500GB external drive in China. When it didn't work the way it should, he took it to a repair shop in Russia, to have the technicians bust it open, then bust out laughing. Inside was a single 125MB flash drive looping to overwrite previous files when it ran out of space.
But at least some effort was put into that last one. Look at what some poor chap got back in China in 2007, , thinking he was paying for several jiggabits worth of thumb drive.
Think that can only happen in China? Think again. This unique MacBook Pro was purchased in 2009 from a Best Buy in Texas. Customer Ryan was first perplexed, then vexed, when the Best Buy manager told him to "take it up with Apple" … presumably he was eventually able to at least reverse the credit card charges.
Then there was the who opened her iPod box to find … rocks. So back to store she went with her mum to be told that the two options were store credit or keep the rocks … oh, and they were fresh out of iPods. They finally located an iPod at another location, drove there to purchase it (since the employees refused to check the box before purchase), and opened it … yep, rocks.
Target still refused to issue a refund, so the pair ended up using their store credit on other things that were not rocks.
It ain't just Apple products. When Jodi Wykle bought Guitar Hero for DS as a gift for her son, she planned to play him a prank — her son didn't own a DS. But when she gave him the second gift, the prank was on both of them. Inside was some smooshed-up newspaper, a bunch of rocks, and no Nintendo DS. After getting the runaround from Walmart, she finally got a refund after it was discovered that a previous customer had returned the same item before it was purchased by Wykle, and Walmart had forgotten to check the box.
It could have been smellier, though. On Christmas day, 2005, a Hawaii boy opened an iPod box to find some sort of mystery meat — and no iPod. An investigation found that the culprit was one Walmart employee, who thought it would be absolutely hilarious (and profitable) to ruin Christmases by swapping out the actual product for rotting flesh. Yeek. Maybe we should start checking boxes in-store.
Ever had one of those "solar-powered" calculators that still mysteriously work even when there's no sun? It could be one of these numbers, pulled apart by Instructables forum member Rotten194 in 2009. The "solar panel" actually turned out to be a piece of thick cellophane not connected to anything at all, while the calculator was powered by a single button-cell battery. Mind you, at least it worked.
While we await news of the iPhone 5 (or not), ; or rather, they're selling the "HiPhone 5", a dual-sim knock-off available in a range of colours. At a quick glance, it looks like the iPhone 4, but closer examination reveals curved bezels, a raised home button and a thinner overall form factor. Patent injunctions are mysteriously absent.
We wouldn't go rushing off to spend your money in the HiPhone quite yet, though. The iPed ought to serve as a cautionary tale to those who want the latest device but want to circumvent the normal channels/actual brand. Although it looked a lot like the iPad, the iPed ended up being the unsavoury hanger-on no one wanted to talk about; with its sluggish screen, miserable screen, frigid speed and sizzling running temperatures, you'd have been better off folding your money into a fancy origami party hat.
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