Remember the battery amnesty? Despite the stores doing everything they could to try to convince me not to replace the batteries, I insisted and persisted. I figured $29 would buy me the start of a new battery life-cycle.
Less than 2 years later, my daughter’s iPhone SE battery is dead.
Let me try to explain how important her iPhone is to her. She goes everywhere with it: to stores, in the car, at appointments. There is no time when she’s not tapping on it, from morning until she sleeps. It’s one of those neurodiversity things and it is her great comfort.
It took us a couple of weeks until we could finally snag an appointment last week and the appointment was for today. I have just returned.
It seems that instead of replacing her battery, they gave her back her original one–and her original iPhone, apparently. They had planned on replacing the phone as well, which I remember we were told was an option, but didn’t. The genius figured this out because her serial number was supposed to retired at the time they traded it out but instead they never did.
But because of that her device as a serial number that the Apple corporate system considers invalid. We could not get a loaner. We could not get a repair. And we won’t be able to even start our process for a few weeks more because the serial number issue must be addressed before they can even talk to us about the bad battery.
So after driving almost an hour each way, we got, well, nowhere.
No phone, and no timeline in which we can estimate how to move forward. Our only option, according to the genius, was to buy a new phone and wait it out. I declined the purchase.
So, they’ll look into it and we should get a phone call before August to figure out the next steps and set up another appointment. And start the process all over again.
Update 1: Call in to Apple. Senior advisor (“I’m as high as you can escalate”) says: “This is the store’s problem. We can’t handle it here.” She offered to let us pay (again) for the battery replacement that was never done. After almost 3 hours on the phone, she got the Park Meadows coordinator into the call and I’ll pick up with them tomorrow.
Update 2: Final outcome: Apple will do the work we paid for almost two years ago within the next week or so! No apologies. No refunds for the work they didn’t do. No kind words about being sent home from the genius bar without any action. They offered to give me a $30 trade-in for the SE on a new phone — exactly what the online store would normally offer for a used SE.
Update 3: Just a few minutes after hanging up with Park Meadows, this arrived in my mailbox. I don’t intend to pay $269 for a repair we already paid for. Seriously, WTF?
