How about they create a tool that checks for bugs in their software? Seems like they could use that.
Chances are they have that. Software development is hard and depends how under the gun they were to get a release out the door to see how many of the fringe cases are tested. Where I work we got burned and still are dealing with a mess of a software update we released that works fine 95% of the time heck it works great in those 95% cases. The other 5% it is a night mare in clean up and for tech support. Now is the code good, yes. Are the issue that hard to fix. No. Just it was a huge feature set and we got put up against a hard deadline so a lot of cases got missed and once it got into the wild they got found. We knew we were going to have issues due to how complex and big the project was but it needed a much much larger sample size to find everything.
Heck I just fixed one issue that we spent a week tracking down after it was reported to us. Most of that week was banging our heads against the wall. I found the issue by mostly shear luck. That was I wiped out my data, fresh installed it on the device, let it do it initial data loading and then I was just seeing what my starting data was before I started the debug stage and I saw something odd. I had some old test data from a previous project on the server that showed the cause of the bug. The left over test data was not the bug nor was causing it but it did expose the real bug in the software.
Basicly I happen to of dumb lucked into having a the fringed case that cause the issue that we spent a week trying to solve for a customer. We fix the issue after than with in about 1 hour and loaded it for the next release.
My point was, and still is, that the vast majority of people that NEED this service probably won't know abut it. Often times sellers are weary about giving out info, such as IMEI, for God knows what reason. I have had people ask me why on earth I need a VIN when buying a car... It's a good start, nonetheless.
Yeah I find that funny that people are oh so scared to give that number when really they are pretty easy to get if I wanted a clean one. For a phone I just walk into a store look at some boxes and boom IMEI number on the sticker. With a camera I could save it. It is not like it can really do that much.
Car vin OMG you have my vin number. You can run a car fax report on it.
Furnish your original purchase receipt and get Apple to unlock.
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Wouldn't advanced replacement require a holding amount on a credit card in case of non return?
And it depends on the timeframe and depot requirements.
Yeah you do but what they are hoping is you buy it and take it to the Apple store to get it repaired. As such it gets sent in and returned like it needs to be. They get a new working laptop plus some cash.