I agree with you Zboater, this whole thing is just outrageous. The thing is. It is a whole new display assembly including a different lighting. The iPad Air is an awesome product, and my philosophy was to act crazy to get some crazy results. In situations like this, being stubborn is the answer!
Wow. Everytime someone posts a comparison pic of two iPad Airs, its hard to believe that two of the same devices have such different screens. As a person who had to go through many rMinis to get a good screen, I completely understand you. Although it may seem like its abusing the refund policy, I really can't find much difference between ordering two and ordering one and then swapping them out at the Apple Store.
Under normal circumstances, I would agree that it would constitute a "near-crazy" behavior to order two of the same devices to just pick the better screen and to return the other, but in this case of the wide-spread defective screen issue for the iPads, I would have to make this an exception. I noticed the issue even before checking the forum and it was precisely the screen issues that led me to registering and using MacRumors.
Although I would say that some people are being really picky about their screens, I believe that the customers are going through a vicious cycle.
1. Opens up and notices a defective screen.
2. Goes online to find people with similar issues
3. Realizes that this is a wide-spread issue, looks for other well-known issues
4. Exchanges / Returns the defective unit
5. Now that the customer/user is fully aware of the variety of well-known issues, he/she goes through the list of screen issues. (Now this step increases the return/exchange rate greatly as now the customers have more to look for)
6. Finds another fault, goes back to step 4 until he/she decides that they can settle for a less-than-perfect screen (with a couple of minor screen defects)
Now, for those who have never been in this cycle before, this is truly a very time-consuming, frustrating experience. They probably could have avoided this issue overall, had Apple kept their Quality Control at high standards.
Also, having a tech-savvy group of online users on a forum on which they can freely discuss defects with their ipads doesn't help either, as people who probably would have gone through exchanging one or two devices at most without the knowledge from this forum, would now have to go through many more after reading through many threads on MacRumors.
All in all, what people are experiencing is a vicious cycle. Neither should anyone be criticized for their behaviors nor should they be applauded for their behavior; their behavior was, to a degree, caused by the low QC by Apple. It was the threads at MacRumors that fueled their returns/exchanges.
