Apple takes the time to fix watch complaint
Senior’s device screen shattered without any previous damage. Prodding was needed for repair
Holly Harris bought an Apple Watch this past August, a Series 3 product currently selling at $369 to $499.
Just 20 days later, she had a frightening problem.
While watching TV, she reached across her watch to press a button to check data. The screen was raised and she tried to put it back in.
“As I did, the glass started to break into smithereens. I cut my hand,” she says.
Harris, a former elementary school principal who lives in Mississauga, went back to the Apple Store, hoping to get a new watch.
Instead, the store manager said she must have banged the screen, causing it to break. She would have to pay $299 to get it repaired.
“I was shocked,” she says. “Two hours before this happened, I had taken my watch off to shower and the screen was fine when I put it back on.
“I told them I had not banged the watch and showed them there wasn’t even a scratch on the watch. If I had broken the screen, I would have paid to have it repaired.”
After doing some online research, she found complaints about screens popping up on Apple smart watches, starting in the first generation launched in 2015 and continuing in the second and third generations. Apple recently introduced a Series 4 watch, starting at $519.
She also found a class-action suit filed by a Colorado man in a northern California court last June. It alleged that every model through the Series 3 has a defect, “causing the screens on the watches to crack, shatter or detach from the body of the watch, through no fault of the wearer, oftentimes only days or weeks after purchase.”
Apple has not acknowledged a problem, and when confronted with the defect, its conduct “indicates that its internal policy is to deny the existence of the defect, claim the defect is the result of ‘accidental damage’ caused by consumers, and then refuse to honour
its limited warranty on those grounds,” lawyers for plaintiff Kenneth Sciacca argued.
“Without limited warranty coverage, consumers are forced to incur the significant expense of repairing or replacing their defective watch.”
The class-action suit has not been certified by a court. It seeks only $5 million in damages — a small amount that would cover repairs or replacements for only a small percentage of current watch owners.
Holly Harris wrote to the lawyer handling the U.S. classaction suit, Kolin Tang, to see if she could join it. He said the proposed class only covered purchasers in the U.S.
Then she turned to me for help with her quandary. Apple’s policies did not support her and she didn’t want to go to court on her own.
“If your screen cracks due to a manufacturing defect, it’s covered by the Apple warranty,” the company says on its watch service and repair page.
But since Apple has not confirmed it has a manufacturing defect and does not cover accidental damage to the watch screen, her only option was to pay an out-of-warranty fee of $299.
I forwarded her complaint to Tara Hendela, an Apple Canada spokesperson, on Nov. 7.
“I can’t believe how fast Apple responded,” Harris said the next day, adding that she was instructed to take pictures of her watch and send them to the head office in Cupertino, Calif.
On Nov. 9, she had to go to her local Apple store to have more pictures taken.
“They sure knew I was coming. Staff were overly polite and couldn’t do enough to make sure I was served quickly,” she said of her visit to the Square One Mall store in Mississauga.
By Nov. 28, Harris was getting impatient. Her Apple contact in Cupertino was calling each week, extending the deadline for a decision.
On Dec. 3, she got the answer she had been waiting to hear.
“Great news. My contact just phoned and said Apple would repair (or replace if necessary) my watch at no cost to me. She said it was a one-time exception,” Harris said.
Companies often make exceptions, or goodwill gestures, on behalf of a single customer, based on personal circumstances, when the media gets involved.
Harris had a good case, since she’s a senior citizen who doesn’t participate in extreme sports. Moreover, she was diagnosed a few years ago with osteoporosis (weak or porous bones that may break easily).
“A blow hard enough to break the watch screen would also have shattered my wrist,” she told me.
Hendela was not available for comment. But Apple seems to be open to helping other watch buyers with shattered screens.
Personal disclosure: I get few complaints about Apple products. I asked Star readers for comments on its customer service and wrote about their reactions in April 2017.
Most people raved about friendly staff and Apple’s willingness to sort out problems at the head office. But some talked about poor battery performance and fragile devices. “The company doesn’t design products for longevity,” one reader said.
Is the U.S. class-action suit on the right track? If you have an Apple Watch, please let me know about any experiences you had with a broken screen and how you were treated when you reported it.