Apple gives in, two year warranty for Europe | Hacker News Reader

Apple gives in, two year warranty for Europe

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66 pointsdanmaz7430 comments

I worked for a German retailer for a while and we had a lot of problems with customers not understanding the difference between the warranty the manufacturer gives and the "warranty" required by European law.

The first difference is who is liable. In the first case it is the manufacturer, in the second case the seller of the product.

The second distinction is to when it applies. In the first case Apple will repair anything that breaks during coverage, unless the damage is caused by carelessness. In the second case the "warranty" only applies to what is alredy broken when the seller gives you the device. Examples where this warranty does not hold, is when your hard drive breaks after 8 month or some connections ports stop working after 14 months although they once worked.

In summary the European warranty reduces to a protection for the customer, that the seller doesn't deliver a broken product. So in principle a manufacturer doesn't need to give any warranty at all, but the sellers would not be comfortable with that as in the first 6 months, they have to prove to the customer that the product was working at delivery, which is arguably impossible.

The only case where the European law results in additional coverage for the customer compared to the year apple gives, is when a defect was present at delivery and the customer only noticed it after one year and is able to prove that the defect was there at the beginning. I would like to see someone trying to prove that there was a manufacturing defect causing a connection port to disconnect from the motherboard after 14 month (or did you yank on that cord to much?...).

This is either a badly written law or a very seller-friendly interpretation of it. Surely, if a hard drives breaks after 14 months of use, it is either the consumer's fault or a manufacturing defect.

The fact the liability is on seller shouldn't change the interpretation of "breakage". At least in the Russian consumer protection law, you can go to the seller instead of the manufacturer if your computer breaks, and it's up to the seller what it does with it -- if you don't get it repaired in 45 days, the seller must pay you the full price or send a replacement.

I would like to see someone trying to prove that there was a manufacturing defect causing a connection port to disconnect from the motherboard after 14 month

And that's why in some countries the burden of such proof is on the seller.

Well I don't think the problem is about wether it's seller or customer friendly but how the cost is distributed between the customers. If the warranty is high, the additional support costs will added to the product price, such that the support penalty is effectively shared between the customers. On the other side, if the warranty period is short, the product price will be lower, but a small number of customers must pay a lot to repair their devices out of warranty. Then one needs to take into consideration that there are many ways to break a device by being "sloppy" but not fall outside warranty constrains. I try to be careful with the devices I own and in the first case I would have to pay for the carelessness of other people and I don't like that. On the other side high repair cost can be a large burden to single individuals, which is when it is reasonable to share risks in the community (see, e.g., medical costs).

This is why I guess the European law is basically about getting a working device in the first place and not about how repair costs are being distributed, which is non-obvious to decide.

It's not 14 months, but in Poland, if it happens before 6 months, it is considered to be a defect that existed during sale.

It doesn't change much, because two year warranty was the law in Europe anyway.

The biggest issue here was that Apple was selling an insurance extension for the second year.

Anyway, you don't want to have to go to court if your iPhone fails for a defect after one year and 2 months...

I don't see what changed at all. It still says 1 year for Apple's products (which Apple gave before) and 2 years for products sold by Apple (which is the law of land as it was yesterday).

It's part a matter of semantics and part Apple who are dodging the law:

Where I live, what the EU law provides is not called a "warranty"; we use another word. Here, warranties are optional and for the manufacturer; if you build sturdy products, you can have a life-time warranty programme, if you want to. The warranty applies to the manufacturer.

What the EU provides is - in English - a "warranty" with a fixed period of, say, two years that applies to the seller of the product, not the manufacturer.

As sellers, Apple have probably not wanted to comply with the two-year seller warranty, but the other part of the problem is that they have mislead consumers to believe that they were not covered by this protection for the full two years. And even if they are not the seller, the consumers purchasing Apple products would still be covered by the European warranty, albeit through the seller of the product, leaving little if any reason to get AppleCare.

Take [this link](http://www.apple.com/support/products/ipad.html) for the iPad:

    Every iPad comes with one year of hardware repair 
    coverage through its limited warranty and up to 90 days 
    of complimentary support. AppleCare+ for iPad extends 
    your coverage to two years from the original purchase 
    date of your iPad and adds up to two incidents of 
    accidental damage coverage, each subject to a $49 
    service fee.

This information is misleading according to EU consumer law. Apple has continually been sued in countries such as [Italy](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16339651) for misleading customers, and I imagine that they've seen that their prospects of winning an appeal case are slim.

In other words, what is new is probably that Apple have found out that they can no longer dodge European consumer laws without a litany of suits and bad PR, so now they're resorting to this statement.

Applecare includes replacements for damaged devices. Accidentally drop your iPhone in some water and you don't have to spend 600$ replacing it. So, sure if your device is defective and the battery melts down in 13 months your covered, but I destroy way more than one cellphone every 12 years so it's well worth the 100$ IMO.

They are not selling Applecare plus in my EU home country yet, and it's not available for laptops anyway. Regular Applecare does not cover accidental damage.

No, 1 year is the EU minimum of product warranty.

I think the title is quite misleading, apple did not "gives in" they just force to apply the laws

In Australia we have an "expected life" provision in consumer law, where more expensive products have a higher expectation they'll keep working - a $2000 fridge should last longer than a $200 fridge for instance.

I've never seen it actually applied to Apple products, but a "reasonable person" as defined by the law would surely expect a $1,799.00AUD Macbook air to last longer than the 12 month warranty covers.

Does anyone know of such cases?

This is interesting. I previously though of buying through John Lewis because they offer a 2 year warranty on computing products. I wonder if this will harm them.

This isn't an extension of the one-year warranty. It's a clarification of the consumer complaint period and an acknowledgement of it. While EU mandates a minimum of 2 years, in some countries, this time period can be longer, like in Sweden where it's 3 years. However, there is a big difference between warranty and a consumer complaint case: Apple's warranty covers things that break after the customer has received the product - essentially a guarantee that the customer will be able to enjoy 12 months of fault-free goods - while a consumer complaint case covers defects and flaws (including false or erroneous marketing) that were present in the product before the customer received it. Examples of this can be a manufacturer claiming that an LCD screen is a 24-bit truecolor display while it is in fact an 18-bit dithering display, or claiming a certain resolution for a digital camera higher than the camera's sensor can actually provide.

If something in the product that was working ok and as advertised for 1 year suddenly breaks, you're not covered by Apple's warranty, and you're not covered by the consumer protection laws of the EU. If you within the established consumer complaint time period find that something about the product isn't as it should or isn't as advertised, you have a legal right to a full refund providing that you can prove that the problem in question accompanied the product when you received it.

The bottom line: you still just have 1 year of warranty, but now Apple also lets you know that you have another type of consumer right that extends beyond the warranty period.

At least here in Germany, in many ways, the two-years "consumer complaint time" works out as an implied warranty. When I'm not discussing the difference between Apple's manufacturer warranty (Garantie in German) and the legally required one (Gewährleistung), I'd simply translate it as warranty. If anything, the protection offered by the Gewährleistung extend beyond the ones offered my many manufacturer warranties.

If any piece of electronics dies within two years that's not expected the die from mere use (e.g. laptop batteries), I immediately return it to the shop I bought it from (not the manufacturer) and I can typically expect some sort of remedy; repair, replacement or a refund. I'm not sure how much of it directly derives from the EU regulations, I sort of expected it to be very similar in other EU countries but I might be wrong.

Incidentally, we also get fourteen days to return anything bought online for a full refund, no questions asked, including shipping costs for for stuff >40 EUR. Naturally it ends up being a zero-sum game, the shops have to recoup those costs some way.

In Poland, if a disagreement between sale contract and reality is found before 6 months from sale have passed, it is assumed that it existed when sale contract was made. If product does not work, and the fault is not on customer's side, it is considered to be a disagreement between contract and reality, and the seller is required to fix or replace the product. This way, there's a 6 months implied warranty on almost everything.

Of course, 6 months is less then 1 year, but I can easily imagine it to be extended further.

Also, IANAL.

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