Thank EU

Consumer Protection Law FTW

A little knowledge of consumer law has saved me a decent amount of money as my beloved Macbook Air is off getting serviced for the second time this month. A faulty SSD at the start of September led to a hard drive failure and a quick trip back to the store. As the problem was caused by a ‘known fault’ it was covered under the standard warranty. The drive was replaced and I was back with my Mac the next day.

ROUND 2

My Macbook’s battery has been unreliable and it recently started displaying the ‘service battery’ warning on the toolbar. As I have a few busy weeks coming up I thought ‘now or never’ and decided to take it in again to get serviced. My Macbook is almost two years old which in many countries would mean a battery replacement would be an out of warranty job – luckily I bought mine in Sweden and am covered by the EU Consumer Protection laws. These laws  say that a product must remain fit for purpose for at least two years. This led to a funny conversation with the Apple-authorised service desk:

Me: ‘Hi, I’d like to have my battery replaced’.

Service Tech: ‘How old is it?’

Me: ‘Almost two years’

Service Tech: ‘Oh, sorry but Apple only covers warranty issues for 1 year so it’s out of warranty now.’

Me: ‘Really? Under the EU consumer protection laws doesn’t…’

Service Tech, cutting me off: ‘Yeah yeah ok. We’ll fix it’.

And that was that. The technician ran some tests to confirm the fault and my Macbook is off getting fixed again – for free. If I hadn’t mentioned the consumer protection law then I have no doubt that my battery would be off getting fixed at my expense.

Moral of the story – know your rights. You can save yourself some serious money just by understanding the rights that are available to you.

ps: With my Macbook in the shop I’m back to using my backup computer – an old netbook that running Ubuntu Netbook Edition. To say it’s a painful experience is an understatement.