<p>Hardly the best Fall for the Cupertino geniuses:</p>
<p>After losing patent battles in Texas and other places, not being able to bully the Mexican iFone in Mexico, now they lose another patent case in Delaware.</p>
<p>It would be a nice Christmas present if more bad news were to hit Apple between now and the end of the year. The company makes great products which will continue to sell well. At the same time the company’s stock is a great value yet under some technical pressure. If it drops below $500, it would make a superb medium-term investment.</p>
<p>After the Australian police told people that Apple Maps could be life threatening, Google was very nice to Apple and let Apple have a Google map app. That was sort of a gift to Apple. At least Google knows how to be nice to its neighbors. </p>
<p>This was at the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, NH (I’m about 7 minutes from that mall right now). They have a small police station in the mall - they added the office many years ago to deal mostly with rowdy teenagers and certain other crimes (like cars getting stolen and ending up stripped in Mass).</p>
<p>The buying Apple stuff and bringing it over to China isn’t all that uncommon. One of the guys on my team was asked to buy a bunch of iPads a year ago for his relatives. This lady had $16K in cash with her so I guess she wanted to buy a bunch of them. She lives in Newton, MA so the Burlington, MA store would have been a lot closer but it looked like she wanted to avoid MA sales taxes and went to the Nashua store. She could have just bought 2 at the Burlington store, 2 at the Nashua store and 2 at the Salem, NH store the same day.</p>
<p>It should be interesting to see if the charges get dropped.</p>
<p>I wonder if she’s going to try to buy the rest of the phones that she wants at the other Apple Stores. Or maybe she can get a few at the carrier stores.</p>
<p>BTW, I was using a Garmin Nuvi to bring my daughter to the airport this past summer. It gave me directions to drive 45 miles on a highway. I shut it off and rebooted it and it gave me the right directions when I reprogrammed it. She asked me where we would be if we drove 45 miles on the highway. I told her - the Atlantic Ocean. Everyone has bugs.</p>
<p>The woman was tasered not for trying to buy too many Iphones but for not leaving the store when the police told her to leave and after being given a ten minute period to do so. There is a 2 phone limit for iphones and she apparently ordered a bunch of them and the store would not permit her to pay and pick up all that she ordered, since it is against the expressed policy of the store. A number of companies have limits on quantities one customer can buy. Coach is another such company and American Girl Doll, yet another. The police were called when she raised a commotion upon being told she could only buy two phones. She then refused to do as the police directed, which was to leave the store.</p>
<p>My understanding is that she bought two the previous day and that they wouldn’t let her buy more on the day of the incident because they recognized her.</p>
<p>It’s interesting that Coach has a limit too. I understand that Coach is quite popular in Japan.</p>
<p>More detail: she bought two on Friday. She wanted to buy more but they said that there was a limit of two. She started taking video of other customers in the store that she said were buying more than two. The store manager asked her to leave because she was taking videos of other customers in the store. She then ordered two online with in-store pickup. She was asked to leave at the store because of her previous activity. Not because she was buying iPhones. She must have already paid for them online - that’s the way in-store pickup works.</p>
<p>Police said that the store requested a no-trespass order for the lady, apparently on Friday. The family said that her English is poor and that she didn’t understand that they were asking her to leave.</p>
<p>For the record, I knew all the details of this story after receiving the alert all the way from Europe. Of course, Apple managers do not hit their customers with Taser guns --their prices take care of that! But, it is rather disingenuous to separate calling the cops/security forces to clean up the messes from the intent. </p>
<p>This story is obviously hilarious in many ways. How an immigrant does not understand English well enough to understand the word LEAVE but can navigate an online ordering system! And how police has to intervene to deal with unruly customers who are simply trying to buy a return ticket for the precious phones to their country of origin. Apple should actively support such trades as it would do wonders for our balance of trade and help keeping some of those profits right here in the country --quite a departure that would be!</p>
<p>Do you know the racial makeup of the employees in the store? Or the city? Or the police department?</p>
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<p>I think that there were a fair number of mistakes involved.</p>
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<p>She lives in Newton, MA which is wealthy area and their public school system is typically in the top ten in the state. Could she have difficulty communicating with the people in the store? Certainly.</p>
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<p>Perhaps Apple will starting building iPhones in the US if their 2013 project to build Macs in the US works out well.</p>
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<p>I’d rather that they build them here and export them.</p>
<p>There’s also the issue of buying in NH and skipping out on the MA use tax (I’m assuming that she wasn’t planning on paying the tax given that she drove an extra 15 miles to get to a NH store).</p>
<p>This lady should send an email to Tim Cook. She did lots of things wrong but I think that the store manager did as well.</p>
<p>I doubt she was buying phones to send to China. Why? Because the iPhone 5 is on sale in China this Friday with preorders already taken. </p>
<p>I wonder about her sanity because she drove to NH to save money and because she came back the second time. The distance from Newton to Pheasant Lane Mall is almost 40 miles. That means she drove 80 * 2 or 160 miles. If her car gets 16 mpg, then at $3.60/gal she spent $36, not counting depreciation, etc., to save $62 on $1000. So maybe she could have saved $30-50 by valuing her time at next to nothing. </p>
<p>But in response to the thread headline, I hope Santa helps people who actually need help because Apple’s products are flying off the shelf. They continue to be supply constrained; they can barely make enough to keep up with demand.</p>
<p>No. Is there any reason why you ask that question? Would you feel better if I had written about knowing the details of this story as they were shared in the NEWS articles. The same articles you obviously relied on those to add “more detail.”</p>
<p>Next I will start a quick study of the demographics in the area in question.</p>
<p>I just returned from our local Apple Store. It’s a Thursday, and the store was packed at 10:00 am. The iPad seemed to be what everyone was buying.</p>
<p>The adapter on my nearly four year old MacBook Pro has started acting up, not charging consistently, and I took it in to see if they would replace it, or if not, I would buy another. My warranty had expired in July, so I didn’t have much hope.
I had to make a “genius appointment,” but the tech was extremely prompt and knowledgeable, and he put my laptop through a diagnostic check to see if everything was working properly. Then, because the part was covered by some sort of replacement program, I was given a new adapter free of chargea and sent on my way. </p>
<p>Even though their products are expensive and the marketing is a bit too cute for my taste, our family is loyal to the company because of their customer service. Their employees are always pleasant, knowledgeable and seem to take customer satisfaction seriously. I really like that.</p>
<p>She said that they were for her family in China in the TV interview
(perhaps translated by her daughter).</p>
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<p>She bought four unlocked phones so we’re talking at least $2,600. The
easiest store to drive to would be at the Burlington Mall and that’s
about ten miles so her delta is 30 miles per trip.</p>
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<p>Which of those articles talked about the racial makeup of the area?
Have you read about screwups at the NPD over the years? Do you
understand the demographics of the demographics?</p>
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<p>Good luck on that one.</p>
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<p>I have to go to the PLM store for a warranty issue on one of our MBPs
this weekend. I’ll see if the mood there is any different.</p>
<p>BC, there’s an Apple store in Newton, but the entire thing sounds weird because the iPhone is on sale in China. Preorders are in the hundreds of thousands.</p>
<p>moonchild, the word is they’ll replace adaptors just because. At least they’ll do it once. The second time they’ll often make you pay. </p>
<p>It’s weird how the Google maps thing worked out: in 3 months, Apple has managed to get from Google exactly the product they wanted Google to deliver before but which Google refused to do.</p>
<p>This particular Apple Store serves a lot of Indians and Chinese that work in the high-tech firms in Nashua and the surrounding NH communities, and the Tech and Defense firms along the Merrimack Valley.</p>
<p>The Apple Store typically has a staff in the store of 30 or more.</p>
<p>I have never seen an Asian (Chinese, Indian, etc.) employee in that store. Would it be that hard to have someone that speaks Chinese there that could have averted any communication problems?</p>
<p>I didn’t know that. Makes sense that it’s in the Chestnut Hill Mall. I haven’t been to the Chestnut Hill Mall since the 1980s I think. I guess that I don’t have a reason to go to the ones in MA because I work practically next to one in NH.</p>
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<p>Some people like to be first. Or maybe it would take a while to work through the preorders.</p>
<p>When the first iPhone came out, my project leader (lived in the UK) flew to the US to buy one. I don’t know how she bought it - whether she bought it with a contract and then cancelled the contract and then brought it back home or if she had someone local buy it and then give it to her. She did a lot of traveling for work and had the frequent flyer miles to come over here. I thought that it was quite a bother to do for just a phone but we take this stuff coming here early for granted.</p>
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<p>Yup. And Google gets to call it a victory while Apple says nothing.</p>
<p>When the iPad2 came out, I waited and waited but the stories were selling out each morning as soon as they opened. I was going out of town and wanted to take it with me so I went to Chestnut Hill really early and got in line. Behind 22 Chinese guys, 2 really nice kids from some other state, and the family of one of the guys who cleans the mall at night and 2 or 3 others. So before it was light, I was like number 28 in line. At some point, the manager comes out and says they have number of iPads and she has a card for each one. They have no ATT ones, only Verizon. All the Chinese guys left. I got the last one and that only because it was too expensive - being 64GB - for the people ahead of me. I was glad the kids and the janitor’s family got what they wanted. </p>
<p>Thing about phones in China now is I don’t know if they use the same LTE or how it’s configured. As you know, it isn’t one thing but a bunch.</p>
<p>The Verizon iPhones are essentially unlocked and can operate on the AT&T frequencies so they’re the most flexible models out there right now. I don’t have LTE available in my area - but AT&T 3G and 4G is more than enough speed for me.</p>