The iPhone upgrade program was meant to be advantageous both for customers and Apple. For Apple it more or less meant locking in a customer to a new iPhone every year, and for customers it also gave them an easy way to make an upgrade to the latest iPhone, so on paper it sounds like everyone wins.
Unfortunately this year is a different story, so much so that Apple is now facing a class-action lawsuit in which they are basically accused of prioritizing new customers of the iPhone, instead of existing customers who paid to be part of the upgrade program. Essentially for those not in the program, pre-ordering the new iPhones was a non-issue, but those in the program were instead told to “check back later” for remaining inventory and that they could only buy the phones in store.
Is this an issue? For those who are looking to upgrade their iPhones every launch day, taking the chance that a retail store has stock could mean that next year, you might not be able to upgrade on launch day either, which we guess for some users is important. However the issue is also that until they get their upgraded iPhones, they will have to keep paying Apple every month to be part of this program.
The lawsuit is asking Apple to reimburse customers who are part of this program, and are also asking Apple to make its inventory available to upgrade customers. The former sounds doable, but the latter might not since Apple can’t just take away someone else’s purchase to give to another customer since that’s basically inviting yet another lawsuit, but what do you guys think? Any of our readers affected by the iPhone upgrade program?
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