Apple stores in Beijing sued for selling refurbished iPhones as brand new

By George Wong on 08/18/2011, filed in Home > Apple

Apple stores in Beijing sued for selling refurbished iPhones as brand new After clamping down on fake Apple stores in China, Apple is now on the receiving end of a new lawsuit, and this time it’s being delivered by a well-known consumer rights advocate in China. The complaint? Apparently Apple has been passing off refurbished iPhones as brand new devices and selling them at full price to consumers.

The scheme was discovered when some consumers who purchased the iPhone registered their phones online only to discover that their device warranties were less than the 1-year that they were promised by Apple. This has led them to believe that they were being sold refurbished units that have been passed off as brand new units.

When they made complaints at the Apple Stores, some of them were offered new iPhones, while others were given the chance to extend the date of their warranties. Now there’s no telling if this was just a case of an error in the system or a real scam, but it’s definitely bad news for Apple. If consumers aren’t guaranteed new devices from official Apple Stores, who can they turn to? At least those fake Apple stores sold brand new iPhones right? Let’s hope this case clears up soon.

iPhone 4 online warranty registration

iPhone 4 receipt

Apple Inc: Apple Inc was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne as a computer company wich is often credited to have initiated personal computing. After a meteoric rise in the 80s, Apple had lost the personal computing battle against Microsoft and others in the 90s. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, the company came back to profitability by focusing on less products and started using industry-standard components. Apple's largest business is now in the smartphone space, with the iPhone representing more than half of the revenues and an even larger part of the profits. Read our Apple product reviews to see what the company has been up to: iPhone 5 Review, Macbook Pro with Retina display review

iOS: was once upon a time called iPhone OS, or "operating system", which is the software that provides all the basic device functionality and is the interface between the hardware and applications. iOS was introduced with the iPhone on January 9 2007, and it was originally not intended to be programmable by third parties. Steve Jobs had envisioned that developers could create Web Apps that would run in the browser. This changed less than one year after when the iPhone SDK (software development kit) was introduced in October 2007. Today, hundreds of thousands of apps have been created for this platform. iPhone OS became iOS on June 2010. Interestingly, both iPhone and iOS were former trademarks of Cisco, that Apple now uses under a license.

iPhone: iPhone: The iPhone is Apple's line of smartphones. That was also the original name of the first iPhone, which was announced on January 9th 2007 by Steve Jobs during the Macworld Keynote. The iPhone was released to the public in June of the same year. The development of the iPhone started in 2004, was internally called "project purple" and was the fruit of a collaboration between Apple and AT&T. Since then, Apple has released new iPhone models every year, with the iPhone 3G in July 2008, the iPhone 3GS in June 2009, the iPhone 4 in June 2010, the iPhone 4S in October 2011 and the iPhone 5 in September 2012. The iPhone represented more than half of Apple's revenues in 2012.

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