Stepede for used iBooks
August 16, 2005 by Mike Wendland
Apple iBooks are nice… but not THAT nice. Seventeen injured during used laptop sale
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The Henrico laptop mess has been completely mishandled since the day they decided to replace Apple with Dell. I’m not talking about the decision to replace the iBooks with Windows machines itself (although, as a Mac advocate, of course I think this was unwise as well); I’m talking about how they handled things *after* the fact.
These laptops are 500MHz G3 CD-Rom 10GB models with OS X Jaguar and Airport cards included. A quick search on eBay shows that they could have simply sold them online for *easily* five times as much (perhaps $250 apiece) *without* any of the expense or nonsense (or, it now appears, lawsuits!) that they’re ending up with. They could have assigned numbers to be called in order. They could have auctioned them off in person. They could have sold sweepstakes tickets. There’s a dozen different ways they could have handled this which would have made infinitely more sense.
I wrote to Apple a week ago to urge them to buy them up at $100 a pop to avoid a different kind of mess: I read that these were typical four-year old mishandled student laptops, and many were in poor working condition, so I thought they would reflect poorly on Apple.
As it turns out, had they done that, it would have been a good move. But Charles is right– an eBay auction with an “as-is” provision would have been a better move. Hell, the airport cards alone would have sold for $50, I do not exaggerate.