Customer, Beware

[viridian5]

Remember my heartwarming story of getting a brand new iPhone the same model as my original 5S for the $81 it cost to replace the battery, which Apple couldn’t do? How they made it sound like it was a “my bad” thing and didn’t tell me I had to pay anything else for it? So nice. My phone carrier, AT&T, has separately charged $518 for that phone. Nobody said my carrier might do this, I wasn’t presented a receipt to sign for this additional charge, it was just a fait accompli on the card linked to the phone service account. AT&T treated my $81 like it was a down payment on the phone. If anyone at the Apple Store had been honest with me and said I’d get charged full price for a new phone no matter what I did but upgrading to an iPhone 6 or 7 would cost $X more I’d at least have some options, choices, but I certainly can’t afford or justify an upgrade now. And that’s with the new iPhone 5 I have lagging a bit because the current, up-to-date operating system wasn’t really designed for the older models.

With this level of honesty going, was it really impossible to replace the battery in my original 5S?

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