Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Sony mp3 player service issues

My daughter bought a 1 GB mp3 bean player six months ago. The parts are under warranty for a year, but the service only for ninety days.

You have to slide a little piece on the end to uncover the USB plug. This broke, which resulted in her not only being unable to uncover the USB plug easily, but also somehow prevented an adjoining button from working.

Sony has no service centers in Israel. Although they have centers in other Middle East locations and in Europe, we were told that the only service center than could help us was in the U.S. We shipped it there at our cost.

The player cost us $110 retail. They send me an email with a bill for $77 to fix the player. When I said that it's under warranty, they said that that's the cost of labor alone.

Now I don't know about you, but $77 seems to me about the wholesale price of a new player. I don't see how it should cost $77 worth of labor to throw out my player and send me a new one if I'm not paying for the materials. When I asked them this, they offered me a 10% discount on labor, which would have brought the fix price down to around $70.

I have a suspicion that by now, a half a year after I bought the player, the price of a 1GB Sony bean has probably dropped to around that price, anyway.

They were polite about it, and they were willing to ship the broken player back to me in Israel for no cost.

But Apple gave us a 1 year guarantee on parts AND labor for my son's Ipod.

Yehuda

2 comments:

Pragmatician said...

It certainly makes no sense to pay for the labour, as you said you could've gotten a brand new one at that price.
It's equally unfair they don't have a -closer service facility than the US.
Of course APPLE offers a better service, it's just more expensive to begin with.

Yehuda Berlinger said...

Prag: true, but Sony is not exactly a no-name brand. There customer service does seem to be lacking as of late, however.

Yehuda