Why I will never have another Apple product

6 Comments

My mother had been given an iPhone 4 by my brother. She and my father had forgotten the digital camera, so she decided to use this on their once in a lifetime trip to Darwin, and all down the cost of Queensland from the top to bottom. You see, my father has cancer, that at the moment is stabilised, but he knows it will come back and take his life. I wanted to help mum out as she kept having to manually go to Facebook on the phone, and was getting confused, so we tried to download the app, except it wouldn’t because my brother had never updated the software. Wanting to do it the right way I rang Apple support in Australia to help me via remote access on my laptop, through iTunes. After the lady, who had been helping me got off the phone, she told me she would allow the update 15 minutes to download and call me back. Now I explained the full extent of the situation to the lady, so she knew it was a phone that had never been backed up or software updated. I get a call from a different person I. The specified time, and we go through the set up process, only to discover that all of mum’s contacts and over 100 holiday snaps had been deleted. I get transferred to a third person, who tells me all they can do is apologise. By this time my partner takes my mum, who is due to fly back to Tassie in a couple of hours to the Apple shop in town. Still nobody can do anything. I’m in tears, and dad comes into the bedroom, as I’ve been distraught to tell me it’s ok they are only photos, mum just wanted a couple to remember him by when he is gone, but that they had sent a couple to friends, so should be able to get one or two back. My eyes are puffy, I’m full of guilt and blame myself, and I will be paying out my contract and getting a Samsung.

Posted anonymously, 2nd July 2015

6 Comments

- - mom81879 said
  - 25 Sep 2015
    8:25 am
Oh no, how sad :,( At least you can get copies of a couple of them though. And most of our memories are in our heads and hearts. So don’t beat yourself up too badly

- - mom94125 said
  - 04 Jul 2015
    7:55 pm
either way, don’t stress out because you still have time to cherish your dad. I wish you the best. Now you can help your mum prepare her phone so hopefully it can all get backed up and not happen again!

- - BellaB said
  - 03 Jul 2015
    5:27 pm
This is awful. I’m so sorry; my kid deleted unbacked up photos of his baby sister from my iPad.

- - mom94125 said
  - 02 Jul 2015
    8:58 pm
oh my god that is so heartbreaking. Especially when your dad said that your mum wanted the photos to remember him by. My dad is gone and i can sympathize. I have had issues with apple phones BUT i have had issues with samsung. You have to get a top range model to reduce problems but even then it’s not guaranteed. I now have a samsung galaxy note edge and it is brilliant! Best phone that i have ever had. No problems. I would make sure that those photos are gone. I know that there is a cloud service that you can set up and so every photo etc gets “sent’ to the cloud (backed up) and you can have them stored which would be good in the future. Maybe get a phone tech to have a quick look at it to see if he can retrieve the photos. The people at apple are just salespeople after all. Have you tried to plug the phone into your laptop and go through the folders? I have had the links deleted to old stuff (by the kids) which i was able to get back through my laptop. Go through your phone and find the DCIM folder and see what is in there. I am so sorry that this happened to you. We had a break-in and i had a chest of baby photos and memorabilia and the last pics of my dad. It all got stolen and if the theif had looked inside, they wouldn’t have taken it. My heart goes out to you. Give it a look when you calm down and see what you can do. I don’t want to give you false hope but it is worth a try. Take dad for a nice day out and get more pics. Give him a big hug! And your poor mum too. There is so much that we would all do differently in hindsight so don’t be too mad at your bro

- - mum4107 said
  - 02 Jul 2015
    8:34 pm
That’s terrible. I’m so very sorry. I can’t believe there is nothing they can do. I have never owned and iPhone but I have heard of people losing photos and contacts when they update

- - mom93821 said
  - 02 Jul 2015
    8:24 pm
Sounds like a tough experience for you.