Google Engineering Director William Reardon took to Twitter with his frustration on Christmas Day upon discovering that Apple had removed one of his purchases, forcing him to repurchase it.
Ironically, the purchase in question is a season of TV series The Grinch. Reardon accused Apple of being the Grinch in this case for stealing something he had paid for. He shared a receipt confirming that he did, in fact, pay $6.99 for the content back in 2015.
In his investigation, Reardon discovered that the content is still available for other countries, but not the US. Interestingly, he found the same content being sold in the US under a new “Ultimate” name for $9.99.
“A good lesson on why to avoid buying digital content from @apple. #AppleGrinch CC: @itunes @AppleSupport @tim_cook @cue” he said, in what was to be his last tweet in the chain.
https://twitter.com/wdr1/status/1210040626319773697
He then took to Reddit’s /r/apple to share his experience, but the thread was locked for what Reardon claimed to be issues he had already addressed, implying a certain level of Apple fanboying on the part of /r/apple’s moderators.
“8/ This was starting to get traction in /r/apple but it was locked by /u/dakta. The odd part is they locked the thread for reasons I had already addressed in my tweets. (i.e., I purchased it via a third party or hadn’t contacted Apple)” he said in response to the Reddit thread getting locked.
The responses so far have been varied, with some claiming that other Christmas content was similarly removed and resold under a different name, while others showed the content was still available for download for them.
https://twitter.com/wdr1/status/1210269842768400384
The majority of the tweets, however, descended into fanboying, with tweets like “If his frame of reference is Google, I could see how calling support might not have seemed like a realistic option to try.” and “Unlike Google, Apple actually has customer service you can reach via phone to help resolve this problem.” One even went as far as to accuse Googler Reardon of spreading bad publicity for competitor Apple, calling it a “serious ethics violation” and calling for Reardon to be fired.
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