Letter from Steve Jobs: No Apple Giftcards for iPads

is this legal? per the department of consumer affairs, "Any gift certificate sold after January 1, 1997, is redeemable in cash for its cash value, or subject to replacement with a new gift certificate at no cost to the purchaser or holder.3 Effective January 1, 2008, any gift certificate with a cash value of less than $10 is redeemable in cash, which includes currency or check, for its cash value."

http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/legal_guides/s-11.shtml

Does anyone really believe anymore that S.J. himself writes all the letters / messages which are so popular lately? I sometimes don't have time to respond to everyone, even though I'm just a developer. I know many managers who could spend the whole day writing and answering emails and they're not even that high in the hierarchy. I can't even imagine how many emails must Steve get from inside the company -- and these are the emails he has to actually handle himself.

I remember an article about Bill Gates a couple of years ago saying that there was a team of ~10 people handling his mail, but can't google it now :/ I don't believe S.J. would answer himself, if the question can be handled by any assistant with access to some internal knowledge-base. (just like this one)

Edit: not what I saw originally, but: http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/30/news/newsmakers/gates_howiwo... <- in 2006 B.G. got only ~100 emails a day from people worth his attention - the rest got filtered out / handled by assistant. And there was already some time after Vista. S.J. probably gets more right now since the iPad release.

Ridiculous, if you have gift cards then you should honour them. You can't just retro-actively undo the possibility of using gift cards already bought for the purpose of gifting someone any apple device, including the iPad.

I'm betting they'll be redeeming a lot of gift cards for their cash value because of this stupidity.

I never really realized just how much of a control freak Jobs really is, imagine the CEO of a big company second guessing his entire marketing department by sending out email directly to customers.

Talk about delegation skills...

This also explains to me why Jobs' health is monitored like it is of prime importance by major Apple stock holders, it probably is of prime importance, if Jobs believes that stuff like this should be decided by him then Apple is pretty fragile.

> The fact that he spends time answering a customer complaint 8:43AM on a SATURDAY MORNING speaks volumes about his commitment to customer experience and service. Thank you Steve.

Viral customer service. By answering one (or maybe a few to make sure it gets out) customers who have a general issue, he lets them take care of getting the word out, which is so leveraged nowadays it's very easy for them.

Jobs spends a few minutes crafting an email and the crowd takes it from there. A new form of disintermediation.

People should also be more tolerant of his changing his mind in a later email vs. an Official Company Policy.

I ran in to this the other day as well. The weird thing is that prior to this email no one in the retail stores or the Apple customer relations line would say anything beyond "it's Apple's policy" and couldn't point to anywhere on Apple's site where it's in writing. Eventually I found Apple's Retail Store purchase policies: http://www.apple.com/legal/sales_policies/retail_us.html which say that you can't buy an iPad with a gift card. The store reps seemed annoyed when I pressed for information, saying things like "I don't know, I'm just an employee. It's Apple policy." while the corporate customer relations rep offered to enter my concerns in some database.

The gift cards themselves say that "Apple reserves the right in its sole discretion to determine whether gift cards may be applied to purchases of particular products or services." So, while they technically tell you that you may not be able to buy anything with the card, it's still a pretty weird situation. Especially because you can still use a gift card to buy an iPad on the online Apple store.

It is funny how Apple manages to simply punish everyone for the bad behavior of a few. This would really frustrated me because the poor guy was not evening buying the entire thing using a gift card. He was only using it to cover a portion.

First of all, this is only in effect for like a month. It wouldn't kill anyone to wait it out until the ban is lifted. It sounds like Apple put in place a number of systems to keep people from gaming the rules (they caught that guy who was buying iPads and shipping them overseas).

If it really is a huge deal, you can sell your cards on Cardpool. It looks like they are paying $340, so it would cost $60 for the convenience of having cash that you can use right now...

I must be missing something ...How does banning gift cards have anything to do with people buying craploads if iPads and shipping them overseas?

The moral of this recent flux of letters and e-mails: Steve Jobs needs to start a blog or get on Twitter.

So they'll soon also stop accepting cash? I don't see how this can actually have the effect they want. The people overseas doing this are super motivated and aren't married to gift cards.

Was it sent from his Macbook?

Only someone who had "bought 5 iPods, 5 Macs, iPhone, etc" could possibly take Jobs' rhetoric and allow it as justification for a ridiculous policy.