My Ipad of only 21 months has stopped working. It's dead as confirmed by my local apple store. It has not been dropped nor abused. Apple don't seem interested and have yet to respond to a letter. Any suggestions welcome!

Question

For Christmas 2012 my son bought me my first iPad when up in Scotland on business. So from 25th December until last Tuesday evening, September 3rd, this had worked fine and was my pride and joy. It's an amazing piece of technology.
Imagine my horror and annoyance when I went to use it on the Tuesday evening only to find that it would not start up. All the usual buttons were pressed and I plugged it in to a power source then into iTunes and saw no no change.
On Wednesday morning I went into the Apple shop in Harrogate, where JCL (salesman) tried all of the same things as I had and declared that he had never seen this happen to an iPad! My only course of action was to send it back to Apple who would tell me it's dead and advise me to buy a new one. [This, as it is welded together and they have no means of repairing them!!] So what can I do? I had to buy a new one, which cost me £399.
Is this good value for money under the Sale of Goods Act? An iPad should surely last more than 20 months? The device has never been dropped and is in very good condition other than it does not work.
I would appreciate any views on this.
I have written to Apple and they have yet to respond (15 days ago)

Answer 1

There is No overriding EU law on this however there is a directive 1999/44/EC and sets out a general framework on harmonizing complaints and settlement of defects and resulting breaches in contract.
Under UK law these are the relevant regulations
Sale of Goods Act 1979
Supply of Goods (Implied Terms) Act 1973
Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982
The Sale and Supply of Goods to Consumers Regulations 2002
These are considered to be in compliance with the directive in most respects and in some respects exceed the minimum directive definitions.
The Directive itself adds very little and in some ways actually reduces the consumer (buyers) rights compared to UK laws and regulations.
The directive sets a maximum period of just two years for which the seller may be held responsible for repairing/replacing pre-existing faults and a period of just two months from identifying the fault and reporting it to the seller.
As stated above UK law allows a period of 5 years in Scotland and 6 years in the UK and doesn’t have a defined period of identification or reporting of that pre-existing fault
The UK law also incorporates a minimum period of 6 months of unlimited warranty (Extended to 12 month by most sellers including Apple).
There is NO provision for unlimited warranty within the EU directive, and all faults are assumed to be pre-existing.
Pre-existing is very important in all these claims as in UK law it fixes the timeline of the fault using the three definitions in the previous post as being present at the start of the contract (Time of purchase)
Hence the need for an expert report !