Apple has pulled their ‘Mac mini Test Drive’ promotion, one day after the promo launched yesterday.
The Apple Store no longer lists the 30-day money-back-guarantee offer without explanation. The online promo page now defaults to the regular Mac mini pages.
MacDailyNews Take: Response too great too handle? Something amiss? Just a test? Too good of an idea? What a great promo though! It would have sold Macs and created more Mac users. No wonder they pulled it so fast!
Somebody’s head rolled in Cupertino today, if we had to guess.
Mac mini Test Drive, we hardly knew you! We hope it returns soon.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple launches ‘Mac mini Test Drive’ promo: try it for 30 days – full refund if you don’t love it – August 30, 2005
It’s either one of the reasons you mentioned, or someone jumped the gun with posting this promo.
Indian giver.
This is bad publicity for Apple.
“This is bad publicity for Apple?”
How?
A web developer with a good idea that the corporate suits blindly ignore.
WTF?
macnut222
finger it out.
This was poorly thought out by Apple, no matter what the cause.
It makes it look like Apple isn’t well organized to the public when something like this occurs, and it this instance, their right.
I have a feeling someone is about to get “Steved”
“Steved” = Fired
“This is bad publicity for Apple?”
macnut is right. What? There was no publicity for the promotion. No publicity of its launch, no publicity for the unexpected end to the promotion.
No publicity whatsoever.
No, I think it was a sign of things to come. A new program that was yet to start and some webdesigner dropped the file into the wrong directory.
We may yet see the test drive.
This is a little disappointing. Although the Mac Mini is a great buy without the 30 day money back guarantee, I told 3 borderline “switchers” about the promo yesterday and that it would be a good time for them to give the best OS a try.
Now it makes me look stupid – as well as Apple. There is good publicity and bad publicity – this would be the bad type.
Boo to you Steve, or your Marketing folk.
Oh well…
Either this appeared like Mac Mini sales were weak, a glitch occured somehow, or this wasn’t meant to be seen just yet and accidentially posted.
Maybe the response was indeed overwhelming. 😀
Or we all have been tricked!
this is kinda like that “Win What You Want” contest that we canadians were supposed to have but then got pulled, without disclosing the reason. (supposedly it was a case of right hand not knowing what left hand was doing type situation)
No one that anyone will ever know or has known will get Steved. the offending person will just take a very long vacation to somewhere in the middle of nowhere and never return.
If this were Dell or HP, or Creative, imagine how stupid we’d say they were…
maybe they wanted to annouce it on Sept 7th…who knows
Supposed to start in 60 days instead of ending then? For the holiday season?
Pulling this was probably a good idea. Maybe someone finally remembered the “Test Drive a Mac” campaign from the early 90’s. I worked for an Apple reseller back then and what ended up happening was a lot of returned Macs that couldn’t be sold as new.
not the first time — back in 84 Scully launched a ‘test drive a macintosh’ campaign, in that case, a 24-hour trial. it was a mess for a variety of reasons and i suspect this program was canned because of bad memories in general. the situation in 84 was very different, with mac shortages and heavy reliance on resellers, but i’m sure the bad taste lingers.
apple’s risks with this type of program today seem pretty low to me — few would return and the cost of returned machines could mostly be recouped through the “reconditioned” sales channel. but then again, they already have the best marketing program in place for the Mini — a low price point to begin with.
Maybe they found a loophole in the terms and needed to revise.
I’m guessing the promo was supposed to be launched NEXT year with the Intel based Mac mini.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
I ordered a mini yesterday because of the test drive program, and the folks at telesales (1-800-MY-APPLE) said they’d been fully briefed about the program, so it’s not a web-designer-jumped-the-gun mistake.
When I talked to them today, they were also unaware of why the program had been cancelled. They’d received an urgent email saying “Urgent Change: Test Drive Campaign Cancelled,” but not saying why.
I’m told they even had banners up in some of the stores.
So I can’t tell whether this was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, or the right hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Oh well, my mini’s on the Fedex truck, so unless they send out ninjas to hijack the trucks back to Elk Grove, I’m OK.
Maybe this was also supposed to roll out on Sept. 7th?
A good idea, but a bit of a waste of resources. My dad used to be able to keep up with the latest tech by exploiting offers like this one. He had a new computer every 6 months, for like three years, and all he needed was some start up cash. It went bust when he forgot on one cycle.
ron wrote:
“macnut222
finger it out.”
How many fingers does he need to use ron?