Q: Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring (iMac to AppleTV) Not Working

Walter1964

Writing and requesting a refund is not easy.

For my refund I started by logging a request on Apples iTunes support page

https://expresslane.apple.com/Issues.action

This started a long email exchange which resulted in a refund recently.  The exchange is below which may, or may not help you.  As I said in a previous post – I am not sure if the goodwill refund was a result of a change in policy by Apple or just due to my persistence.

My initial web entry was this:

Other Mac App Store Topics Sub Issue : Refund of app purchase GCRM

Details:

I installed OSX Mountain Lion for Airplay and only found out afterwards that it is not compatible with my Mac Book Pro.  The website advertising the product does not indicate a restriction.

1. www.apple.com/osx/whats-new implies that it is compatible for all Mac (at the bottom of the page a MacBook Pro is defined as a Mac).  After almost an hour on the phone with customer support ref XXXXXXXX the technician found a reference to Mac definitions in a separate page under tech specs.

As this was not prominently displayed or referenced - I feel this is false advertising.  I only upgraded for AirPlay and would like to return the software and get a refund.

Note, Apple have recently changed their whatsnew page to display the limitation of Airplay.  Fist Reply from macappstore_english_us_support@apple.com so you may like to try this email directly.

Hello Chris,

Chelsea here from iTunes Store support! I understand that you are having  issue with "Airplay". I can certainly see how frustrating it can be to pay for something that you are unable to download. 

I would like to help you with this, but I could not locate the purchase based on the information you provided. Please respond and include your purchase's order number in your reply.

You can find your order numbers on your email receipts and in your Purchase History. If you need to review your Purchase History, follow the steps in this article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2727

Chris, I look forward to your reply with the information needed to locate the order so I can determine if you can get a refund. Please don't hesitate to write back in should you require further assistance with this issue.

Thank you for contacting iTunes Store Customer Support. I hope that you continue to enjoy the iTunes Store. Have a stellar day.

Sincerely,

Chelsea

My first response

Chelsea,

I think you have misunderstood.

The problem not with an app called "Airplay" it is with the download of "OS X Mountain lion" and the Airplay feature.  The download of OS X Mountain lion worked fine it is just not delivering what it promised.

Airplay is a major component of the new operating system OS X Mountain Lion and it does not work on my Mac - see below your url link "www.apple.com/osx/whats-new" which advertises this feature but does not deliver to all Macs (no mention of that in the "what-new").

I would therefore like a refund of the purchase of "OS X Lion" and instruction on how to "uninstall" and "return" it as it does not work as advertised and there are no other features that I would like.

I am surprised that you are not aware of this issue with Mountain Lions as there are a number of irate users on your forums complaining about it.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/19041853#19041853

Unlike people just complaining on forums - I actually would like a refund as the advertising behind this feature falsely made me upgrade.

Thanks

Chris

2nd reply

Hello Chris,

Chelsea here again from the iTunes Store support!

I sorry there is nothing else I can do, the system requirements are listed on the Mac App Store. I also cannot refund the software "OS X Mountain Lion"

Apple recognizes that no one is better qualified to provide feedback about our products and services than the people who use them. I urge you to submit any feedback you have about Airplay at Apple's Feedback page:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Your efforts to share your feedback are very much appreciated.

Chris, I do sorry that I could not provided the service that you expected from Apple, but please fill out the feedback about the Airplay on the new system.

Thank you for contacting iTunes Store Customer Support. I hope that you continue to enjoy the iTunes Store. Have a lovely day.

Sincerely,

Chelsea

My response:

Chelsea,

Thanks looking into that.  I will also raise it with the advertising standards authority and citizens advice consumer service.

Chris

Advertising standards response

APPLE (UK) LTD

Thank you for contacting the Advertising Standards Authority.  I’m sorry to hear that this matter has caused you concern.

We think you’ve made a valid point and, with a view to acting quickly, we asked the advertisers to make changes.  I’m please to advise that the advertisers have agreed to the following changes, without the need for a formal investigation:

1. 1.  The Airplay footnote has been added to the main features page (http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/whats-new/).
2. 2.  They will also add the same Airplay footnote to the two click through pages (www.apple.com/uk/appletv and www.apple.com/uk/airplay) by August 15th.

We will therefore now close our files on this basis.  Basic information including the company name, the industry sector and the medium in which the ad appeared will appear on our website www.asa.org.uk, on 22^nd August in a list with other advertisers that have co-operated in resolving complaints.

I do hope that this outcome is satisfactory to you, and finally I’d like to thank you for taking the time and trouble to write to us and bring this matter to our attention. 

Armed with this I felt Apple would be sure to give me a refund...

Chelsea,

I hope that you are doing well.

I see that the ASA has upheld my complaint and now Apple will be making the advert clearer.  Are Apple looking at compensating customers over this issue too?

The Citizens Advice Bureau have said that I will need to put a formal request to yourselves in writing for a refund and redress.  It is not something that I want to do for £14 but feel that I should as this is a matter of principal.

If Apple are not going to refund this and tell me how to return the App could you please send me the address in the UK for a formal procedures.

Thanks,

Chris

Steve took up my complaint...

Dear Chris,

Thank you for contacting the iTunes Store Support team. My name is Steve. Chelsea is currently away from the office, however, I will be happy to review your email in her stead.

I understand you are looking for an address in order to forward written communication in regards to feedback to Apple's refund policies. I can certainly appreciate your concerns, and I will do my best to provide you with the most useful information and steps to take in such a situation.

Apple takes your feedback seriously. I assure you that your feedback about a request for refund has been logged.

Customer communications are frequently reviewed to help us improve our business, but if you would still like to send a written communication, here is Apple's postal address:

Apple, Inc.

Attn: Customer Care

1 Infinite Loop

Cupertino, CA 95014

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the iTunes Store, please do not hesitate to contact me. I will be happy to help with whatever I can.

Sincerely,

Steve

My response to Steve.

Steve, I am a UK customer and was looking for a UK address.

What response is Apple taking to the Advertising Complaints Commissions finding?

Regards,

Chris

Looked like a fob off to me.

Dear Chris,

Steve here from the iTunes Store. I'm sorry, but I can't comment on Advertising Complaints Commissions on behalf of Apple.

Apple makes our company news available to the public through several channels. Here are some great ways you can stay up to date:

Hot News: http://www.apple.com/hotnews

Press Info: http://www.apple.com/pr

Apple and the Environment: http://www.apple.com/environment Investor Relations: http://www.apple.com/investor Email Subscriptions: http://www.apple.com/enews/subscribe

If you would still like to send a written communication, here is Apple's postal address:

Apple, Inc.

Attn: Customer Care

1 Infinite Loop

Cupertino, CA 95014

For information about Apple support options, please visit: 

http://www.apple.com/uk/contact/

Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

Sincerely,

Steve

More direct question.

Is there no UK address for the App store?

Chris

Hello Chris,

Steve here again. I am sorry, but there is not an available address in the U.K. for written correspondence.

If you would still like to send a written communication, this is Apple's postal address:

Apple, Inc.

Attn: Customer Care

1 Infinite Loop

Cupertino, CA 95014

For additional information about Apple support options, please visit: 

http://www.apple.com/uk/contact/

If you have questions or concerns regarding the iTunes Store, or your iTunes Store account, please do not hesitate to contact me. I will be happy to help with whatever I can.

Sincerely,

Steve

I then tried to get Apple to confirm the facts of the case for my letter.

For clarity in my letter.

I was misled into purchasing an app "os x mountain lion" due to false advertising

I requested a refund due to a misleading advert

Apple would not acknowledge the false advertising or refund the app.

The advertising authority in the UK has found the advert webpage misleading

Apple have agree to fix the misleading advert.

Apple won't allow me to return the app for refund even though I was misled with acknowledged false advertising .

Is there anything in there that I am missing (If you can't comment please pass onto someone who will) as I will be cc'ing the press in with my letter to apple.

Thanks

Chris

I sensed Steve was getting tired...

Dear Chris,

Steve here again from the iTunes Store. I am sorry, but I cannot make comments about Advertising Complaints Commissions on behalf of Apple. Please feel free to send any written correspondence you have to the postal address provided.

I apologize for any inconvenience you have experienced, but any additional emails from you regarding Advertising Complaints Commissions will not receive a response from iTunes Store Customer Support.

Sincerely,

Steve

This one was one more direct question that did not get a response...

I am not writing about the complaint commission, just asking if the facts that I have laid out are correct or if I am missing something.  Are you the right people to be emailing?  Is there a better email address to use?

Chris

So was followed up the next day with...

Steve,

I have not received your normal quick response - so not sure if you are busy trying to find someone who can answer this question or if you feel this deals with the advertising point which you said you would ignore.

If you are ignoring this mail - let me rephrase.

Why do you feel that you do not have to refund this purchase of this app and allow me to restore back to OS X Mountain Lion?

As discussed in the original thread - I would like to return this product as I purchased it on the basis of the Airplay feature and as the airplay feature is not available to me - I have no need for the upgrade and would like to return it.

Regards,

Chris

Finally, the refund...

Dear Chris,

After reviewing the circumstances of your case, we determined that issuing you a refund for your purchase of "OS X Mountain Lion" is an appropriate exception to the App Store Terms and Conditions, which state that all sales are final. In five to seven business days, a credit of £13.99 should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns regarding the iTunes Store. I'll be more than happy to assist you with whatever I can.

Sincerely,

Steve

I thought that I had received a refund I should at least return the App...

Steve,

Thanks for that - how do I go about returning the app?

Chris

Dear Chris,

I am glad to hear I was able to assist in issuing a refund for OS X Mountain Lion. As an Advisor for the iTunes Store, I specialize in iTunes Store account-and iTunes billing-related issues.

Your best choice for assistance in removing OS X Mountain Lion is to reach out to an AppleCare Technical Support Advisor. A technical Advisor will be able to tell you about Apple's complimentary and fee-based support options as well as assist you in determining what option might be most helpful in this case. To find the appropriate phone number, please visit:

Contacting Apple for support and service

http://support.apple.com/kb/HE57

United Kingdom - (44) 0844 209 0611

If I can provide additional help in finding the right Apple resource for you, or if you need assistance with your iTunes Store account, please reply to this message. I will be happy to help with whatever I can.

Sincerely,

Steve

That proved less easy and I was not about to start calling a call centre so I turned this into a gesture of goodwill.

Steve,

To be perfectly frank, I have the result I wanted in the refund and am not prepared to call expensive support numbers, being kept on hold for an hour to get it off.

If you would like your App returned please ask your technicians to get hold of me to tell my how to do it (they can contact me on this email address) - otherwise I will be treating this refund as a gesture of goodwill and keeping the app on my Mac.

Hopefully, the last email on this matter, thank you for your patience and assistance with this matter.

Chris

1. P.S. I am not sure if you received my attachment from the ASA but I have copied the text below for your information. On the 22nd of August there will be an announcement in the UK that your website was misleading and I would suggest you have an appropriate response for customers who (like me) would like a refund on the basis of the misleading website.

Steve did not seem to want to get a technician to contact me so said I should provide feedback to Apple – which is what brings my post here...

Dear Chris,

I wanted you to know that Apple recognizes that no one is better qualified to provide feedback about iTunes than the people who use it. To make sure your request is considered, I've gone ahead and put through a request to the iTunes feedback page for you.

To increase your chances, I encourage you to use the iTunes Feedback page to submit any comments yourself for future instances:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns. I'll be more than happy to assist you with whatever I can.

Sincerely,

Steve

I managed to get a ML App refund from the App store almost painlessly and expecting I was therefore keeping ML for free I was realtively content accepting afterall mirroring would not work on my older iMac.

However the point was then made to me that effectively I had not purchased ML so I would not get support for ML any more unless I purchased it again. Querying the fact I decided trying to go back to LION would no doubt be a pain to organise so pushed again for compensation and ended up with a 5 tune credit on iTunes. Whoohoo!

I expect I'll relent and buy ML again if I feel I need to benefit from future support. But what a shambles eh!

Jajajajaja!

You are my new Hero!!

Well done!!!

Agreed this is completely bogus! I bought a new apple TV and upgraded my OS (even though I just did it a few months ago) just to have screen mirroring. It was not clear anywher in the mac store that it would not work and I had to do quite a bit of research before I figured out the problem. My mac book is not even that old- it says Mid 2010. really lame.

just installed ML and it is OUTRAGEOUS  to discover [[ just now ]]  that I cant have mirroring - especially that that was the main reason i bought apple tv. this is border line sleazy of apple. dissapointing but hope it can be fixed.

Ok people stop complaining about air play mirroring already on your mac, is a done deal, if you want just get a refund, if not just learn to leave with it, like I did.

But iElier, I think the point is that this should not be left alone...   otherwise it will only happen again.  The only way that we can help Apple, the company that we love, is by submitting to this forum and if we have to, demand refund/apologies/fixes!!  Otherwise they will think all is sweet.  Apple advertises that ML was downloaded by at least 3 million times over 4 days...   how many of those people are now disenchanted, feel ripped off and have just learned to live with it.  In the bigger picture, Apple could lose support and we don't want that...   doing nothing by thier supporters would be detrimental to the icon.

I say keep hounding Apple and request refunds etc until they come good.

I understand there are technical reasons air mirroring is unavailable. As I've stated previously Apple did a poor job of promoting air mirroring, which led to a lot of unrealistic expectations and poorly informed purchases. The people in this thread are expressing their opinion and dissatisfaction. If you aren't dissatisfied, I am not sure why this thread would be of interest to you.

I am happy to see so many people giving their feedback; I happily purchased mountain lion AFTER finding out about the air mirroring limitation. Like many of the people here I found the advertising campaign misleading. If I had bought ML for air mirroring, I would want a refund. I don't like the direction Apple is going, their support for Mac pro customers is another example.

The complaints in this thread are on topic,

Ok people stop complaining about air play mirroring already on your mac, is a done deal, if you want just get a refund, if not just learn to leave with it, like I did.

doesn't really offer anything constructive.

but I'm so sorry but you are paying apple? I have everything that exists on the market and if you let apple buy a computer two years ago and see that it can not 'be used with other products dare to make me angry? believe or believe by chance that I'm willing to spend a lot of money for them every year? do not say things that do not make sense please. sorry for my english

This is how Apple and other businesses make money. Whether you like it or not, who gives a ****. Remember Steve Jobs stole profit money from Wozniak when Apple was just starting. He does everything just for the money. This is Steve Job's legacy and it wouldn't change since he is already dead.

This is awful.  My iMac is under 2 years old and is a high end system.  Do they expect me to buy a new one every year?  This is ridiculous.  I've held Apple in such high regard since I started purchasing their products, both for the quality and the longevity of their products.  Holding back features for no good reason negates any longevity, and invalidates any argument for paying 2-3 times as much for a comparable PC.  I feel like this is a slight to me personally, and an unscrupulous money-grab.  The designation of the age of the system as a cut-off does not speak at all to the system capabilities, and is therefore arbitrary.  Let me rephrase; it's not arbitrary, it seems it is specifically chosen to slowly start holding back new features from users with older systems, such that they eventually feel forced to upgrade.  Way to stand behind your product.  One might benefit from Googling the term "shyster." 

What I find excellently comical about this move from Apple is that a i5 based MacBook Air can run AirPlay mirroring simply because the i5 can transcode x264 natively; however a 12 core Xeon monster of a Mac Pro, complete with eye wateringly powerful graphics cards from 2010, can't. So a machine designed to play quite merrily with 4K ProRes footage is unable to transcode a little bit of x264 (at lower resolutions that 4K may I add) on the fly and yet a mobile computer can?!

I mean for goodness sake that Mac Pro has 12 cores and 24 threads to play with, take a whole core, maybe a thread or two just to transcode the video for AirPlay if needs be - third parties seem to be able to do it just fine, why can't you?

What makes this even funnier for me is that my iPHONE AND iPAD can do this!!! In what world is a modern workstation computer unable to do something that a pokey little 1GHz Samsung ARM Processor can?!

I don't care about the money I spent on Mountain Lion, what I care about is the blatent marketing move - we should all be greatful that Apple don't make games because they'll claim my Triple SLI Nvidia GTX 580 System is "incapable of running the game" but the Intel HD 4000 graphics card in my laptop will be up to the job just because it happens to support SpeedStep.

I'm taking this personally Apple, I'm pretty sure that HP and Microsoft will have a new customer soon.

Oh! Before anyone makes comments that I'm complaining - yes I am complaining and I think I am entitled to. My Mac Pro cost £10,000< and is even BBC approved, a mere year and a half ago - it should be able to do this just fine, especially seeing that if I turn to my PC based machine running Fedora I can see it happily encoding 20 x264 videos in 1080p for online publishing simultaneously, as well as playing some music, browsing the internet and all on an old Core 2 Quad Q9650.

As a small business I have invested huge amounts into Apple and to omit a feature as basic as this to me shows a huge lack of commitment.

If you have read through this, many thanks - I had to get this off my chest and I couldn't think of anywhere better to voice my opinion; not that Apple cares.

Couldn't  have put it better myself. Remember what they did to Final Cut Pro so why should this move surprise anybody. Fortunately Air Parrot works fine as long as you don't ask it to do too much.

Apple are the new Microsoft. I've just resigned myself to the fact that. It's all about the money.

It's all very well leading from the front but I think they find folk less inclined to follow next time. Anyhow ML is so buggy and just not Apple, so expect a huge maintenance update soon. You never know they just throw in AirPlay Mirroring to say sooty for screwing all you loyal customers. Don't hold your breath on that apology !

We shall have to wait and see!

I just hope they respond as well as they responded to the whole Final Cut Pro X debarkle. Initially they had omitted obvious features, however they have slowly been bringing them back, which I respect.

Though I am not a fan of where the editor at all I respect the boldness in the changes that they've made and that they do seem to be listening. Though I have had to migrate to Adobe for my professional work I do feel that though initially Apple did give us professional users a slap in the face they have been doing their best to sort it out; with all luck they shall do the same for Mountain Lion.

Fingers crossed, eh! I've sunk a lot of money in that company, I hope that wasn't all in vain.

Same problem here... No mirroring, No power nap and no twitter integration.. what a dissappointment !!