A former Apple Genius Bar Expert has shed more light on the company’s new policy to aggressively push customers towards buying a new iPhone when they give in their existing iPhone for repair. 

The Genius Bar Expert has revealed to us that Apple first sent a memo to its retail store employees at the end of December after poor iPhone sales to push customers towards upgrading to a new iPhone.

Genius Bar employees were ordered to tell customers that it would be cheaper for them to upgrade to a new iPhone than fix their existing one. They were to also highlight Apple’s buyback program under which the company would take their old iPhone and give a discount towards the purchase of the iPhone XR.

Apple was offering customers full buyback value as a part of its trade-in program even if their iPhone 6 or iPhone 7 was bricked or had hardware issues related to the network/GPS and which required a logic board replacement. While this is good for customers, it is going to create an issue between Apple and Brightstar — the trade-in program partner — as the latter will reduce the buyback value of the devices due to the hardware issues.

That’s not all. Apple is even buying back iPhones as old as the iPhone 5c as a part of its trade-in program just to get customers to upgrade to a new iPhone instead.

Employees were told to brainwash customers into upgrading to a new iPhone using iPhone Upgrade Program and iPhone Payments. For this, some Apple Stores even placed an Expert or Pro at the Genius Bar to talk to customers waiting for getting their iPhone repaired into upgrading to a new one instead.

“Among the many things that we were told was to pretty much brainwash the customers and always tell them it was more expensive to repair the device vs. upgrading” – former Apple Genius Bar Expert.

Apple had sent this memo to all its retail store employees and marketing teams in December.

Our Take

Apple really seems to have taken a very aggressive approach to try and stop the dwindling iPhone sales. However, I can’t help but feel that by adopting such measures, the company is killing the very essence of going to an Apple Store. In a bid to push iPhone sales, the company is damaging the whole Apple Store experience.

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