On 01/12/2005, at 5:04 AM, WAMUG Mailing List wrote:
However, you should have a legal right to negotiate a "remedy" with the retailer (or, if that is unsuccessful, to have a complaint heard) as part of standard consumer protections: see <http:// www.docep.wa.gov.au>. Three typical conditions that trigger these rights & obligations are: "faults" in products that were not reasonably obvious at the time of purchase; "mis-representation" of products by shop staff or ads; "unsuitability" of products for the purpose for which they were sold and bought.
In that framework one should expect that returning the Mac to have the drive fault corrected would be a reasonable action. The response I got from my Apple dealer when I asked directly about the region-free status of the drive in my new eMac at the time of purchase was that it could be 'supplied' but at a price. The dealer also advised that they would not do any flashing inside the warranty provisions.
Considering that there is no restriction in this country on sale of either region-free machines or non-Australian-region coded discs (importing of them is not restricted either), I view the persistence of region coding as simply one more avenue for the more technically adept to make a quick profit on repairing crippled goods.
I have three friends who returned their Macs with locked optical drives to the dealer for correction of the fault. In 2 cases this was done without charge under warranty - as an exchange region-free drive. In the remaining case, the dealer charged $50 to exchange the drive.
I prefer not to spend the money on, or stuff around with flashing, hardware when such good software as MacTheRipper is available. I note that it's based on open-sourced GPL stuff. Another advantage of ripping commercial dvds to one's hard drive is a much improved control of playback from the eMac hard drive compared to the latency with control of the optical drive.
This may be different of course with higher-end hardware. Nancy M
