Another Message to Apple: Your Store Sucks (Apparently)

I ran into another lost soul at my job today. What was a co-worker's problem, soon became mine after I volunteered to help this woman with her question. Basically, she wanted to buy an Apple TV, but was curious as to if it would work with her projection TV, and if not, how easily she could return the product.

At first, I merely overheard the whole conversation about this from the walkies we use, and while the manager and my co-worker tried to help the best they could, they ended up resorting to looking into a reference table for the Apple phone number. As soon as I took over the situation, the woman revealed to me that she looked on the Apple site, went to the Apple Store, and even visited forums (I've never seen a customer do this before...) on advice for the product. She ended up with two questions:

- Will it work with my 5 year old projection TV (implying 4x3 ratio, Standard Definition, and analogue inputs).

- Can I return it if it doesn't.

Being a low level employee, I could not fully advise her on returns, but I tried to alleviate her compatibility issue quite a bit. To make a long story short, I showed her what component inputs were, reassured her that if the connection was made correctly, that nothing more than letterboxing can happen to her videos, and that her TV most likely has said inputs considering it's a huge projection set... Yet she was always wondering this because of one thing.

The Apple Store told her that she could only use the product on a widescreen/HDTV.

Upon inspection of the product, the box made no such mention (it does mention compatibility with 16x9 TVs, but it does not mention exclusivity), and I found such a claim to be bullshit anyway. After all, a lot of Apple's own content is 4x3, such as TV shows and music videos; not everything is 16x9 still... I could not believe Apple trains its employees with such a low level of knowledge. Oh wait, what was their market again? That's right...

So what am I left with? Well, I sealed the deal for one thing. I even told her to avoid component cables, and use her existing composite cables since they were essentially the same thing with different color coding. Hell, I even explained how to connect the cables and finally get the manager to confirm that she could return it if it didn't work. Oh well, it's nice to get a good story at work, but seriously Apple, is it really good business practice to say that your products just DON'T work?