Joe vs. Toshiba
Amy still loves her iPhone that I got her for Christmas. And I’ve been really happy with the super-awesome HD-DVD player she got me — Toshiba HD-A35… Until a few weeks ago. Rumors about HD-DVD losing the format war to Blu-ray conveniently picked up steam about a month after Christmas, and now it’s official. Toshiba itself issued a press release saying “Yeah, we surrender. No more HD-DVD.” Toshiba spent millions of dollars on a Superbowl ad trying to get people to buy into HD-DVD at a time when the pricepoint was still inflated for early adopers, and now they have simply discontinued the product.
It’s easy to just say “Tough. You bought in early, you take the risk.” But that’s not an attitude that a large corporation should take if they’d like to get any repeat business from the demographic that does tend to buy in early on hot new technology. So, I’m contacting Toshiba to see if they can do anything for me.
In Japan, retailer Edion will trade-in your HD-DVD player for a Blu-ray player. I don’t think it’s unfair to ask for something similar here. I suppose an alternative would be to return every device as non-functional for a store credit, right?
I’ll give Toshiba a chance to respond first. Let’s see what happens.