One Year, Two Years, What’s the Difference?

JR Raphael, writing for Computerworld:

When a company promises two years of free mobile data service with a device, you expect them to deliver. So what happens when a promise suddenly evaporates after you’ve purchased a product?

That’s the situation owners of Google’s LTE Chromebook Pixel are finding themselves facing right now. The LTE model of the Pixel went on sale from Google’s Play Store last April for $1450. At the time, the product was advertised as coming with a free two-year mobile broadband plan from Verizon — 100 MB per month, with the option to purchase more data on a pay-as-you-go basis as needed.

Fast-forward to one year later, and Pixel LTE owners are discovering their data plans have been disconnected. The option to pay for data remains, but the free 100 MB per month mysteriously vanished just one year into the promised two-year period.

Just a flat-out reneging.

That this story is only breaking in June, two months after it started affecting Chromebook Pixel owners, seems telling regarding the device’s popularity.

★ Monday, 23 June 2014