Apple is a total dick, forces the largest Kickstarter refund ever

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Apple is a total dick, forces the largest Kickstarter refund ever

In September, Jamie Siminoff and Edison Junior raised $139,170 on Kickstarter to support the creation of POP, a minimalist multi-device charging station. Today, in the largest Kickstarter refund yet, they’re giving that money back because Apple is being a total dick. They don’t want any non-Lightning connectors next to any Lightning connectors in a multi-charging device.

Through an announcement posted on the site, Siminoff let backers know that the problem is with Apple’s Lightning adapter. With new rules to be announced shortly, Apple is forbidding the inclusion of non-Lightning adapters alongside their newest connector. That means no micro-USB and not even the classic 30 pin iPod/iPhone adapter.

“If you promise four of something and now you deliver two it’s not the same product that someone bought,” Siminoff told Wired. He says that the change was too big to justify keeping their backers’ money. “We didn’t feel all right keeping the money anymore.”

Edison Junior will refund 100 percent of the money that backers contributed, which means they are absorbing the 3 percent fee that credit cards take and Kickstarter’s 5 percent cut for a total of over $11,000.

The twist is that the mechanism that Siminoff will use to refund backers’ money will be through his new industrial-design-focused crowdfunding site Christie Street, which Wired covered previously. Siminoff says that Christie Street is crowdfunding redesigned from the ground up for physical products. The project-creation process involves audits before the projects launch and a system for refunding backers a portion of their funds if a project fails along the way to completion.

“Part of why we started Christie Street was our experience doing Kickstarter with POP,” he says. As their licensing discussions with Apple reached an impasse, “we realized ‘woah, we might have to refund the money.’ There’s no mechanism for that in Kickstarter.”

Via