UK woman orders an iPhone 12 Pro Max, gets a broken tile instead

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Iphone Box With Broken Tile
Iphone Box With Broken Tile (Image credit: Olivia Parkinson)

What you need to know

  • UK woman Olivia Parkinson ordered a new iPhone 12 Pro Max from carrier Virgin Media and awaited delivery.
  • Courier Yodel delivered a fresh, broken tile instead of an iPhone.

Getting a new iPhone is supposed to be an exciting day, but sometimes things go wrong. And then sometimes you get a broken tile in an iPhone 12 Pro Max box instead.

That's what happened to Olivia Parkinson after she had the misfortune to order an iPhone 12 Pro Max from UK carrier Virgin Media. That part wasn't really the problem, but things started to go awry when Virgin Media used Yodel to deliver the thing. As fellow UK dwellers will attest, that wasn't great news.

Things took a turn when the iPhone arrived at Parkinson's doorstep but after opening it she didn't see a shiny new Apple device. She saw a tile instead. What's worse, it was a broken tile as if someone wanted to add insult to injury.

As LADbible reports, Parkinson initially got the cold shoulder from Virgin Media and was told she was liable for the lost iPhone. Eventually, and once the people of Twitter got involved, Virgin Media agreed that something was amiss and refunded Parkinson for her loss. Still, it could all have been handled better, it seems.

It seems fairly obvious that someone somewhere recognized the size and shape of Parkinson's parcel and then had away with the iPhone that was inside. Yodel is more known for throwing expensive items into pools and over 6ft walls than outright stealing things, but who knows. I presume the stolen iPhone is now a very nice-looking paperweight and nothing more thanks to the various locks carriers can place on modern phones.

Hopefully Parkinson gets her new iPhone eventually. The impressive iPhone 12 Pro Max is the best iPhone for photographers as well, so she can at least take some stunning images of that there tile.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.