Months after Chromebook Pixel owners began complaining that they had been shortchanged on the free Verizon Wireless data that was supposed to be included in the purchase price of their laptops, and days after national news reports called out Big V for its failure to understand how calendars and contracts work, the company has finally admitted that it screwed up and will be doing something vaguely nice to make up for it.

As we mentioned on Monday, ComputerWorld’s JR Raphael had called out Google and Verizon for failing to honor the promise of two years of 100MB/month of free LTE data for the people who purchased the Pixel during its initial launch in the spring of 2013.

Verizon didn’t have an answer and customer service reps were telling angry Pixel owners that they must have been mistaken, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Google, presumably not wanting bad publicity on the same week it announced its new Android TV platform and other developments, then tried to intervene on Verizon’s behalf, saying it couldn’t do anything about the free data, but hey… here’s a $150 gift card for your troubles.

But last night, Verizon finally admitted that maybe it wasn’t the paragon of customer service that it believes it is in its own deluded mind.

“We understand that a very small number of Chromebook Pixel customers may have had a promo end prematurely,” VZW told the UK’s Register in an e-mailed statement. “We apologize for this, and will work with these customers to address the situation.”

Again, 100MB of data won’t get you very far over the course of a month. But it will allow a laptop user quick access to a few web-browsing sessions or allow them do some work on the fly without having to rely on sketchy and sluggish public WiFi hotspots.

[via TechSpot]

Thanks to Paul for the tip!

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