Best Pram - Best Pushchair - Best Stroller

I’d love to be able to say the iCandy Apple was a good buy for our baby, but it’s definitely been a love/hate relationship. Almost a year since we started using it, it’s fair to say we’re both very much in love with it again, but we’ve had a number of problems along the way - some downright dangerous and others just disappointing - which, considering its cost,  has sadly taken some of the shine of the rose-tinted specs.

The iCandy Apple is a stunning pushchair. Obviously, taste is very much a matter of personal opinion, but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been stopped in the street by someone wanting to know what make it is.  But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t any teething issues with it. Speaking to a seller at the Baby Show last week, it would seem that iCandy are aware of the issues I’ll go on to discuss and claim that these have now been resolved by the introduction of a new chassis. In which case, you’d do well to bear this point in mind when reading about the problems we experienced and reserve judgement until you can test-drive it for yourself. But the fact remains that for those of us who bought our pushchairs in the early days and thus became rather expensive guinea pigs, the road has been a little more fraught with problems.

To start at the beginning, it was love at first sight when we saw it. My husband, especially, was completely bowled over by the sleek, masculine and understated design, and felt sure it ticked every single one of our boxes.  Forward and rear-facing? Yes! Handle-height adjustable? Yes! Maxi cosi cabriofix car seat compatible? Yes! The list went on and on, and after a couple of test-drives around the shop, we were both completely sold.

At the time we bought it - April 2007 - it was often compared to the extremely popular Bugaboo Chameleon, probably because they’re not too dissimilar in looks and both were very different from the run of the mill pushchairs around at the time and therefore seemed somewhat more exclusive, though with a never-ending parade of brightly coloured Bugaboos jostling for position on every high street in the country right now, I’m not sure this is the case any more! 

In retrospect and joking aside, maybe this is a crucial point. With new pushchairs, you have to take a leap of faith that they’ll stand the test of time. No-one’s been there before you using it for any real length of time, so user reviews like this one are extremely hard to find. The Bugaboo, it would seem, has more than earned its reputation as one of the most popular pushchairs of all time. The majority of people who’ve been using them with what was a baby and is now a toddler, are still shouting from the roof tops about how much they love their bugs.  What better advert could there be?

At the time, however, with the Apple pram being new, different and - at £399 for the pushchair and carrycot  combination - coming in at around £200 cheaper than the Bugaboo Chameleon, there wasn’t much we didn’t love about this beautiful new pushchair design.  We had NO doubts whatsoever as we handed over our hard earned cash, which, together with £50 for the footmuff,  oh, and don’t forget £30 for the matching changing bag, gave us one whole pound change out of £480.  Ker-ching!

Assembling the Travel System

The first decision you have to make when you get your pram out of the box is whether you want it to be in 3-wheel mode like a jogger, or 4-wheel mode like a traditional pram/travel system. This is not as simple as you might imagine, as the pushchair can only ever be one or the other, and switching between the two involves completely removing and replacing the wheels. With tools!  Not something you can do on a whim while doing your weekly shop.

Given that this pram would be carrying the most precious cargo of all - our soon to be born Boo - we opted for substance over style and plumped initially for the 4-wheel option. It just felt like it would be sturdier.  At this point, I’ll admit to knowing nothing about the mechanics of putting the iCandy together. One look at the disassembled wheels lying forlornly next to the instructions’ booklet brought me out in a cold sweat,  so husband Paul was summoned with a lofty wave in the general direction of the heap of pram parts and told to ’sort it’. As I was 7 months pregnant at the time, with a bump that looked like I was smuggling not one but several basketballs, he bit back whatever retort he might otherwise have thrown at me, and 30 minutes later (after much swearing!) summoned me back with a smug ‘ta-dah’ to show me our beautiful, assembled pram. Wow!

What did you love about the iCandy Apple Travel System?

As we’d bought the full travel system, including carrycot, this is what we used first, and it’s a fabulous, practical, considered design. We literally can’t fault it.  The big, air-filled tyres and all round suspension ensured the smoothest of rides, no matter what the terrain, and Boo always looked comfortable and cosy while out and about. Boo was a summer baby, and we did worry about the combination of an all- black carrycot with blazing summer heat, but it’s so roomy that air was able to circulate freely and he never got overly hot and bothered. The carrycot is lovely and high compared to its competitors, meaning you’re really close to baby while pushing it out and about, or stopping for coffee somewhere, and we especially loved the handy flip-down bar underneath the carrycot which attached to the front of the shopping basket, making it sturdier and safer still. Some travel systems we tried, including the Bugaboo, seemed to bounce around quite alarmingly in carrycot mode, so having this additional stabilising device on the Apple was a real bonus.

We used the carrycot for 5/6 months and got every penny of our money’s worth out of it, especially by buying an additional, vented mattress and using it as a moses basket too.  With the apron cover on, and the hood in the upright position, the carrycot shields out the vast majority of outside light and noise, and Boo would happily spend all evening asleep in our lounge, before being carried upstairs, still sound asleep, to our bedroom for the night. The carrycot hood has a handy gap at the top, so you can hold the foam covered  handle and carry it quite safely. If truth be told, Boo has never slept quite so well since (sob!).

The compatibility with the maxi cosi cabrio car seat (with the use of car seat adaptors that come with the carrycot) is also not a feature to be sniffed at. The ability to leave baby relatively undisturbed while you pop the car seat on and off the chassis and in and out of the car while you run errands, nip to the shops, or visit friends, was one of our best-loved and most-used features of the pram. Boo’s in the next stage car seat now, but we got over 8 months use out of it, often up to 3 or 4 times a week (only for very short periods at a time), and I’ve really missed being able to use it.

I also love the shopping basket on the Apple, which handles pretty much everything I can throw at it (or stuff under it!) and the height adjustable handle - operated by simply squeezing the grey button on the handle and pulling/pushing it to your preferred height - has had an untold amount of stick (as Paul and I both prefer different heights) but still works like a dream.

In 3-wheel pushchair mode, I loved that I could keep Boo rear-facing and smile at him while he slowly got used to the sights and sounds of the world around him. Then, a few months down the line (when he suddenly became Mr Independent and fed up of looking at his Mum’s ugly mug) change it to forward-facing in a matter of seconds.

The pushchair seat has plenty of room to accommodate a growing child (though the harness does seem disproportianately big even on the smallest setting!), and I feel sure we’ll get our 2-3 years worth of use out of it.  Which leads me on to another of its greatest selling points…

What about the iCandy Pear?

An additional selling feature for anyone considering buying the iCandy Apple at the same time as ourselves,  was the eagerly awaited release of a ‘convertor’ kit which would somehow turn it into a double pram/pushchair. This idea is now a reality and the iCandy Pear multi-mode system, boasting 20 different combinations, is available to buy, with owners of the original Apple system able to ‘upgrade’ their system by paying £249 for a ‘pip’ converter. As this is something we’ve neither bought, nor road-tested, I won’t review the iCandy Pear here, suffice to say this was, and is, a massive selling point of the Apple for anyone with plans to extend their family in the future.

What are the downsides?

Ok, this is where the review gets tricky, as I’m conscious that iCandy have developed a new chassis to fix a lot of these issues.  However, in the interests of complete honesty, I’ll start with the biggie and tell you I had a simply terrifying experience pushing Boo on our narrow and very traffic-heavy high street one day when, without warning, the front wheels jammed,  and the forward motion of me pushing behind it meant I quite literally rammed it into the road.  I don’t need to over-egg this particular pudding. I’m sure you can all imagine how upset I was about the what ifs, and how angry I was that it could have happened at all, though thankfully we were both fine.

My first reaction was to phone iCandyuk and tell them what had happened and ask for their advice. At this point, their customer services team fell at the first hurdle by refusing point blank to even speak to me about the incident, insisting that I should speak to the place I bought it from.

So I did. And they were wonderful. A new chassis was promptly ordered and the old one taken away “for testing”. But the new chassis looked different. Where mine was plain on the side panels, the new one had ‘iCandy’ printed along the side. 

I’ve subsequently discovered, speaking to other owners in forums and real life, that I was not alone in experiencing this jamming issue - far from it, in fact - and the new iCandy-branded chassis was released to fix it. With this in mind, I’m very disappointed that previous customers like myself - some of whom had only been using their pram for a matter of months - weren’t proactively contacted to arrange a replacement chassis. We wouldn’t have been hard to find. iCandyuk only deal with selected retailers, and if a problem is sufficiently serious to warrant a complete redesign and recall of the old stock from retailers, then surely it’s serious enough to consider the consequences of NOT contacting customers who had bought the old design, and therefore might be affected by the locking wheels issue.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well, as our new chassis - being used in 3-wheel, pushchair mode - is fantastic. So fantastic, that we now know we actually had another problem with the old chassis, in that I found it almost impossible to fold. Whilst Paul had the strength to collapse it pretty much every time, I found myself in tears on more than one occasion with a pram that refused to fold after 10, 20, 30 attempts, day after day after day. Sadly, I’m really not exaggerating. The new chassis, on the other hand, has presented no such problems and folds like a dream, so I can only surmise the old chassis was faulty in this respect also. There is a definite knack to folding it as you push forwards towards the wheels rather than the down towards the floor. If you’re having problems, any iCandy retailer - who will be trained in how to use the system - should be able to demonstrate it for you.

Our other issues with the pram are  personal niggles really, as I’m aware all pushchair systems will have their own idiosyncrasies whilst you get to grips with using them. For example, I find the pushchair hood near impossible to extend fully without first unhooking it from the back of the pushchair, opening it out and then re-attaching it to the back of the pushchair.  Also, I sometimes wonder whether the designers think we all have three arms and not two, as altering the seat position requires you to hold in buttons on either side of the pushchair and push down or backward, depending on which direction you want to go.  If I’m on my own, I usually have to do this manoeuvre with my knee or elbow which, if nothing else, raises an amused grin from Boo!

And finally, the other main issue - not necessarily a downside, but certainly an issue you really need to take into consideration - is It’s heavy. Really heavy. I dismissed this when we were road-testing it ourselves (quite easy to do when you’re pushing it jauntily around the shop without a baby inside!), but when you add a 20+lb growing baby complete with bulging changing bag to a 15kg system, you really feel it.  For me personally, the weight is actually a plus point.  It brings to mind images of a tank in terms of safety, and I feel like I’m getting a proper workout when Boo and I head out for our daily stroll. And don’t get me wrong, the large, air-filled tyres mean - despite its weight - it’s lovely to push. But if you’re going to be using public transport a lot, or be in and out of your car (and thus needing to separate the pram from the chassis before you can collapse, lift and stow it) I’ll go out on a limb and say this pram probably isn’t for you (have a look at the much lighter iCandy Cherry instead).

Think the iCandy Apple is the best pram for you?  Click here to read our quick-fire buying guide first

Popularity: 57% [?]