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Warranty-void-if-removed stickers reduce the cost to the company of providing the warranty, among other effects. Outlawing these stickers increases the cost of

Warranty-void-if-removed stickers reduce the cost to the company of providing the warranty, among other effects. Outlawing these stickers increases the cost of warranties to consumers who have no interest in opening the hardware. In this situation, it is unclear whether the use of government rule making -- and the use of government force to uphold those rules -- enhances overall welfare. I would be interested to hear from the regulators what assumptions were necessary to justify the policy.

ghusbands 10y ago
There are many ways one can mislead consumers in order to make more money. Governments typically try to combat this. In this case, by outlawing this particular lie.
nxzero 10y ago
>> "Warranty-void-if-removed stickers reduce the cost to the company of providing the warranty" Yes and no, it's not black & white. I've personally repaired a lot of hardware myself and a lot of the hardware that's "voided" if opened gets returned by me instead of me fixing it myself. While I can't speak for any random person opening hardware, if I break something trying to repair hardware, I accept responsibility for it.
RainCloud 10y ago
So companies should be allowed to falsely advertise to lower prices? I don't follow the logic here.
csydas 10y ago
I disagree and would like to see evidence to support this claim. I admit my evidence is anecdotal, but when I assisted with computer repairs at a University, regardless of whether or not a user had broken the warranty sticker companies would do whatever was in their power to refuse service or provide improper/inadequate service on machines. As I often worked with foreign exchange students who really needed their machines repair as opposed to buying new ones, I would often act as an authorized intermediary for the students and would work with the manufacturer warranties directly. Numerous times consumers would be accused of having violated the warranty because of "broken warranty stickers" when we hadn't so much as removed the battery on laptops that still had detachable batteries. The machines would be returned to the student having been opened by the manufacturer and then the blame would be put on the student. Combine this with the fact that standard warranties are very short and even a paid for warranty often won't cover the most common damage to portable electronics (water damage), and I guess I'm wondering what you're even paying for. Warranty support is a sham for many companies, and often times the focus of warranty support is to find a way to dismiss the claim rather than honor it. There are some that are very good with their warranty support, but also quite a few that are horrible. Apple, for as controlling and mean as people make them out to be, only have moisture damage stickers inside their products, and their exclusions only include mistreatment of the device and non-certified third party service that causes damage (third party service itself isn't forbidden, just if they wreck the machine, Apple eschews their responsibility). Other companies put warranty stickers right atop screw heads, preventing things like swapping hard drives, RAM, or other easily replaceable components without voiding the warranty, quite illegally as the article demonstrated. So even if there is a cost reduction that can be demonstrated, if it comes at the cost that I can't swap out HDDs on my own without voiding my warranty, I think the extra cost is better, since you're paying far more than the extra few $$$ in order to get the largely non-usable warranty.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  I work for an MSP. This is HP's motivus operandi. We had a number of machines that constantly blue screened. Reviews of the crash dump were impossible because in the middle of the dump the system would lock up. We also had a number of Dell machines in the same Active Directory domain running the same software that had no issues. After about 3 months of testing (and about 5 'lost' tickets) the client was getting pissed due to a lack of a resolution. We did everything they asked. The final response was that Internet Explorer was not supported on these machines and we needed to stop using it (In this case, basically "Don't use the machines you paid for and they won't bluescreen"). Not IE 8 or 9 mind you, IE11 on Windows 7 machines. I asked them to update their website to reflect this, as I'm sure many customers would like to know, they never did. (It was bullshit, the problem was bad ram, when I replaced it with some I had laying around everything worked fine) It happened that IE11 was a requirement for the web app they use. Eventually we were able to get the VAR to eat the costs and send us replacements, but HP never claimed any responsibility whatsoever. It's on my never buy list now, what a nightmare.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    One of the fun parts of working at a mega-enterprise is being able to screw vendors like this to the wall. Example: - 15 minute callback from a L2 engineer, 98% compliance or hardware replacement. - PC vendors had to hit specific targets for failures in the first 90 days -- exceed a certain number of failures and everything gets replaced. - 72 hour call-to-resolution with penalties that climbed up for SLA misses. The upshot is that the vendor actually tests our shit in the factory. The downside is that folks like your customer who lack leverage get the reject parts.
kalleboo 10y ago
> Warranty-void-if-removed stickers reduce the cost to the company of providing the warranty Obviously, since now they can ignore manufacturing defects in a whole swath of devices. I had a MacBook Pro where I replaced the DVD drive with an SSD, and Apple refused to fix their known-faulty graphics hardware[0] since the Mac had "unauthorized modifications". There was no way that SSD had any impact on the graphics corruption, but Apple did indeed save money on not having to repair it. [0] https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/ https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/
- matwood 10y ago
  That's odd because my old MBP had the same issue and I had also replaced the drive with an SSD. I was fully prepared to put the original hardware back in, but the Apple tech diagnosed and fixed the video issue without any comment on my changes.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    Do you live in the US? All the positive Apple Support stores I hear come from the US. This was in the UK. I've also had meh Apple Support experiences in Sweden and Japan.
    - Alphasite_ 10y ago
      Ive had excellent support in the apple stores I've been to. Out of warranty support, people going out of their way to help, etc.
      - kalleboo 10y ago
        Lucky. I've had a battery that was 10 cycles out of warranty and OS X started throwing up scary warnings but nope, it's out of warranty. A charger that just up and died, they did replace it but not after a 20 questions interrogation. When it's a clear problem they've been friendly, but the repair still takes a week since they don't have the parts or expertise in-store. And I'm super-friendly to support staff - back in the days when I used Palm and Sony Ericsson gear, the would repair user-fault stuff for me no questions asked. I've heard similar things from others in the EU. And all the love stories I hear are from the US.
gd2 10y ago
"I would be interested to hear from the regulators what assumptions were necessary to justify the policy." The article says this rule of law is from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty..., . So, its not some GS-13 level "regulators" who determined this law, but something that was voted on by a majority of both houses of Congress, and signed by the President of the United States. If your interested in what assumptions were made, you can look up speeches of the supporting Senators, and other aspects of legislative history.

ghusbands 10y ago

There are many ways one can mislead consumers in order to make more money. Governments typically try to combat this. In this case, by outlawing this particular lie.

nxzero 10y ago

>> "Warranty-void-if-removed stickers reduce the cost to the company of providing the warranty" Yes and no, it's not black & white. I've personally repaired a lot of hardware myself and a lot of the hardware that's "voided" if opened gets returned by me instead of me fixing it myself. While I can't speak for any random person opening hardware, if I break something trying to repair hardware, I accept responsibility for it.

RainCloud 10y ago

So companies should be allowed to falsely advertise to lower prices? I don't follow the logic here.

csydas 10y ago

I disagree and would like to see evidence to support this claim. I admit my evidence is anecdotal, but when I assisted with computer repairs at a University, regardless of whether or not a user had broken the warranty sticker companies would do whatever was in their power to refuse service or provide improper/inadequate service on machines. As I often worked with foreign exchange students who really needed their machines repair as opposed to buying new ones, I would often act as an authorized intermediary for the students and would work with the manufacturer warranties directly. Numerous times consumers would be accused of having violated the warranty because of "broken warranty stickers" when we hadn't so much as removed the battery on laptops that still had detachable batteries. The machines would be returned to the student having been opened by the manufacturer and then the blame would be put on the student. Combine this with the fact that standard warranties are very short and even a paid for warranty often won't cover the most common damage to portable electronics (water damage), and I guess I'm wondering what you're even paying for. Warranty support is a sham for many companies, and often times the focus of warranty support is to find a way to dismiss the claim rather than honor it. There are some that are very good with their warranty support, but also quite a few that are horrible. Apple, for as controlling and mean as people make them out to be, only have moisture damage stickers inside their products, and their exclusions only include mistreatment of the device and non-certified third party service that causes damage (third party service itself isn't forbidden, just if they wreck the machine, Apple eschews their responsibility). Other companies put warranty stickers right atop screw heads, preventing things like swapping hard drives, RAM, or other easily replaceable components without voiding the warranty, quite illegally as the article demonstrated. So even if there is a cost reduction that can be demonstrated, if it comes at the cost that I can't swap out HDDs on my own without voiding my warranty, I think the extra cost is better, since you're paying far more than the extra few $$$ in order to get the largely non-usable warranty.

cmdrfred 10y ago
I work for an MSP. This is HP's motivus operandi. We had a number of machines that constantly blue screened. Reviews of the crash dump were impossible because in the middle of the dump the system would lock up. We also had a number of Dell machines in the same Active Directory domain running the same software that had no issues. After about 3 months of testing (and about 5 'lost' tickets) the client was getting pissed due to a lack of a resolution. We did everything they asked. The final response was that Internet Explorer was not supported on these machines and we needed to stop using it (In this case, basically "Don't use the machines you paid for and they won't bluescreen"). Not IE 8 or 9 mind you, IE11 on Windows 7 machines. I asked them to update their website to reflect this, as I'm sure many customers would like to know, they never did. (It was bullshit, the problem was bad ram, when I replaced it with some I had laying around everything worked fine) It happened that IE11 was a requirement for the web app they use. Eventually we were able to get the VAR to eat the costs and send us replacements, but HP never claimed any responsibility whatsoever. It's on my never buy list now, what a nightmare.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  One of the fun parts of working at a mega-enterprise is being able to screw vendors like this to the wall. Example: - 15 minute callback from a L2 engineer, 98% compliance or hardware replacement. - PC vendors had to hit specific targets for failures in the first 90 days -- exceed a certain number of failures and everything gets replaced. - 72 hour call-to-resolution with penalties that climbed up for SLA misses. The upshot is that the vendor actually tests our shit in the factory. The downside is that folks like your customer who lack leverage get the reject parts.

kalleboo 10y ago

> Warranty-void-if-removed stickers reduce the cost to the company of providing the warranty Obviously, since now they can ignore manufacturing defects in a whole swath of devices. I had a MacBook Pro where I replaced the DVD drive with an SSD, and Apple refused to fix their known-faulty graphics hardware[0] since the Mac had "unauthorized modifications". There was no way that SSD had any impact on the graphics corruption, but Apple did indeed save money on not having to repair it. [0] https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/ https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/

matwood 10y ago
That's odd because my old MBP had the same issue and I had also replaced the drive with an SSD. I was fully prepared to put the original hardware back in, but the Apple tech diagnosed and fixed the video issue without any comment on my changes.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Do you live in the US? All the positive Apple Support stores I hear come from the US. This was in the UK. I've also had meh Apple Support experiences in Sweden and Japan.
  - Alphasite_ 10y ago
    Ive had excellent support in the apple stores I've been to. Out of warranty support, people going out of their way to help, etc.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      Lucky. I've had a battery that was 10 cycles out of warranty and OS X started throwing up scary warnings but nope, it's out of warranty. A charger that just up and died, they did replace it but not after a 20 questions interrogation. When it's a clear problem they've been friendly, but the repair still takes a week since they don't have the parts or expertise in-store. And I'm super-friendly to support staff - back in the days when I used Palm and Sony Ericsson gear, the would repair user-fault stuff for me no questions asked. I've heard similar things from others in the EU. And all the love stories I hear are from the US.

gd2 10y ago

"I would be interested to hear from the regulators what assumptions were necessary to justify the policy." The article says this rule of law is from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty..., . So, its not some GS-13 level "regulators" who determined this law, but something that was voted on by a majority of both houses of Congress, and signed by the President of the United States. If your interested in what assumptions were made, you can look up speeches of the supporting Senators, and other aspects of legislative history.