You have to realize there are people that sit down and calculate the discount against the real warranty replacement cost because of the relative friction to get

You have to realize there are people that sit down and calculate the discount against the real warranty replacement cost because of the relative friction to getting this fixed. This is at face value damn near criminal and it should be made criminal. It's behavior that's simply anti-consumer, pro-monopoly. To be fair, my favorite culprit of this kind of bogus warranty RMA process is Google. Try getting a warranty-repair for a manufacturing defect (wholly Google's fault) in a Pixel and you'll be out of a phone for weeks -- pretty unreasonable if you're one of the normal people that doesn't keep an extra cell phone around. If the new capitalism is giant technology monopolies, consumer protections specifically targeting this sort of well-designed, seemingly clever anti-consumer action are required and required now. And seriously the solution is simple: pay for a replacement that is delivered to you immediately and have that replacement cost returned when your defective laptop is received.