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from the an-industry-group-of-notorious-for-lobbying-to-protect-is-repair-monopolies dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
When you buy a game console, smartphone, dryer, vacuum cleaner, or any number of other complicated electronics, there’s usually a sticker or a piece of paperwork telling you that trying to repair the device yourself will void your warranty. That’s illegal under the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Companies offering a warranty on their goods aren’t allowed to void that warranty if the user attempts to repair it themself, but that doesn’t stop the company from scaring customers into thinking it’s true.
It’s such a huge problem that US PIRG—a non-profit that uses grassroots methods to advocate for political change—found that 90 percent of manufacturers it contacted claimed that a third party repair would void its warranty [pdf]. PIRG researched the warranty information of 50 companies in the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM)—an industry group of notorious for lobbying to protect is repair monopolies [sic]—and found that 45 of them claimed independent repair would void their warranty.
(Score: 4, Disagree) by SparkyGSX on Saturday October 13 2018, @10:51PM (10 children)
You can't reasonably expect a company to provide warranty to a product that has effectively been destroyed by a botched repair. If a modern piece of electronics (with static sensitive components inside) is disassembled in a non-ESD safe workshop, and a wire or connector is soldered with a (shudder!) ungrounded mains powered soldering iron, it is easy to damage sensitive parts with no obvious visible damage.
What is a company supposed to do? If it's still under warranty, send it back for repair under warranty.
Would you really expect a car company to replace your engine under warranty if you took it apart and did a bad job putting it back together, stripping half the bolts in the process?
I fully support the right to repair, and I do think companies should be required to provide repair information and spare parts for a reasonable price, but since damage is often impossible to detect, taking a device apart means you can't make them fix it for free later.
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: 5, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday October 13 2018, @11:59PM (2 children)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday October 15 2018, @08:03AM (1 child)
The problem is that there's no cost to the consumer for claiming that they didn't break it. The manufacturer eats the entire cost.
Cars are expensive, smartphones are cheap: less profit that a manufacturer can lose to false claims.
It's much easier to accidentally break microelectronics than a car. You can see most of the stuff in the car, you can't see ESD frying a board, you can't see a transistor getting loosened by a small knock to the board.
Cars are more robust than smartphones. Leaving your car under the sun is fine; leaving a phone in the sun will very likely cause the battery to explode, and good luck proving it wasn't due to a manufacturing defect. Even the small nudge during repair could cause a short in a battery cell leading to rapid failure.
It's much harder to figure out why a smartphone broke compared to a car, and the manufacturer is responsible for eating that entire investigation cost, per device.
Smartphone components are nowhere near as standardized as car components. It's very likely that using a bad/generic part might have caused some issue. All of the parts are specifically designed to work together and fit within a small case, and even then there are sometimes design issues, like Samsung's battery incident. What are the chances that sticking an off-the-shelf part in as a replacement could have caused some issue? Almost definitely, especially since many of these parts come from China with questionable lineages, and the manufacturer must somehow investigate the lifecycle of every replacement part to prove that it was bad and eat the cost.
If manufacturers actually followed this standard, they would probably have to double their prices at the very least, because they would have to cover the cost of providing new devices for most warranty claims (it would be cheaper than actually trying to prove that user error broke it.)
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Monday October 15 2018, @01:07PM
I'd call that a manufacturing defect either way....
It's not just about standardization, it's also about lack of proper engineering. Apple is a good example. You know one part that almost *never* fails in Apple products? Fuses. The protection circuitry is worthless by design. No wonder some minor change elsewhere can fry the whole board. With a car you've got peoples lives at risk, so you can have multiple hoses or other components rust completely through and the damn thing still drives; but one part slightly out of spec on a smartphone and it blows up in someone's hand.
If my encryption algorithm becomes insecure the moment someone reads the source code, then it's a garbage algorithm. If my smartphone becomes less robust the moment someone pops the case open, then it's a garbage product. You CAN build stuff that survives user interaction quite well, and it doesn't even have to cost that much. Look at a Raspberry Pi for an excellent example. You have NO IDEA how many times I've hooked something up with a Pi, gone "Hmm, what's that burning plastic smell?", and realized the goddamn thing was on fire...then I rip it all apart and figure out what I screwed up in my wiring, then put it back together and *it still worked fine*. If I had a dollar for every time I was *sure* I fried a Raspberry Pi and it ended up being perfectly fine then I'd be retired already. So why can't a $1000 phone be even half as robust as a $40 computer? Probably because this whole culture of phones lasting 1-2 years is EXTREMELY profitable to the manufacturers...why would they want to manufacture something better when people are willing to just keep overpaying for garbage?
Those both seem VERY unlikely, especially if it's a decent quality board. There's probably a few hundred people every single day building PCs on their living room carpet without ever having an ESD issue. I've done it dozens of times myself. And I've done it with phones, cameras, stereos, and plenty of other devices. I also regularly throw my phone -- every time I tell someone they need a better phone case, I demonstrate mine by whipping it against the nearest wall. If that doesn't loosen a transistor, then a careful repair attempt isn't going to do it either. On the other hand, I rip pads off of solder joints with embarrassing frequency, so I think you probably WOULD have pretty good evidence of a botched repair when you see a component with half the damn pads missing or disconnected solder joints or whatever else. Attempts to repair without tools shouldn't be capable of doing much damage (at least without it being very, very obvious like components ripped right off); attempts to repair with incorrect tools will generally cause very obvious damage like missing solder pads or incorrectly installed components; and attempts to repair with proper tools carefully applied will generally mean the person doing the work already knows enough that they aren't likely to break anything else.
If you wanna offer a good warranty, then either you spend money building a good product, or you spend money constantly replacing your garbage.
(Score: 5, Informative) by sjames on Sunday October 14 2018, @12:06AM (1 child)
That's not what's being discussed. If the company can prove the owner damaged the product, they can legally refuse warranty repair.
What they can't do is refuse to fix a covered problem if the owner fixed (or had a 3rd party fix) something unrelated that wasn't covered by warranty.
The classic example that got the law on the books in the first place, if you choose to change your own oil rather than paying the stealership $100 to do it, the auto maker cannot void the warranty on the transmission as a result.
For a more modern example, you drop your brand new phone and crack the screen. The warranty doesn't cover damage, only defects and the manufacturer wants 90% of the cost of the phone just for the screen. So you get a 3rd party to put in a new screen for under $100. It works great.
By law, the manufacturer cannot void the warranty on the other parts of the phone unless they can clearly show that the damage was done by the person who replaced the screen.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday October 14 2018, @02:22AM
If you change your oil then your transmission fails, you should have changed your transmission fluid instead.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedBear on Sunday October 14 2018, @04:02AM (2 children)
You're right. They don't have to. That's not what the law says. And no one actually wants that. Because that would be unreasonable. What are you talking about?
This problem is not limited to electronics. It is easy to accidentally damage or fail to properly repair a great many things, from tiny chips to huge power plants. Lots of equipment will rapidly fail if it is so much as a micron out of specifications. Most repair people know this, and conduct their repairs accordingly, so their customers don't get angry and give them bad reviews and never become repeat customers. Bad repairs are bad for business.
No. And the law does not require them to do so. But if your engine fails because of a manufacturing defect unrelated to a third-party installed rebuilt carburetor, you're damn right I expect the company to replace the engine, unless they can show that the engine failed due to the third-party carburetor repair. That is, in fact, what the law requires. And it is usually pretty easy to determine what actually caused the failure.
Actually, you don't. You support the right for the company to use unrelated repairs or modifications that did not cause the failure as an illegal excuse not to back their warranties on unmodified components. Oftentimes those "repairs" consist of nothing but a torn or missing (illegal) "warranty void" sticker, with nothing inside the device having actually been touched.
That would certainly be big step in the right direction, but is only loosely related to the problem discussed in the article.
I would submit that if damage is in fact "impossible" to detect, is there actually any damage? Most of the time it's pretty easy to figure out what component has failed, and why, even with "sensitive electronics". Watch a bunch of Louis Rossmann's videos, you might be surprised how easy it is to competently repair even nearly-microscopic electronic components and bring a device back to fully working condition. It's just a matter of using your eyes and reading the schematic correctly.
A major mistake you are making is believing that all third party repair people are incompetent and/or fraudulent while all company repair techs are competent. In the real world the balance seems to be decidedly in the other direction.
Bottom line is that we have the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act for good reasons, because car manufacturers were extorting car owners with threats of completely voiding their warranty if even the most irrelevant component of the vehicle was changed by a non-dealer repair or used a non-OEM part, even if the non-OEM part was actually superior, which it often was. "Oh, you replaced a broken side mirror with a third-party part? Then screw you, we won't replace your $3,000 transmission that just destroyed itself due to a manufacturing defect." Congress acted (no pun intended) because this state of affairs was really bad for the consumer and the economy. MMWA is the law, and every company should be required to take reasonable steps to comply with the law. Nobody wants anything here that isn't reasonable. We just want to be able to trust that manufacturers will be required by law to stand behind their product, even when it may have been modified or repaired in a way unrelated to the warranty issue.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
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(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday October 15 2018, @08:11AM (1 child)
> Lots of equipment will rapidly fail if it is so much as a micron out of specifications
Very few things require that level of precision. Even microelectronics don't require that level of precision (although modern semiconductor fabrication might). However, electronics definitely requires more precision than most things.
>Most of the time it's pretty easy to figure out what component has failed, and why, even with "sensitive electronics". Watch a bunch of Louis Rossmann's videos, you might be surprised how easy it is to competently repair even nearly-microscopic electronic components and bring a device back to fully working condition. It's just a matter of using your eyes and reading the schematic correctly.
How much does Louis Rossmann charge for such an investigation? $50? $100? You're saying that a manufacturer of a $1000 smartphone is going to spend $100 in labor (not counting administrative overhead) to prove that they don't need to repair the device because the user fucked it up? At that point it's probably cheaper to send a new phone for every warranty claim, and I don't need to tell you why that's not a sustainable business model, do I?
A manufacturer selling a $35,000 car meanwhile can afford to pay a few hundred for a mechanic to examine it.
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(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday October 15 2018, @07:26PM
I was thinking more about physical objects like the moving parts in a car engine. They often have to be machined to extremely tight tolerances in order to function properly. Maybe not microns typically, but certainly a thousandth of an inch can in some cases be too much to be out of spec. The MMWA covers a great many things, and I was speaking very generally, not just about electronics.
You're really thinking about this the wrong way. The techs who typically do repair work inside a company are not paid that well, and they are paid by the hour. It may take 15 minutes for a tech to determine what's wrong with a device, or even 30 minutes. But it will often take only 5 minutes. And they are looking at only a small percentage of the total product that is sold. Common failure rates for many products are anywhere from 1% to 20%, but typically around 5% or less, if the company wants to survive. So even if it did cost the company $100 to repair a $1,000 phone, that doesn't mean they are losing 10% of their total sales revenue. More like 1%.
It is up to the company to make products that don't fail and are easy to repair, so that they don't have to pay for too much labor on repairs. That's just the way things work. The companies that can't do this go out of business, and that is as it should be. They get replaced by companies that make better products. That is theoretically the whole idea behind the mythical "free market".
Last time I checked $1,000 - $100 = $900, so... no, I don't believe it would be cheaper to just send everyone a new phone for warranty claims. And I don't believe that it would typically actually cost the company nearly that much on average for internal techs to do analysis and repairs.
I find your whole take on this to be very illogical.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 14 2018, @11:57AM (1 child)
This isn't about practical, this is about legal. Laws: created by elected politicians. When has that ever had any basis in practical reality?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @06:23AM
Is that a multiple choice question? If so, it will be a really long list of potential answers.