Microsoft, Sony, and others still use illegal warranty-void-if-removed stickers

Isn't this just the Broken Window Fallacy? All the effort spent making ten shitty products instead of one good one could have been better spent improving our lives elsewhere. If economists want this, they're bad economists.

I do see a problem in that the efficiency of manufacturing has far outstripped the efficiency of repair. If you have a fully automated assembly line and you've already put in the capital outlay, it's way cheaper to tell the machines to make another one than it is to pay someone to spend time diagnosing and fixing a faulty unit. This must surely lead to massive materials waste if nothing else.

But then you have to ask yourself, is that bad? And if it really is, why isn't that reflected in the price of the materials? Are there unaccounted externalities? If so, then we need to impose those through tax and regulation.

I tend to think that the answer isn't so much about specific laws (though the laws do need to change) as it is about holistic system change that stops focusing on working as much as possible and starts focusing on ways to optimize for human well being. This was supposed to be the goal of optimizing for growth, but we're seeing the limits to that thinking.

In response, new branches of economics have started that attempt to capture the frustrations many people have with the old ways, and find more holistic, sustainable solutions to economic issues.

One movement I have been following lately is just called "New Economics", and that search term will lead to a load of resources covering the issues being discussed by the New Economics Movement.

I've been tuned in to videos by the New Economics Coalition[1] now, who recently hosted a conference called commonbound. A central theme of New Economics is the idea that we should hold more value in commons, at a local level. Doing so leads to business decisions that are more likely to consider the people they impact. This doesn't work for everything (massive industry like aircraft production, etc), but it can improve life in a lot of areas. It is also stressed that people who work more use more resources (fast food vs cooking at home, etc) which is bad for the environment, and that working less allows us more time to spend with family and friends which leads to more happiness than just having more stuff.

A few people to follow are Juliet Schor [2] and Gar Alperovitz [3]. I also discovered the Institute for Local Self Reliance [4] yesterday, which is worth checking out.

What I've been working to do is reconcile progressive ideas for how I feel the world ought to be with anarchist/libertarian ideas that we shouldn't force anyone to behave a certain way. I think the classical liberal way of choosing how things should be and forcing everyone to comply is a recipe for inequality, concentration of power, and disenfranchisement of the people. To me, New Economics seems like a way to respect individual autonomy while creating an economic system that works for everyone.

This is a lot of links. If you want a short intro, something like this video with Juliet Schor may be a good start [5].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/Efssociety/videos [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD9L96GA_OY [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ZTRa4yP-Q [4] https://ilsr.org/ [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrIhloNEwT8

I've done this with Sprint in the USA, and later with LG and HTC in the UK (they call it 'Petty Debts' but it's basically like Small Claims in the USA).

Bottom line is that these stickers are effective - much like the parking lot signs that say how the lot owners 'accept no liability' for damage to your car. Whether they accept liability is irrelevant, you can still sue and a court may assign liability whether they like it or accept it or not. This point is overlooked by many who don't want the hassle and that's why such signs (and stickers) are effective.

They are just part of a layered defense, and anyone with the will to pursue a claim can still prevail. It's not as if you show up in court and they point to the damaged sticker on your laptop and the judge says 'case dismissed' or whatever. They have to actually defend their point that their warranty does not apply because of some silly sticker (it almost certainly does).

LG, Sprint, and HTC all did the right thing ultimately when I sent a properly formatted business letter demanding that they uphold their end of the warranty terms, and giving them a deadline of ten days to comply or they were going to be sued in Small Claims. I kept it short and sweet, and attached a comprehensive time-line with exact times, dates, and names of everyone involved's correspondence and what they said. It was a bit of a hassle but still cheaper than repairing or replacing an expensive handset off-contract.

They'll usually send an NDA that they want signed before they pay out, and you can ignore that and let them know the ten-day clock is still ticking. They may also ask you to log in to their support website which subjects you to additional T&C's more restrictive than your legal rights - avoid that, it's a minefield! Stick to registered postal mail sent to the companies registered business address.

I think they assess what it will cost to repair versus what it will cost them to show up in some random county court, and cut their losses when it becomes clear a customer has no intention of giving up. Having complete documentation plus a time-line with everyone's names that you spoke to is the single most effective tool to win when you are up against a big company, so always plan offensively from the start of any trouble with a device and keep a simple text file that you maintain for reference.

You shouldn't do any of the above if you really did break the device by doing something stupid, just take the loss and buy a cheap or refurb replacement. Don't try to lie and plan on them not showing up and you winning a default judgement. But if the company is doing you wrong, by all means go after those bastards.

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.

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.

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/

The article says this rule of law is from the 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.

The warranty for most products is limited to one year (two in the EU by law, sometimes three if you pay more.) After that period, no company will repair or refund anything, even if it fails spectacularly.

As soon as that time expires the maintenance is in your hands, so it's a good habit to start by taking it apart, give it a good cleaning, check for corrosion and for faulty capacitors, maybe upgrade the RAM or the disk if you like.