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.
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.
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.
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.
Now you get this bizarre interrogation thing from them. You need to be really firm/aggressive or you'll be stuck there for an hour going through the various scenarios that you device has gotten wet. ("I am running late, get your GM and we can chat about why a failed iMac DIMM has nothing to do with water.")
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.
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.