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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

If Google won't repair a manufacturing defect, consider a chargeback (assuming you bought it from Google).

Services like American Express have purchase protection, but the limits I believe won't be enough to cover the Pixel. If you were sold a lemon and Google won't hash it out, go ahead and let the card company fight that battle for you.

If enough people start doing this, you can bet Google will double down on customer service as proper cost avoidance.

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Initiating a chargeback is tantamount to terminating your Google Account at a random time in the future when they find in your favor.

And that's the problem with google having an ever greater monopoly on everything. Mega corps are no good.

...hmm, you're likely right, but I'm actually quite curious to see if anyone's willing to challenge that in court if it happens given that Google doesn't really give anyone an easy way to migrate an entire life to another service.

Google will let you export all your data. Google "google takeout".

Nice. My google-fu's failing me on finding any services which can import some amount of it and re-establish equivalent services, which suggests either some important details are missing (e.g. account configs) and/or no one's seen a business case for setting up that kind of migration service with any of the other major platforms e.g. Microsoft's cloud apps.

Heh

The latter I think.

> Initiating a chargeback is tantamount to terminating your Google Account at a random time in the future when they find in your favor.

Purchase protection isn't the same thing as a chargeback.

> If Google won't repair a manufacturing defect, consider a chargeback

I highly recommend against doing a chargeback unless it's your last resort. Talk with customer support where you bought the phone from first, telling them you intend to chargeback if they don't resolve the issue. Most businesses consider chargebacks to be a form of fraud and it may sour your relationship with the business.

Chargebacks that are disputed can affect your credit rating as well.

I don't disagree with this. All of this is good advice.

That doesn't change my position that this is the perfect impetus for a chargeback should Google fail to address the defect.

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