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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

> Short of warranty stickers, what are Microsoft to do?

Make opening their products accessible so that people can do it without damaging what they own. PCs are like that. Car parts have no such warranty stickers (that I am aware of).

Stickers are much more cultural than actually preventing damage. Furthermore, you can have stickers that decay over time and void your warranty without you even touching them (those nefarious apple humidity stickers for instance). It is entertaining to see Steve from gamer's nexus bashing warranty stickers at every opportunity.

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Further, provide documentation and support for, and sell spare parts to, users who want to fix their consoles (at least, in the case of procedures that a user could reasonably perform)

I'm a home bicycle mechanic, and all manufacturers of bike components do this.

Fair point with the car example. I guess Microsoft could just suck it up and refuse to repair consoles under warranty if the user FUBARs them through bad repairs. They wouldn't be happy, but car people seem to be able to live with it.

In the EU, home or third party repair of a car cannot itself void a warranty.

Microsoft would have to diagnose the problem as being outside the warranty.

On the other hand, if repair is easy for third parties, warranty becomes far less important.

> On the other hand, if repair is easy for third parties, warranty becomes far less important.

Exactly. Not a single car I've owned has been under warranty, and that's been entirely fine by me, because I can always take it to a shop or take it to a mechanically-inclined friend or fix it myself. Likewise with desktops and laptops; there's been no need for a warranty if I can fix it myself, and until recently (what with the "let's make everything as pointlessly thin as possible" craze) that's almost always been the case.

>you can have stickers that decay over time and void your warranty

They claim it voids your warranty. It does not.

This is an important distinction. Ask them for the warranty repair, if they refuse send a demand letter. If they blow you off take them to small claims court.

> Make opening their products accessible so that people can do it without damaging what they own. PCs are like that. Car parts have no such warranty stickers (that I am aware of).

Soon that will be a bad example! Cars are quickly moving in this terrible direction. You used to be able to wrench them yourself, but every model year there is less and less serviceable by your friendly shade-tree mechanic. If the manufacturers are not stopped, we'll soon need to take our cars to the "Authori$ed Repair" centers or Dealer$hips to perform even basic maintenance.

This is true, but also many cars, especially in the electric space, are extremely reliable apart from battery degradation and UV damage.

Not saying you shouldn’t be able to get independent repairs, but more reliable cars mean less overall maintenance and I’m willing to pay slightly more at the less frequent service interval.

> This is true, but also many cars, especially in the electric space, are extremely reliable apart from battery degradation and UV damage.

This is going to end soon, as EVs gain more traction.

The end goal of value engineering in businesses under competitive pressure is to create a product that's as cheap to make as possible - meaning products evolve to be the worst possible garbage that still clears the "fit to function" bar. EVs don't break much because they're a new class of technologies. Companies will continue to "optimize" them by removing the amount and quality of materials going into their cars, until they start to break just as much as regular cars.

> Make opening their products accessible so that people can do it without damaging what they own.

I think this misses the point that the problem is the unqualified tampering with the internals, not removing the case so you can access them.

Accessibility is not only about opening a case, but accessing things that require maintenance, like coolers.

It seems unreasonable to me that manufacturers prevent users from even cleaning their devices without voiding warranty.

On top of that, stickers are a lazy answer to the problem of damaging an equipment because of the so called unqualified tempering. An appropriate answer to that in my opinion would be to make parts cheap and available so that users can go to a third party workshop to have their systems cleaned, checked and repaired, so they don't have to do it themselves. This is why right to repair is also important.

The point of Magnuson-Moss is that cleaning your device doesn’t void the warranty (assuming the warranty issue doesn’t arise from the cleaning).

Removing a sticker that says “warranty void if sticker removed” doesn’t void your warranty.

My comment's context was the response to AussieWog93 original comment. I think his point is that unqualified tampering with the internals probably should void the warranty. A user is qualified to clean the cooler, and do other basic maintenance.

A good example is when someone follows YouTube videos to mod their xbox with 1/4 inch wood burning tool rather than a soldering iron.

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