God help your soul if you need to deal with an ASUS hardware RMA. They are easily the worst PC hardware manufacturer of all, and they sell clearly damaged and broken parts as "refurb."
They are terrible.
They are terrible.
The only problem I ran into is apparently FedEx treated the return as a soccer ball. The sturdy packaging was very damaged, and I'm surprised the damage to the laptop and dock weren't worse than a cracked frame, bent hinge, and cracked dock frame.
ASUS handled redoing the RMA without charging me anything. My assumption is they used the FedEx insurance.
They always re-image the device. When I got it back the second time, they forgot to remove their repair image and I had to re-image it myself. No biggie, I'm fine with that.
Perhaps what helped me is I've worked with technology for a couple of decades, including doing technical support and front line support for several years at the start of my career. I used my troubleshooting skills before even contacting ASUS and gave them all of my findings. The person I was talking to didn't bother with trying any further troubleshooting and just requested the RMA.
So, while I get that talking to any system builder's tech support and RMA can be a pain, I had a positive experience with ASUS RMA.
I have a friend with a recent Alienware laptop that had issues on day 1. Dell technician did a house call, basically destroyed his laptop, and left. Another friend has sworn off Dell because after several RMAs of his laptop, the warranty eventually expired and it still failed again. I don't know many people who have had to go through RMAs of other companies. But I get the impression that, outside of business support, all of them are garbage. However, ASUS did me right.
Requiring a laptop for a dock issue is insane. That is not good service.
I've had more "horror" from Corsair products. And not just one product line from them.
I suspect when I'm itching for an upgrade in a couple of years or so that I'll go back to a SFF desktop with desktop class graphics and separate thin and light laptop. I might even forego the laptop altogether, depending on how things look at the time.
The Framework laptop (which has been in the news lately) looks like it fits into the thin/light category (< 3 lbs), with integrated graphics rather than discrete. The thunderbolt port supports an eGPU and external display, so it might work for these types of use-cases.
Alternatively, there are these from Origin (which have Nvidia discrete GPUs):
- https://www.originpc.com/gaming/laptops/evo14-s/ - https://www.originpc.com/workstation/laptops/nt-14/ -- appears to be the same as the Evo14?
Just to note - those thunderbolt eGPUs are a bit more limited in performance than Asus's solution because thunderbolt only provides 4 lanes of PCIe, while Asus's port provides 8. So far as I know, USB4 and TB4 didn't expand on this, even with the new PCIe mode. All of that is to say Asus's connector allows for the 3080 Laptop GPU to be used likely near 100%, while TB likely would not be able to, so you'd be limited to lower end graphics. This is what drew me in to the Asus solution.
Maybe it's worth pointing out the eGPU does NOT use the USB-C port on the Flow X13. The proprietary connector includes a USB-C connector along with the PCIe extra connector. The USB-C connector can be used separately. But in terms of the dock, the USB-C port on the connector is used for port expansion (the dock has 4 USB-A 3 ports, ethernet, and power, along with the display outputs).
This is where I think things could end up deprecating Asus's solution. Future TB may provide higher end PCIe (ie: upgrading to a higher level, adding more lanes). There may be other standards based technologies coming as well.
I could probably be fine with a 4060 in a TB enclosure in the future. But at the moment, my needs are met, so I'm not planning out my future technology stack just yet.
Had to throw the card away (out of spite, I had my own machine constantly crash for months before finding the cause) and buy a new one and X570 is not cheap at all. I'll do everything I can to never buy an Asus again for a long time, this include work where I can weight on this.
Since then two friends with a Asus MB (one same as me the other an intel one from 3y ago) went dead too due massive amount of capacitors leak, made me think they have a big problem that isn't talked about very much.
Not sure these days as more a mac person … except my pc is running i9 still asus. Never have motherboard issues. Just sample of one but so far so good.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms one can make of Apple but customer satisfaction under warranty is not one of them.
In summary, I got sold a defective product from a company and left with a much higher overall impression of the company.
Not anymore, check out Asahi Linux.
I consider myself a fan of Louis Rossman. He's fighting the good fight and nearly every individual bad thing he says about Apple is correct. My point is that Apple is colossal and even if they were saints anointed by God -- which they aren't -- I would expect them to have enough design mistakes and negative experiences to fill ten Rossman channels. To some degree these reflect their size, and to some degree they reflect Apple's quality, and you can't tell which without making some effort to correct for base rate. Louis makes absolutely no effort to correct for base rate. That's fine for repair purposes and even for engineering feedback, but it makes his criticism completely useless for analyzing the overall quality situation.
I have a desktop PC for gaming and most of my work laptops have been PC, so an estimate from my own experiences has waaaaay less base rate bias at the cost of admittedly tiny N and much more variance. I've probably seen a dozen big issues (bezels that delaminate on flex, charger DRM broken in update, wifi cables that pull out when you tilt the screen back, ...) on the PCs that would have been twitter scandals and would have filled Rossman Repair's shelves if they had happened in the Mac world, but because of the low expectations in the PC world they just sort of float under the radar. "Dude, that's what you get for buying a Dell/Lenovo/HP/Acer, buy Lenovo/HP/Acer/Dell instead."
So yeah, if I count by twitter complaints, macs suck. If I count by how many broken computers show up at Rossman Repair, macs suck. If I count by average problems that I've personally witnessed per device, macs rule.
That was the moment I realized that most consumer hardware is crap (even well-respected brands), and it can be difficult and expensive to try to find something that's not. I no longer recommend any specific brands to people.
I went from having ASUS graphics cards and motherboards, to swearing off from buying ASUS products ever again. For me, they refused to repair or replace a brand new motherboard with a defective PCI-e slot because of some tiny cosmetic scratch somewhere else on the motherboard, claiming the "damage" voided the warranty. Magnuson-Moss anyone?
ASUS has even been warned by the FTC for violating the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, so really I should not be surprised: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/foia_requests/War...
I had some issues with a corsair power supply a couple years ago I had to do 5 returns before they finally sent me one in a box that was not already opened.
Apple does this as matter of practice. You go in they will give you an "new" phone that is in some weird box that is not the retail box. Those are returned phones.
Before this year, I've never had a defective electronic device (laptop, phone, monitor, camera, etc.) or encountered any issue that made me return a device. But a few months back, I had a similarly terrible experience with returns.
I bought a new lenovo yoga, it came with a defective spacebar. Got a replacement, it came with another defective spacebar! And this was a new laptop, still sealed. Decided to just replace the keyboard & upper case under warranty (which was the recommended procedure), and now the spacebar issue is finally fixed. But now I notice the new upper case had a raised crease above the "Esc" key. This time, I'm not bothering with another return or replacement, at least the crease isn't affecting any functionality.
I've never experienced QC this poor before on a brand new, >$1000 electronic device. The whole thing turned me off from lenovo laptops.
I had a razer laptop with display issues. I paid to ship it to California, and 2 months later they shipped me back a laptop with display issues.
And the tech was anything but fluent in English. He had a very rudimentary command of the language so I question whether he even understood the problem.
Really I found the experience quite the opposite. It was incredibly insulting to have them take the defective iphone i just spend $1200 on and try to make a show of giving me a refurbished unit to replace it. They bring one out in some weird non retail box and make a point that you see them unwrap the cellophane. I asked them WTF this is I want a new phone from a retail box on the shelf over there (so to speak) they made a huff about it but finally conceded to give me an actual new retail phone. Apple is scum. People falling for their dumb little customer service pony show are what keep them in such high profit margins. If any other company did that you would be having a fit that they should give you a discount for getting a used unit.
I shouldn't have to get aggressive with them to force them to give me what I paid full price for. They are at least as bad as any other company and also actively trying to hide it.
That sounds like a replacement refurb. They won't tell you that it's "new." Apple does that, when they can't fix the problem. I've gotten a couple of those, over the years, and never had a problem.
I get AppleCare, by habit. I seldom need it, but when I do, I'm sure glad I did.
I remember, once, I had a laptop that developed a fatigued hinge, as well as issues with the USB-C/TB ports. Apple basically replaced the entire unit. Another time, they gave me a refurb replacement that worked great.
I used to travel a lot, and my laptops saw a lot of action.
> Keep being an apologist though they need people like you to keep those stock prices soaring.
I gather that you have had a bad experience, buying from Apple?
I commented my experience a couple comments up. The whole show they put on while giving you a refub unit without a discount is insulting.
Since this form of 'refurb' would be so cheap to operate, all warranty claims could be handled this way no questions asked.
Send the old innards back to the factory to run the full factory test suite, and if they pass then great, and if they fail have them stripped for parts.
I've bought zenbooks ever since then, and they've been great.
Asrock - have not had a motherboard go bad...but looking at their website, I'd be wary of trying to get an RMA
Gigabyte/MSI all have their own share of complaints....
eVGA? they have stateside support but sometimes the specs aren't as good as Asrock's.
PNY?
I’ve exclusively used UPS ground for my evga returns, of which I did 5-10 over the past couple years.