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Comment by adamkittelson | Hacker News Reader

The ROG Ally seems like a really nice piece of hardware. Having said that, I cannot possibly stress enough how bad of a time you will have if it breaks and you have to deal with an RMA / ASUS customer support.

You'd probably save yourself a lot of time and frustration by just throwing it in the trash and buying a new one or a Steam Deck if something goes wrong with it.

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Basically, if $600-700 is nothing to you then go ahead and buy one. It's new and shiny, faster than a Deck and has a nice screen. Maybe it won't break before a new gen arrives

If you want something that lasts, Steam Deck is a better pick

Considering Valve's track record with the Index and its build quality issues I'm not sure I fully trust them to build something that's lasting either. It's only been a year, guess I will see if my Deck spontaneously falls apart eventually.

Deck is excellently built (have been abusing it for 8 months now) and you can order spare parts from ifixit: https://www.ifixit.com/Parts/Steam_Deck

My only gripe is that they chose not to put the USB-C connector on a separate, easily exchangeable PCB. but other than that, best gadget in a looong time. And the advantages it gives to Linux gaming in general is very nice (I have gamed exclusively on Linux for 5 years, and it has never been better).

Out of the box linux gaming is amazing with steam and proton, and some open sources and indies are publishing native linux installer / executable.

The hardest and most brittle part is the drivers, I find it hard and technical extensive to install drivers.

Whether or not they got it all technically right, I expect them to stand by their product and make things right eventually, at least moreso than the typical hardware vendor. I've personally had several very positive experiences with their customer support department.

My initial steam deck battery wasn’t lasting very long, reporting charge state strangley. After initially trying some things I contacted their support. We tried a bunch of things (reinstalling the OS even). Nothing worked so it was swapped out and got a new one.

Things go wrong sometimes but their support was excellent.

I bought someone's HTC Vive Pro gear on eBay. It was a sketchy listing with very few pictures and details, but I had a good feeling. Delightfully, it came with four v2 lighthouses. One of them didn't work, though, and had chew marks from someone trying to pry it open.

The unit being Valve branded, I messaged Valve's customer support. I asked if I could mail the broken lighthouse to them to make sure it got recycled properly. I made it very clear that it was a sketchy eBay purchase that I essentially got for free, and I really just wanted to make sure it got e-wasted responsibly, rather than float around in my garage for the next decade.

They had no record of its serial number, and explained that it was most likely HTC's inventory rather than Valve's. Despite that, they insisted on RMA'ing it and mailed me a functioning unit! They even sent me a prepaid mailing label, but I printed my own to save them the $5.

That's not my only story where I politely made a modest request of their customer support team, and they significantly over-delivered.

At least Valve has excellent support, I've had 4 hardware issues with my Index and Steam Support has always gone above and beyond to replace the hardware for me despite the one year warranty and the purchase being made 4 years ago.

there's a lot of drama currently with how their bios update is the only fix to burning cpu's and it void's warranty so you lose warranty to fix their mistake. Based on that I won't be getting a ally even though really wanted to.

> there's a lot of drama currently with how their bios update is the only fix to burning cpu's and it void's warranty so you lose warranty to fix their mistake

How is that even legal? Makes me glad I’m in the EU to be honest.

Asus states that despite their boilerplate warranty limitations for beta BIOS, they would honour the warranty in this particular case.

https://www.asus.com/us/news/ihctikmgahafyrib/?tduid=969491b...

They've walked back on those claims and now claim that the warning was automatically added to any "beta" BIOS and doesn't actually apply.

It's godawful even in EU, and that didn't change even one bit over the years.

Long wait times, unhelpful people - even sales people! I wanted to change my order from mid-range model to high range model in their official store, and i got stonewalled and delayed by their sales.

Last time, i sent my phone for repair, a 4 year old one. Quoted price for out of warranty repair was higher than the price of their newest gaming flagship phone.

Previously i sent my tablet for repairs - a broken screen - it came back with used touchscreen that was faulty, had no safety sticker on it(so i assume they just slapped an used one from other repair), and I had to send it back again.

They do the same things in the US. I’ve received many broken graphics cards as RMAs from asus. They are the worst card company.

From worst to best:

Asus Nvidia MSI Zotac Gigabyte

In all my mining, I never had a gigabyte card fail. Nvidia made me do chat support for an hour where they demanded I test the card in a separate desktop PC with fully different parts, and I had to send them the specs on the second machine in full.

As a personal counterpoint - my founders 3070Ti broke and Nvidia was super good at replacing it, they sent FedEx to my house to collect it, and I got a replacement within a week - and that was at the point where you couldn't buy these cards anywhere so I was pretty impressed.

Because you paid 4x what the card is worth! I'm sure if every brand had those insane margins they would be happy to give out replacements like candy and help their public image.

I mean....I paid the rrp at the time, which was £529. Maybe the card was overpriced for what it was, although I find it unlikely - it was obliterating much more expensive cards from the previous generation.

Use a cc with a generous warranty provision.

A travel card that uses Visa Infinite is your best bet here. I have the Capital One Venture X and one of my prime use cases for it (aside from travel upgrades and points transfer) is electronics purchases.

I just recently had an interaction with ASUS customer support, and I can confirm it sucks ass. That was my last purchase from them. Fuck ASUS.

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