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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

This is the most inane thing I have ever heard.

If you buy a laptop, you're not returning it because there's something wrong with the software. You're returning it because there's something wrong with the hardware.

If you bought a phone with a defective battery, would you delete all of your contacts out of it and image the OS before you returned it?

If you're asking consumers to do something to preserve your margins, go fuck yourself.

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> If you bought a phone with a defective battery, would you delete all of your contacts out of it and image the OS before you returned it?

Yes, but of course security/privacy concerns call different rules into play...

> If you buy a laptop, you're not returning it because there's something wrong with the software.

Sometimes it's not easy to tell if you're having a software or hardware problems. Especially for your average customer.

If my mom gets a "No Operating System" message on boot she won't spend time trying to figure out if the disk died or something overwrote the boot sector.

Does your mom install linux on her laptop?

That's you though. A shocking number of people buy stuff, get bored after a couple of days, send it back claiming a non-existent fault, and fully expect to get a refund.

That's right. And this is why we have a class of businesses called "retailers" whose function it is to absorb and amortize that risk. If you don't want to sell to the hoi polloi (edit: typo), don't: sell wholesale instead (you just won't get the same markup).

Sell to hoi polloi.

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