I’m unable to order this laptop without a charging brick which is now illegal in the EU.
Same goes for the standard one year warranty. Should be two at minimum.
I had my country configured to Belgium while testing this.
Same goes for the standard one year warranty. Should be two at minimum.
I had my country configured to Belgium while testing this.
If not, how would those rules apply to them?
Edit: tbh, the new "user friendly" idea of automatically converting US prices to the local currency of the visitor in spite of the company not having any connection to the visitor's locale always makes me think of drop shippers, not of legitimate businesses.
Especially if i'm in a non USD non EUR country, I am fully aware that there are different currencies in the world, I already have an established process for converting between those currencies and it's likely to be more to my advantage than whatever Stripe offers so please cut it down.
I know that USers think their laws apply everywhere, but that's just a myth.
Everything else is just enforcement.
If you sell medical devices (apparently even down to toothbrushes) in the USA, you have to follow FDA rules. If you sell children's toys in the EU, you've had to follow EU consumer regulations (e.g. CE mark) at least since the 90s. Going back to the 70s, if you sold a physical product in the US as a foreign company you had to follow local rules about maximum delivery times and minimum warranties. If you don't follow the rules, your shipments get blocked at customs, and any marketplaces (Amazon) selling your products get fines as well for not verifying you appropriately, so marketplaces will verify and ban your business too if you blatantly violate local rules (e.g. selling devices containing radios without FCC approval). If you're selling laptops at any scale, you need to follow the local rules for every country you ship to.
There'll certainly be cases everywhere where enforcement isn't perfect (if you contact a tiny vendor in China and they ship to you directly and you sign for & pay the customs yourself, in practice you'll get away with it, or you can always travel to a country to buy a product and carry it back personally) but in the general case local regs on physical product sales are not unusual or optional at all.
That's nice and ideal, but unenforceable in reality unless the company has a presence in the EU.
Law makers aren't stupid: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2025/7728... (the Hauge Convention 2019 has been ratified by the UK has been in effect ~10mo ago).
The UK wants to rejoin the Lugano Convention, too; though, it remains to be seen if EFTA/EU will let them in.
Absolutely not true at all.
Wrong.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/94249/are-foreign-se...
Shipping from outside doesn’t mean that the buyer doesn’t get protection.
This is clearly nonsense. There is nothing the EU can do to enforce this.
Well they can turn back shipments at customs. And they can collect fines if any leadership of the company comes to the EU. If you stay outside the EU for the rest of your life, you're probably fine.
They can seize your goods. They can order app stores to take down your apps. They can order payment providers to stop doing business with you in the EU.
Most businesses would also prefer to avoid having outstanding fines in foreign countries even if they don't currently have presence there because it's a giant liability in case of looking for funding.
Tbh there are more issues if they wanted to be compliant with EU regulations. I'm fine that they aren't compliant (they aren't in the EU, after all), but it's something to be aware of when ordering from them.
They don't have to do business in EU if they don't want to follow the rules.
Seized by customs because they don't offer 2y warranty or include USB charger?
No. That's ridiculous. You can import whatever you want.
Quite the opposite, in fact. When customs finds that any rule, like the CE declaration on electric devices, is broken, they can and will seize such goods.
You could of course attempt to circumvent or mislead customs. After all, they don't have the capacity to check all imported goods in-depth. That however would usually be a criminal offense.
No, you can't. You can import whatever you are allowed to import, regardless of it's legal status on the original country.
I can see the EU's take on this, and maybe overall this will even be good. I have some nice Anker chargers and can charge everything we have at home with them (added some USB-C to ligthning/micro-USB thingies here and there), but I'd be a bit annoyed if the EU would force my company operating with small margins to have 2 versions of my packaging workflow.
Maybe they should just "encourage" good behaviour? With a law that is less forcing, ie just say: "If you offer a version without charger, the price must be the same as with charger. " That would (slightly) encourage leaving it out, while not forcing companies' hands.
The laptop is being shipped anyway, so I assume the charger in there may be a "sweet deal" if you need one. 65W GaN chargers are a nice sweet-spot at the moment (size/power/price-wise), ie Ikea has one at 14 eur), wouldn't mine having one or two extra.
If you ship to multiple countries you can reduce the SKUs even more as the laptop SKU isn’t country specific anymore.
Offering a version without the charger for the same price would not reduce ewaste which is the point.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/l...
You do realize you’re paying for the charger, right? And you don’t like the option of not having to purchase the charger?
This is a Dutch source, but BTO charged 25 eur to remove the charger [0], because they prefer not to deal with people trying their own wonky chargers. Ok, so this was a 100 W+ laptop, arguably different (BTO only does this with 100 W+ models).
[0]: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/245774/bto-rekent-25-euro-boete-...
I bought a laptop without a charger the other day, plugged it into a charger I already had, and it works great (even under load). YMMV.
You're gonna have to point to part of the regulation where thats not allowed. there is a mechanism for deletion. so long as its done within 30 days its still within spec
The overall point being that if you want to use a product/service, you'll look past minor violations of local regulations on account deletion or charger bundling.
GDPR has nothing to do with friction I beleve.
Our lawyer told me that GDPR also applies to paper records, so there is some real-world friction right there.
The important part that there is a right - in whatever good/broken process it is enveloped is irrelevant.
Moreover does HN host PII data? Not if you don't give it to them.
But deletion requests are not so strong: if you make people really jump through hoops then you might get in some trouble, but the expencted standard is basically at 'sending an email and getting a result within 30 days'.
So additional validation would surely be subject to friction.