Kingston and PNY using cheaper components after good reviews | Hacker News Reader

Kingston and PNY using cheaper components after good reviews

extremetech.com

581 pointsnkurz158 comments

This sort of thing isn't unique to the storage business. In the auto industry, they call it "decontenting":

http://www.autoweek.com/car-shopping/articles/2012/01/decont...

... but it works pretty much the same way: early models of a particular car, the ones that make that car's reputation, come loaded with all sorts of nice touches. Then as time passes the manufacturer slowly strips those touches out, replacing them with cheaper alternatives or just dropping them altogether. The price of the car stays the same, though, so the manufacturer gets to keep the difference as extra profit. (Or the price actually goes up, when the dropped features that used to be standard become optional add-ons instead.)

At least in that case they only make changes in a new model year. In the electronics industry substitutions are often made while retaining the the exact same SKU. So even savvy consumers have no way of knowing exactly what they are going to get. For example sellers of blank optical media will sometimes switch to a different supplier and the only way to tell is to check the MID after you have purchased them. Hard drive manufactures will will also switch to a totally different "cost reduced" design while retaining the same model number. Then there's the infamous panel lottery when buying a monitor from certain unscrupulous companies.

I'm mildly surprised there hasn't been a high profile class action lawsuit over these practices.

> Then there's the infamous panel lottery when buying a monitor from certain unscrupulous companies

You mean like Apple using two different LCDs in retina MacBook Pros, with the LG model being junk?

I can't tell if this is sarcasm (in which case it deserves a downvote, plus it's a bad sarcasm), or if it's true (in which case you should've included a source/explanation.

It's true, but it doesn't apply in this case.

Here's the backstory:

When Apple released the retina MBP in 2012, they had 2 suppliers for the 15 inch retina screen: Samsung and LG. To be fair with Apple, isn't gaming the system by giving earlier review models better quality screens. More likely, this is to ensure that instead of relying on one supplier, they can diversify their screen manufacturing so they don't get screwed if one manufacturer has production difficulties.

At the time, I had purchased a retina MBP with the LG screen that summer. (You don't know what screen you will get when you buy it). The LG screen, as it turned out, had very bad burn-in problems. After complaining to the Apple store a few times, they finally relented and switched it out for me to the better Samsung screen.

The customer service at the time wasn't the best, since Apple should have gone "This is a real issue, if you can show proof of screen burn in on your LG screen, we'll immediately replace it for you" rather than try to brush it under the rug. However, it wasn't a malicious case of screwing over customers after sending better units to reviewers.

I turned in my July 2012 MBPr about a month ago for the screen burn in issues. It went almost exactly like this: "This is a real issue, if you can show proof of screen burn in on your LG screen, we'll immediately replace it for you" Except that I watched them run the test on it instead of proving that it had burn-in myself. Got it back a few days later with a new screen :)

So I guess it just took a bit of time for them to admit the issue.

The problem is that consumers could not know whether they were buying a defective product or not, even if they knew about the problem. Two different products were sold without any means of differentiating them, which is inexcusable. It would have been very easy to construct different serial numbers for the different models. It could have been as simple as adding an A or B or adding something to the tiny print on the back of the laptop or and the packaging.

To what end should hardware manufactures be required to inform their customers of component changes? One big advantage of Apple products compared to other competitors is that there are very limited number of decisions for average consumers to make. It will cause huge amount of confusion if a new model name and change list is generated each time any of the thousands of components in an MBP changes.

Apple already has different model identifiers and different model names for their MacBook Pros. That's because they don't sell only one version of each laptop; they usually offer two or three versions that have different processors and different amounts of RAM. There were 6 different model numbers and 9 different configurations (across two different sizes and two different batches) of the MacBook Pro sold in 2013 alone:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4132

I'm not suggesting that they advertise the MacBook Pros by their model numbers. My point is that they already have to differentiate between different models and different configurations, so it would not be difficult for them to make the model numbers different (it could be simple as one letter or digit change at the end) when they change such a significant part component.

It seems to me that focusing on component changes is completely missing the point. The real problem was not that Apple had two subtly different versions of their MacBook Pro with no way to tell them apart. The real problem was that Apple was shipping seriously defective hardware. Imagine if Apple hand standardized entirely on the defective LG panels. That eliminates the "panel lottery" complaint, right? And yet the actual problem, in terms of what you get when you buy one, is worse, not better.

Manufacturers need to ship products that are fit for purpose and that perform as advertised. As long as that's maintained, swapping components shouldn't be a problem. If swapping components affects that, then it's the bad products, not the swapping, that are the real problem.

I totally agree with you. For this particular article, if there is a clear and comprehensive specification on how the drives should perform (IOPs, latency, BW, etc), the problem will be resolved immediately with no controversy. The comment I was replying to implied that Apple should provide a means for customers to distinguish the products, which I do not believe is a realistic solution because swapping components is quite common in hardware world.

I agree with you too! I'm just expanding on that a bit, and saying how even if distinguishing the products was somehow realistic, it's solving the wrong problem anyway.

while apple's customer support is generally pretty good for ordinary requests, they are known for never admitting fault. i.e. "you're holding the phone the wrong way"

It's not sarcasm. A class action lawsuit was filed in March 2013. It seems that LG screens on a certain model(s?) of a 15.6 inch Retina MacBook Pro suffer from burn in, and that there is no way for a consumer to tell whether the screen was manufactured by Samsung or LG before buying the laptop.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/macbook-pro-retina-lg...

It's not just the retina Macbook screens, the image retention issue affects basically every LG IPS laptop panel manufactured before 2013. It's just that Apple wasn't using the IPS panels until the Retina.

There was a situation not long ago with some Macbook monitors going bad and it turned out Apple was getting the panels from Samsung and LG and it was the LG ones going bad. I'm not sure if there was much scandal around it though.

Plus, the colors/gamma were weird on one of them... You have to install a special color profile or else the contrast would be really screwy.

I also forgot about consumer routers which sometimes ship totally different hardware under the same model number.

Samsung has been known to ship Android tablets containing completely different SoCs under the same model. For example, the new Galaxy Tab S might contain an Exynos SoC or a Qualcomm SoC. They're essentially two completely different tablets with the same name and exterior.

Though, my understanding is that in their case it's not so much a bait-and-switch as a supply chain issue: they actually want to sell more units than any one SoC provider can deliver.

Big pain for developers, though, when they're trying to track down a user-reported bug on one of these things.

My understanding is that it's due to the Exynos SoC not supporting 4G, while the Qualcomm does. If you buy the 4G version you'll always get the Qualcomm version, and if you buy the wifi version you always get the Exynos version. So it's not like it's completely random what SoC you end up with.

You are right, and they have different SKU numbers.

Ah, that makes sense too. I've heard (from Android engineers I know) that supply chain issues have been the reason in the past, but I honestly don't know if that's the case for this particular device.

Another reason is 4G, for awhile (still maybe?) Samsung wasn't building any Exynos Chipsets with 4G radios, so markets where that mattered (US, etc.) they used Qualcomm

Except Samsung has different model numbers for different SOC's (Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 in N9005/Exynos 5420 in N9000) and those are in comparable speed.

It's extremely common to swap out major components without changing the name and number the router is advertised under, but in every instance I'm aware of there was a version number that was incremented on the packaging, eg. WRT54G v4.0 to v5.0 halved the memory (and v7.0 switched from Broadcom to Atheros and v7.2 switched back). It doesn't really help if you're buying online, but if you're buying from a brick-and-mortar store you can pretty much always know what you're getting if you read the fine print.

What would be the grounds for a class action suit? In all the examples you give, they sell you a good that meets the advertised specs. If someone is advertising generic blank DVDs, for instance, and they happen to sell you TDK media one day, I don't see how you can make a legal case that this binds them to only selling you TDK media. If you want TDK media, you should be buying from someone who advertises TDK media.

Interesting note at the end:

"Don't think decontenting is limited to just cars. Next time you're at the grocery store, stop by the freezer case and check out your favorite carton of ice cream. Most brands have quietly gone from a half-gallon (two-quart) container to 1.75 quarts--without changing the price."

I'm pretty sure I've seen the higher-end brands dropping to 1.5 quarts now. Sodas are pushing 1.25L and 1.5L containers when it used to just be purely 2L. There are a lot of four-packs in the beer aisle. A fair number of meats are being sold in fixed-sized packages, invariably less than one pound per package, rather than being sold by the pound.

At least it's clear enough if you look for it. In the SSD case, it sounds like they're making important alterations to things that aren't discussed in the specs. Of course, you shouldn't buy something depending on anything that isn't listed in the specs, but if all the manufacturers have the same crappy set of incomplete specs, you don't have a lot of choice.

Worse yet, some ice-cream brands (e.g., Breyer's) are also reformulating their recipes to use cheaper ingredients -- meaning they no longer meet the standard to be called "ice cream", but instead must be called "frozen dairy dessert": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/dining/remembering-when-br...

Part of this is for cost, and part is for consumer taste. Starting in the early 80s through 90s, consumers started seeking out products based on the amount of fat per serving, leading to the rise of "fro yo" and low-fat high-sugar formulations which had to move away from creamy, low-overrun ice creams. Ice cream is defined by high butterfat content and low air injection (overrun), but as people have started to recognize that sugar is as bad for you as fat, perhaps the market will tilt again.

Can we stop already with this fat is bad for you? There is so much nutrition misinformation that no wonder there is an obesity epidemic... Fat is not bad for you, in fact it's critical to living a healthy life. Sugar is much easier to abuse because it's absorbed too quickly (which is why fruit juice is bad, no fiber slowing down the absorption) and provided in such vast quantities.

We need to real governance here, bring back some real nutritional science in to the consumers attention and make organisations legally liable for spreading dangerous misinformation. It could save more lives than stopping smoking/alcohol/drugs, gun violence, wars and car accidents combined.

Saturated fat is bad for you - and dairy has saturated fat.

Canola = OK Butter = Bad

Go get the current issue of Tine Magazine[1]. This thinking was never backed up with good science 40 years ago and has been totally debunked in literature in the last decade. Saturated fat is very much a part of a healthy diet.

1. No, I don't consider that the "literature", but it's a good jumping off point to start learning what is true in nutrition versus what is dogma.

Dietary Fat is not bad for you, neither is it the same thing as body fat which is an indicator for excessive energy intake (most often from sugary drinks) and being generally misinformed (99% Fat Free? Awesome! Nevermind that added sugar to cover the lack to flavour we took out). What is bad for you is too much, EXCESS. Except this goes for everything. Such as too much sugar, protein, hormones, almost any drug & water can be a detriment, even lethal to you. I'll only give you that trans-fat is terrible.

The market hasn't and never will teach you that moderation is healthy because it's against their business model of selling excess. See meal portion sizes and how they have increased over the last few decades. I hope you're not taking fish oil supplements as well. Anything with this much marketing behind it should be cautioned with much skepticism.

Edit: I stand behind my criticism of anti-fat culture.

It is more likely that you are down voted as you went on a rant about fat to a parent who was talking about consumer tastes I the 80s and 90s. It would feel that both these replies are likely noted as off topic to the general conversation going on here.

There is no evidence Saturated fat is bad.

My father told me that before and during the Depression there was a chocolate bar that sold for a nickel. The price stayed the same, but the size of the bar varied with the changing price of chocolate.

found a link: http://www.hersheyarchives.org/exhibits/default.aspx?Exhibit...

It's not clear why, but the fourth wrapper in the link (1906-1911) actually says "10 cents" (possibly the wrapper is slightly larger)

That actually seems like a good idea - as long as they market as "one nickels worth of chocolate".

You know, I have just been noticing this from a lot of "ice cream" brands in the grocery store: some of their flavors say "ice cream" while others say "frozen dairy product". Mind you, these are different flavors from the same brands, so you can't just go for a specific brand and assume you're getting ice cream, you have to read the fine print.

Keep in mind this is a brand-specific change. Unilever, the owner of Breyer's, is the worlds largest ice cream manufacturer and also owns Ben & Jerry's, Klondike, Popsicle, Magnum, and a host of other brands. Breyer's being one of their non-premium brands, it's one of the few they have that's so price sensitive that they'd risk so blatantly using filler substitutes.

An upshot of this is that staples like ice cream, mayonnaise, and cheese are some of the most label-regulated industries. The existence of terms like "processed cheese food" is a good thing.

Ice cream, mayo and cheese are staples? I'm guessing you're based in North America. :)

Can't pass up that chance to take a cheap shot at an entire continent of people! After all, everyone knows that people who live in North America are all fat, lazy, and too stupid to know it!

Maybe that fake cheese they eat on pizzas and the like.

That's a case of the labeling law working nicely though.

I like it when package prices have to be shown next to sensible unit prices, it really simplifies the comparison, regardless of any psychology that has been built into the packaging.

The grocery store I usually visit shows the price for all of its products both per unit and (much smaller, below it) in price per kilogram. I look at that all the time, and it's often surprising which of the products is actually the cheapest, and how large the differences can be between seemingly very similar products.

> I like it when package prices have to be shown next to sensible unit prices, it really simplifies the comparison, regardless of any psychology that has been built into the packaging.

This is standard consumer protection law in many places such as the EU and Australia.

This really makes me hate the half-assed use of the metric system in the US. It seems like my local stores go out of their way to use different imperial units for different products, making it harder to compare. Unit prices are great, but when one package is $/oz and another is $/gallon, it defeats much of the purpose.

Oz is weight and gallon is volume. This is not a metric vs standard issue.

Oz most certainly can be used for volume. It's called the "fluid ounce".

But both oz and gallon are still imperial units. In metric they would use liters. So this isn't caused by half-assed use of the metric system, but rather by not using it at all.

In your rush to be pedantic, would it kill you to engage your brain for a few seconds first?

The US uses the metric system in many places. However, adoption has been half-assed, and non-metric units remain in common use in many situations. I buy soda and wine in liters but milk and juice in gallons, for example.

The fact that any non-metric units remain at all is due to the half-assed nature of metric system adoption in this country.

What's with the hostility? I was pointing out that WalterBright was down voted for the perfectly valid point that the problem you spoke of is not caused by half-assed use of the metric system. No matter how much I use my brain, it won't become such either. There may be other problems caused by that (I wouldn't know; I'm not American), but you specifically brought up one that is not related to metric in any way.

The hostility comes because you're going out of your way to interpret what I said in a way that makes me wrong, rather than seeing how I'm right.

And you're doing it again. Did you just ignore my explanation above, about how any use of non-metric units in the US is ultimately due to the half-assed adoption of the metric system in this country?

Hey, I understand what you are saying. But he did have a point, why use hostility? You could have made the same comment without the first line saying 'use your brain' and kept everything civil. Even if you are right, do you need to denigrate others who have gotten something wrong?

Pedantry is an inherent part of nerd-dom. It's often a good thing. Computers and other such things don't work on "well, you know what I meant".

However, there's a nasty subset of pedantry which basically consists of pattern-matching words without truly grasping the meaning and using that as a launching point for a "you're wrong" reply. This kind of pedantry derails conversations and wrecks communities.

That's the kind of pedantry I got above with this nonsense reply about how "in metric they would use liters". As if I didn't know that! A moment's thought would indicate, hey, maybe this guy is not a complete idiot who doesn't know anything about metric, and he probably already knows that neither ounces nor gallons are metric, so let's figure out what he actually meant instead of doing a mindless pattern-matching "you're wrong" reply. That is hostility too. Especially when you keep on going even after the guy explains it.

And of course I get the usual internet double standard, where it's perfectly OK to to write a really bad comment as long as you don't outright use upsetting words, but calling that behavior out is criticized.

I don't subscribe to this idea that "civil" is equivalent to "use nice words". To me, "civil" is about how you behave. If you curse but treat other people with respect, that's civil. If you use nothing but benign words arranged in a way that treats other people without respect, that's "not civil".

I suppose any argument in the internet can feel hostile if you care about the subject, but my apologies for any distress I may have caused anyway. My message is not intended to be about whether you are wrong, but whether the example you gave is valid. I did read your explanation, and I find it mistaken. Let me rephrase my argument, and you can point out the part you think is wrong.

If we say that a problem is caused by half-assed adoption of X, it implies the problem can be solved in two ways: (1) Properly adopting X, or (2) Reverting back to no adoption at all. The example you gave can only be solved by 1, because it is an inherent problem of the imperial system. If you take metric out of the equasion, the situation is not affected. While you may have meant to say "the imperial system has problems, let's use metric", one can also understand it as "the transition to metric is causing problems, let's stop it".

Your mistake is thinking that any statement of the form, "I hate X, for example because Y" implies that Y can be solved by any action that eliminates X.

For example, "I hate how they're serving a 50/50 mixture of coffee and urine, makes the coffee taste like urine." This does not imply that the problem can be solved by eliminating the coffee.

Consumerist has been tracking this for years:

http://consumerist.com/category/grocery-shrink-ray/

http://www.mouseprint.org/

I remember noticing this as an 10-year-old with bags of chips -- $0.79 bags would become bigger $0.99 "big grab" bags with a big exclamatory balloon, then the size would later go down to before, but the price would stay the same.

Even as a kid, it seemed kinda sleazy

I agree, but I think it's just a way for the producers to mask inflation. My gut feeling is that people are more likely to consciously notice a price increase of 20% than a 20% decrease in volume/weight.

Sometimes these shrinkings are (accidentally) synchronized. In the early 2000s almost everything available from big manufacturers in Brazilian groceries shrunk while keeping the same prices (e.g. cookie bags going from 300g to 290g).

Last year and a half yogurt not only shrunk but started vanishing from the malls, being replaced by almost identically-looking bottles of "fermented milk", as the new formulation did not met the mandatory labeling standards to be called "yogurt". Of course, the prices were kept or raised.

That's everywhere.

Intellectually, I know that "fermented milk" is a perfectly accurate way to describe cheese, yogurt, and similar products, but I don't know if I could bring myself to buy and eat something that had it right on the label....

How about fermented grape juice or fermented grain?

Oddly, I have no problem with those. Something about fermented milk specifically sounds bad. Even though I'll happily eat all sorts of cheese.

For what it's worth, I decided this might be because I've had far too much experience with disgusting sour milk that sat in the refrigerator too long, while my only experience with rotten grain or grapes is with the nicely packaged kind where it was done on purpose.

I've seen this with assorted products offered in "new and improved" packaging that offers less than before, while the price stays the same.

The new "E-Z pour" bottle is an excuse to reduce the contents.

Intel sort of does it, too. Like they have started calling some of their Atom CPU's "Celeron", while they still serve more powerful Haswell Celerons on the market, and the naming is just slightly different (a letter). They don't exactly replace it in the same model, though, so I guess they are not quite that bad yet, but they try to be misleading about it, too.

And I think Atoms has gotten better since the old days too.

Well that sucks. It should not happen, yet it does. And it should not definitely spread to more industries.

But that really is no argument. I am sure the car manufacturers did not downgrade the car so that it runs at half its speed/milage. Then they came up with a fake benchmark to prove to the world that it actually does (even if it does not). Come on that is an insult to one's intelligence. These guys are ripping their customers. Whatever reviews for the product exist are based on the specs that no longer are. That is pure evil.

What can someone do to stop this ? Besides not buying their products.

This isn't always a 'gotcha' scenario in which the OEM acts in bad faith to the customer. In hardware, when you're under a lot of pressure to be deliver products on time, teams will be risk averse and over design to meet timing. As time goes on, engineering learns of the over design, or over capacity, and corrects the issue to save cost or optimize performance. This becomes an issue when teams trade off performance for cost.

That article first claims that prices stay the same, but then contains this:

"They're grateful that the Jetta's base price is down $1,740."

Then you're just getting less value for less money, which seems fair to me.

It's only fair if you know you are getting less value. Otherwise it's false advertising.

I'm currently trying to buy a pair of shoes on amazon, and many reviewers are calling out the fact that after giving the shoes a five star, they go to buy a second pair of the same shoe to find that it is completely different and of terribly quality.

Dell does this with their monitors [1], first by shipping certain models with IPS panels, then with cheaper PVA panels after good reviews are published.

That bit me w/their 2007wfp, which was a great monitor mostly for 1 reason: it was IPS at a great price point. Overwhelmingly positive reviews convinced me to purchase 2 of them.

Then buyers started noticing picture quality issues not described in previous positive reviews. After some research, it was found Dell had silently started shipping the 2007wfp with cheaper PVA panels, not IPS. After noticing similar issues with the 2 I purchased, I eventually confirmed they were PVA monitors. I was fairly upset.

There's a good thread on Hard Forum about all of this here.[2]

And despite very frustrated customers, Dell never acknowledged any problem. In fact, a Dell rep can be quoted: "... a 2007WFP is a 2007WFP ... It does not matter what panel is installed." [3]

I stopped buying Dell products after this experience.

[1] http://en.community.dell.com/f/3529/t/18107050.aspx

[2] http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1111100

[3] http://en.community.dell.com/f/3529/t/18286693.aspx

> In fact, a Dell rep can be quoted: "... a 2007WFP is a 2007WFP ... It does not matter what panel is installed."

Did they ever list the panel type? If they did, isn't this false advertising?

If they never promised the panel type/view angle/color accuracy in the first place, then I don't think there's anything wrong with what the rep said. After all, not every one cares what type of panel is used as much as physical dimension/resolution. Nevertheless, it is very surprising to me that they didn't specify what panel is used.

Would you be ok if a car manufacturer put a smaller motor in a car you bought because car reviews said "it had great ability to get up and hold freeway speeds"? Is it ok as long as they didn't sell based on horse power? Or maybe it's handling: reviewers say it corners great, but then you find the suspension has been massively downgraded. How do you even advertise a spec'ed suspension?

It's dirty business if you are giving reviewers something better than the people who are reading the reviews. People don't buy computer parts (or cars) based on the advertised spec sheet, they buy them based on what they can really do.

> Would you be ok if a car manufacturer put a smaller motor in a car you bought because car reviews said "it had great ability to get up and hold freeway speeds"? Is it ok as long as they didn't sell based on horse power?

If they lie about the engine performance, then its wrong. If they change the components underlying (admittedly weasel-wording-marketing-speak) marketing phrasing, then it's not as clearly wrong.

>Or maybe it's handling: reviewers say it corners great, but then you find the suspension has been massively downgraded. How do you even advertise a spec'ed suspension? This is why specifications, and often component information, exists.

I'm not saying that these companies are in the right, or that this doesn't happen. It clearly does, in some cases. In other cases, it's probably due to the fact that the manufacturing supply chain is more complex than most people understand.

In all cases, it's not a great idea to paint with a broad brush. Especially when creating somewhat comparable analogies than are also pretty general.

> dirty business if you are giving reviewers something better than the people who are reading the reviews

It isn't clear if this is what's happening behind. I think the Dell rep was being very frank about it, that Dell did not intend to supply an IPS monitor and reserve the right to be flexible regarding what panel to use. If IPS panel really matters, then one may want to choose a monitor that clearly says so in the spec. In fact, if you look at the link [3] in the root comment, some people clearly understood that it was possible to receive the cheaper, inferior panel, yet would like to participate in the gamble.

[3] http://en.community.dell.com/f/3529/t/18286693.aspx

The challenge of engineering physical goods is that, unlike software, many things vary. That is why in electronics industry, manufacturers publish detailed datasheet that lists nearly all the parameter one will care about, including all the tolerances. It is quite uncommon for the customer to actually test each of those parameter to ensure they are within spec, but it is a contractual constraint placed on the supplier in case things go wrong. I think the same idea can be applied to your car example. Ideally, even if most customers don't read the spec sheet, the manufacturer should still provide it. Customer can have peace of mind by knowing that his/her experience will not be too far off from the review others published online. If what you care about is absent from the spec, think twice before buying the product.

I recall the panel type being listed somewhere in the specs. However, I can't find an advertised panel type for the 2007wfp today. This is the only Dell web page I found that still lists that monitor, but panel type isn't cited [1].

But Dell does advertise panel types, especially for their Ultra Sharp monitors (which the 2007wfp is one of). E.g. click into any Ultra Sharp monitor here [2], then view the Tech Specs tab and look for panel type.

> After all, not every one cares what type of panel is used

Agreed, although I'd argue those are likely people that don't seek out higher priced monitors with picture quality only IPS can deliver. It's worth making clear that the difference between IPS and any other panel type is noticeable, in both display quality and (especially) price. In a lot of cases I know of someone owning an IPS monitor, it was an intentional purchase having at least something to do with that detail.

[1] http://www.dfsdirectsales.com/StoreCatalog/ctl641/cp57138/si...

[2] http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&catego...

On the one hand, that's awful.

On the other hand, if you only discovered that you got the inferior version well after you purchased, did it really matter for you?

Good question, but indeed it did, for a couple reasons.

For one, I only purchase IPS monitors. Even before I found out about everything, I had already noticed slightly less picture quality compared to other IPS monitors I used; lesser viewing angle, colors shifting, etc. Part of what caught my attention regarding the customer complaints I found is their symptoms were apparent on the 2 I purchased. So despite not knowing I had a PVA panel, there was a noticeable quality difference that mattered. The customer complaints supplemented, rather than created, my initial concerns.

Second, I was cheated. The monitor they delivered was inferior to the one advertised (at the time, the 2007wfp was advertised with an IPS panel, a detail later removed). That's lying. What's worse, is a customer support department trying to sweep it under the rug.

I'm sorry you had to learn this way, but you have now learned one of the lessons that everyone who has anything to do with computers has (or ought) to learn: don't trust Dell, don't buy Dell, don't use Dell.

Their business level support is excellent though - for SMBs without in-house tech I will recommend them every time. On-site, fast and knowledgable hardware swapout is a lifesaver.

If you noticed it independently, that's clear enough. And if they advertised it but didn't deliver, that supports it too.

I'm interesting in cases where someone really wants X, unknowingly gets not-X, and then is perfectly happy with not-X until they discover the difference through other means. It happens, but doesn't sound like it happened here.

And this is why I always buy Crucial. Cruial and Micron are the same company and micron actually make the chips rather than just assemble them. They have control over the entire process end to end and no motivation to pick up chips anywhere else as they already have the best deal.

Over the last 10-12 years I've bought about 2000-3000 sticks of RAM from them. Not one failure or problem ever. I used to buy vendor provided RAM (mainly IBM and Sun back then) and just got ripped off every time. Zero failures on Sun stuff but the ECC stuff hurts. IBM sold us crap lots of times.

Only pain is you can't get an 8Mb EDO SIMM anymore for embedded stuff so its off to a dealer to be shafted repetitively for stuff like that.

> They have control over the entire process end to end

How is that supposed to protect you from a completely intentional shady business tactic? Because that's what this is. "We looked the other way and our supplier screwed us over" is a flimsy excuse at the best of times (quality control and penalties should be built into the contract in the first place), but in the Kingston/PNY example it isn't even that.

Presumably because semiconductor manufacturing has massive setup costs, so changing anything in the middle of a production run is likely to be uneconomical. But an assembler can simply switch parts or suppliers.

Well the supplier and the manufacturer are the same for Micron. They wouldn't screw themselves over. That's illogical.

the issue at hand was using cheaper fabrication for lesser quality parts.

micron/crucial could still do this.

this is all about saving money once the reputation of a model has been established.

PNT's other choice is to pay more for better quality NAND or controllers and then pass the cost along to the consumer.

I avoid Crucial SSDs like the plague. They shipped the M4 and similar models with a firmware bug that causes the drive to stop working after 5000 hours of power on time:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Crucial-m4-Firmware-BSOD,14...

Not cool.

Crucial, OCZ and Kingston were the favorite failure complaints on the email list I was on at Microsoft ("Hardware Junkies"). The wisdom a few years ago was to stick with Intel and Samsung.

I see no reason to change that. I'd rather spend fifty or a hundred bucks more and get a drive that I'm pretty sure won't fall flat on its face.

OCZ is the worst - I avoid them like the plague now. I've had 2 of 3 of their SSDs fail on me.

They actually found the bug and released a fimware update fixing it before anyone's SSD was 5000 hours old, and SSD owners (at least back in those days) are generally expected to install firmware updates. It was quite well-publicised, too; they handled it really well, except for the actual release.

That wasn't even the only firmware problem with those drives. There was a later bug that would cause the drive to not be recognized after a hard power down, and it wouldn't show up again until you left the computer sitting at the BIOS screen for at least 20 minutes.

It was fixed quickly and that's been the only major complaint I've seen. Further, the bug would cause reboots, but wasn't outright destructive. This is about the same time Sandforce based drives were failing left and right.

tl;dr - Crucial is one of a handful of brands I do trust, and I've owned a number of the M4 series.

SSDs are complicated beasts. We don't use them on anything other than disposable workstations. Every problem with SSDs is down to software rather then hardware.

Your M4s I wouldn't touch. There's nothing wrong with the hardware at all but the firmware sucks.

As far as you can go with SSDs is buy the ones with the least shit firmware, which is Samsung 840 Pro.

If your kit is mission critical, SAS is still the right choice.

Crucial/Micron RAM has no firmware!

As an ex EE this sort if crap is why I trust the hardware guys more than the software ones in life. We still haven't figured out software engineering yet.

I think the main issue is that hardware companies in general really suck at writing software.

ALL companies suck at writing software. Our tools are in the dark ages still. There is nothing that combines the wisdom of the past and applies it to the problems of today.

Wouldn't you say the same was true of hardware? What EE tools are available that help people avoid making stupid choices?

I'm pretty new to actual engineering (I will be getting a BSEE in one year), but I've worked for a couple of years at a hardware company. From what I have seen I think EE and other types of engineering are quite a bit more rigorous than Software Engineering is currently.

Also keep in mind that for firmware often times an EE will be the one doing the programming and much of the time they picked programming as another tool on the way rather than as another separate field of work.

I think when you start picking apart a lot of electronic designs you see that there are a lot of bad EEs out there too.

Software engineering and EE are different in a lot of ways though. It's a lot harder to modify a EE design after it's shipped. You're also often designing around a particular manufacturing process. I think that makes you focus on getting things working correctly before it gets out the door.

Software engineering has a long way to go, but I can also see the EE world does too. A lot of the EE design tools suck, lack standards, and often don't (or aren't) integrate well with revision control. The design process therefore, tends to be a bit messy during development.

The fundamentals of EE work do seem to been clearer than software engineering though. I think this is partly due to EE having developed a mature set of design patterns, but also because it relies on a standard set of components which are really based on physical properties and as such strict and concrete in their definition as opposed to most concepts in software engineering.

I've seen a similar situation about five years ago when I was testing USB pendrives for a local paper. It turned out it was close to impossible to get two pieces with the same specs and performance, even though they were branded with the same name.

I've heard similar stories about HDDs having different controllers, number of discs and so on.

Luckily in EU one can return within two weeks anything ordered online, so a simple solution is to order, test and return if it doesn't match expectations.

I've heard about HDD by recovery professionals trying to swap internals with hard time. But, even though it could look like some kind of voluntary lock in, to me it was normal production practice. Some batches of hdd with certain chipsets and later switching suppliers because of life means different chips.

They should give it a different model number.

well, model numbers are fairly large, it's probably the case, but it's hard to infer what mean the last X digits.

Return something that was taken out of the box and used?!

Yes; in UK, it's Distance Selling Regulations (DSR).

You're better protected if you buy online than in a store, ironically.

PS: I looked it up, and actually the DSR has been superseded as of yesterday (!) by Consumer Contracts Regulations, which ups the UK protection from 7 days to 14 days, bringing it into line with EU directives.

> You're better protected if you buy online than in a store, ironically.

It's the only thing that makes sense, particularly if you want to instil trust in customers that buying online is "safe" and not prone to scams.

Here are the English laws - the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations

https://www.gov.uk/online-and-distance-selling-for-businesse...

http://www.out-law.com/page-430

In my country (Norway in Europe, but not EU member): Yes. But you cannot "use the product as your own", just open it and test that it meets your expectations.

Yes, indeed, with certain limitations, but it's quite common to order things online and send them back within two weeks – if you change your mind – usually without any penalties.

So the seller can impose some penalties if it wants to for example a restocking fee.

Not really, no. For the most part, you don't even pay for shipping.

Indeed, as long as it doesn't show any signs of usage. And as someone has mentioned, it works only when ordered and delievered - picking up something at the store makes return impossible (since one had a chance to see and evaluate the item).

But for electronics you can't test the item in store.

Those damn socialists, amirite?

I'm not sure about online purchases -- except on Amazon, which is very liberal in what it accepts, in my experience -- but brick and mortar retailers in the US are often very open to accepting open goods for returns (and the Target I usually go to, for instance, often has returned, opened electronics in the clearance section).

In my experience, it's not particularly unusual for grocery stores to take back open food, even.

I have heard personally once, and online many times, from foreigners marvelling at how readily many US retailers will take returns, even for silly reasons.

I am not aware of any regulations mandating such practices, though I suppose they could exist.

I don't think it's required by law, since there are sellers with much less friendly return policies. But some sellers have learned that liberal return policies earn more business than the money they cost.

Some just sort of unofficially try to keep customers happy, but some are up-front about it. Costco, for example, lets you return almost anything almost any time for any reason, or no reason. Electronics are limited to 90 days, but others have no limit. Bought some fruit that doesn't taste quite right, possibly because you left it in your car for two weeks? Just bring the moldy remains back. In the world of clothing, LL Bean and Lands' End are two examples where they take pretty much anything, any time. Lands' End even has an amusing story that they use to promote their crazy return policy, about a man who bought a collectible car from them as part of some promotion, and his widow returned it 20 years later after he died. (Two decades of inflation no doubt ate away at the true value of the refund, but still.) LL Bean will go out of their way to remind you of their policy. I had a button break on some pants and when I asked if I could get a replacement button somehow, they told me nope, just return them and we'll send you a new pair.

I had this problem with PNY with one of their other products - I bought a mid-tier video card from them (GeForce GTX 570), and after a hardware failure, sent it in for an RMA. Over the course of multiple RMA mailings, at various times they would send back a visibly physically damaged 'replacement' card, a 'replacement' card that was a different size/shape (and obviously a different model), and in one case my broken card, that I sent them initially. It was as if they had a pile of 'works well enough to boot Windows' cards and RMAs that weren't totally broken got put into the pile, while they pulled other cards out of the pile to ship to customers.

It was pretty impressive to be able to watch shady cost-cutting in action. Too bad it cost me around $120 in UPS shipping fees.

I purchased an ASUS Notebook X550DP-DS101-CA with a resolution of 1920x1080 last year.

Exact same model #, 1366x768 at some stores, 1920x1080 at others. (Same store franchise.)

I was run around three stores until I managed to get the "real model" that I was looking for.

Caveat emptor.

Lenovo did this with the last Thinkpad I ever bought.

Is this something the storage industry is particularly notorious for? I recall that Seagate and Western Digital's (knowingly) substandard drives nearly bankrupted Amstrad.

It's common in any commodity industry where the differences aren't obvious to the casual buyer. In older industries we've had regulation requiring things like standard labels, sealed packaging, etc. to prevent abuses like selling food with inferior ingredients or lying about a car's fuel economy. I suspect it's only a matter of time before this happens in the tech industry since the market pressures give a strong incentive to cheat.

Bunnie Huang had a fascinating, disturbing post about what the MicroSD market is like in China, eventually disassembling some dodgy Kingston cards:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022

Just yesterday motor oil, transmission fluid, and antifreeze came up in a similar lawsuit. Not a lot of details, but interested parties could start here: http://fox2now.com/2014/06/13/mo-attorney-general-suing-five...

The unfortunate thing is there are probably so many people who just buy that shit because they need it. My initial reaction was that piece wasn't necessary & is more due to companies coming up with shit products & flooding the market, which happens in IT too.

People shouldn't have bought those brands to begin with since they add no value: http://www.storagereview.com/it_s_game_over_for_most_consume...

BTW, Apple does the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689180

That's not the same thing.

I hate hearing about these stories from manufactures, it totally kills their rep for me to ever trust them again. Why do companies go against just building solid products, even if it costs a little more money. It's exactly how Apple has gotten away with charging premium dollars for similar hardware - build quality always wins.

Nothing is more aggravating than planned obsolescence in appliances. Just sell me a good product that will last 30+ year with basic maintenance. I'll happily pay literally up to 5x the price you charge for your 5 year lifetime (if I'm lucky) piece of shit. Hell, I'll probably buy the replacement parts from you besides so it's not like you're completely losing my business.

Because nobody buys 100 dollar toasters.

I would if it came with an assurance/warranty for the next 30 years from a company I didn't think would go bankrupt before then.

If that were actually true they would be making them.

(And they do make them, they're commercial quality equipment and they're easy to find. Consumer's don't want to pay the big bucks for this stuff. Not even you, or you'd go find it.)

I have looked into these things, sadly commercial dishwashers aren't viewed as being suitable for residential purposes. Toasters perhaps, I'll confess to having not looked into those yet. Washing machine and dryer I do plan to buy commercial most likely as soon as the need arises and I don't live in a place with laundry provided.

I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm fine with paying for these things, I've learned time and time again that I'm better off paying more for a quality product than getting the cheapest thing I can possibly find.

Me too. If I'm buying cheap it's cuz I'm poor atm!

Dell has also been caught doing this with monitors.

Were they good to start with?

With a few exceptions (which may be what poolpool is referring to), Dell's UltraSharp lines have been one of the better sources of consistently good consumer IPS displays for 10+ years.

And even the models that have used PVA panels have been much better than TN-based monitors, with their biggest weakness generally being input lag.

Dell makes very good flat-screens for an affordable price, e.g. the U2311H was a really nice one.

Did you not read the article in this post? Or are you just being daft and trying to say something snide about Dell?

The article itself is about switching out quality components for cheaper ones after your first batch gets good reviews. So yes, if Dell is doing the same thing, it follows that yes, they were at one point good, and then they started swapping out for cheaper components.

Pretty sure he wasn't asking a normal question, he was obviously implying they he didn't believe there monitors were good in the first place.

Which is wrong. They have their good monitors and their bad ones.

Right, so the latter, he was just being daft and trying to say something snide about Dell.

It's called the internet. Dell's feelings weren't hurt.

> The Cadillac DTS initially came with standard heated leather seats. In 2009, that feature became an option. "However, the price of the car didn't change," he said.

The price actually dropped, due to inflation.

Good to know

Kingston seemed to be a nice brand some 10 years ago, but nowadays it's mostly hype

Kingston was always the dodgy cheap brand.

Hardly new stuff. We had horrible problems in production 10 years ago. After analyzing the situation, we found out that the new servers had same memory as older ones from Kingston. But when you watched closely, you noticed that even if the Kingston label with all type information was exactly the same, the chips on the DIMM weren't. So no new news here.

If you work in the IT department, you'll also probably know, that when ordering 300 "similar" computers: Changes are quite low that you're really getting those delivered. After going through the delivery, it's quite likely that you got at least 10 different computer series in that delivery. Different power source, different memory, possibly different motherboard, hard drive, power source cooling fan, cpu cooler etc. That's just normal unfortunately. That's why many supplier leave the specification quite open on purpose, so it doesn't matter what they deliver as long as it's something meeting the specification.

If you're going to buy a SSD go with Samsung or Intel

I was going to say the same thing. These seems to yield the least unhappy customers and return rates. Intel more than anyone seems to care about the quality of their SSDs.

Samsung too. Evo 240gb, Half the benchmarked read/write iops on newer SSDs. We returned 6 before going with a different brand.

Do you have a source for that? I'm looking to buy, that or the Crucial MX100.

Just get Intel ssds. They are the best

I've always wondered how this maneuver isn't considered a major free market failure.

What a bunch of cunts.

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