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Comment by magila | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

You are right, and they have different SKU numbers.

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.

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