>Apple's apparent lack of control over their supply chain and brand

In this case it's Amazon's lack of vetting third-party sellers that's causing this. Anything that actually comes from Apple will be good. Also, it won't be > 50% off, which should be a huge red flag that this is a counterfeit.

You're right, I should have price checked against Apple.com. But Amazon shouldn't claim that it's "by Apple" while burying the fact that it's actually sold by a third party several lines down.

Totally agree. I no longer trust third party electronics sellers on Amazon, and always have a ton of trouble finding that info.

That's not Apple's fault; it's Amazon. A counterfeit maker sells though Amazon's Seller Central and opts for Prime shipping by sending it to Amazon's warehouse. When purchasing, Amazon chooses the cheapest seller (which is most likely a counterfeit). Amazon is at fault for allowing someone to sell a counterfeit as a genuine product.

When you go to a brick-and-mortar store and accidentally purchase a counterfeit cable for your phone, it's not Apple's fault; it's the store's for opting to sell you the counterfeit.

It's worse than that. Suppose you have N sellers selling the same item through Amazon using "fulfilled by Amazon". Each of the N sellers ships stock to Amazon.

Amazon just keeps track of the total number of items each of the N sellers sent, not which particular items came from which seller.

When a customer orders, and picks seller #1 as his seller, Amazon just pulls one from the pile and sends it, and records that seller #1 has one less item attributed to them.

This means that if any seller ships counterfeit items to Amazon, those could end up used to fulfill an "fulfilled by Amazon" order from any other seller of that item!

When the customer pissed off customer then comes and gives a bad review, it will go to their seller even though that seller may be 100% genuine.

Worse, Amazon has no idea which seller actually supplied to counterfeit item, so they act is if it was the seller for that particular sale. That seller gets dinged, and if this happens enough times he gets kicked out of fulfilled by Amazon. (And when that happens, Amazon screws him even more. Suppose that seller logically has K items in stock at Amazon. Amazon gives the seller a choice: pay to have K items shipped back at the seller's expense using a shipping method selected by Amazon, or abandon the items. If the seller elects to have the items shipped back, he gets K random items from the pool so that even if that seller only sent genuine items he may get back counterfeits that other sellers supplied. It often won't be worth it, because Amazon picks expensive shipping methods, so often the seller ends up simply losing their inventory).

There have been allegations that unscrupulous sellers have purposefully taken advantage of this. Suppose seller #1 is a big seller, doing a lot of business. You are a small seller, not doing much business because #1 has great ratings and better prices than you. So you do this:

1. Raise your prices high enough that no one will pick you over seller #1.

2. Ship a bunch of counterfeit items to Amazon to poison the pool.

Since seller #1 sells way more items than you, most of those counterfeits you shipped to Amazon will end up going to #1's customers. This hurts #1's reputation, and if you get lucky gets #1 kicked off of Amazon.

The product you linked to is sold by a 3rd party seller, not Amazon. This is why I never buy from 3rd party sellers.

To be fair, the Amazon page is extremely misleading with regard to this.

https://www.amazon.ca/ORIGINAL-MACBOOK-Magsafe-ADAPTER-CHARG...

ORIGINAL OEM APPLE MACBOOK PRO 60W Magsafe 2 [...] by Apple-Computers

But it's not really by Apple, it's by cable_connexion and is a generic. Amazon does a really lousy job of policing what's put into the "From" field on their site - I'm surprised it hasn't gotten them sued yet.

That's entirely on Amazon. There's keyword spam (for model numbers), the seller is "Apple-Computer" (Apple dropped the 'Computer' from it's name several years ago), and only has good ratings (the one 3-star rating is only about the shipping and lists no detail, and the rest only mention shipping, so they're probably fake/bought).

You're right that the page says "Sold by Mayday Dealz and Fulfilled by Amazon." I definitely missed that when purchasing, because the very top says

    Apple 45W MagSafe 2 Power Adapter for MacBook Air
    *by Apple*

Amazon probably allows this to be misleading, because I bet it increases sales. Ideally they would make it a lot clearer when you're dealing with a third party seller. I realize it only takes a moment to glance at the reviews and see a red flag, but I don't remember them being so negative back when I purchased it about a year ago.

Amazon do seem pretty tolerant of people selling fakes. I imagine it's because it's easier to ignore than do something about but it probably hurts their brand.

Under "Manufacturer" it lists "Apple Computer," a lie made doubly hilarious by the fact that Apple changed its name from Apple Computer in 2007 [1].

[1] http://www.macworld.com/article/1054770/applename.html

Even products sold "by Amazon" can be counterfeit. Amazon lets 3rd party sellers ship their product to the fulfillment centers to be shipped out by Amazon, and if multiple sellers are selling the same item then it can all get bundled together in the same bin.

I've kind of wished lately that Amazon did a verified seller kind of thing like Twitter does with the check mark. Something obvious, not text based, completely controlled by an Amazon process. Buying from a seller with one of these marks should guarantee that you are NOT getting a fake.

A perfect example is sunglasses. I don't want to go down to the mall to go get a new pair, and frankly don't even care if they're at much of a discount. I just want to get a pair of say, polarized Ray-Ban Aviators. There's a HUGE chance that you're getting a knock off or it will lack polarization. Certain things I just will not buy from Amazon because of the overwhelming odds of fakes.

Amazon actually does have these sorts of restrictions but they either don't work or Amazon doesn't do a good job of vetting the "approved" sellers. Some products (and some categories) are "gated" which means you need to get permission from Amazon to sell certain items. I even think the "official" listing for Mag Safe charger is actually gated. The only thing is there are 10 or (seems to be duplicate) listings for Mag Safe charger that are ungated. Some sellers are allowed to create listings too, thus getting past Amazon's restrictions.

It's pretty obvious Amazon just doesn't pay enough attention to the products that are sold on their website. Or they intentionally turn a blind eye. They had a bunch of listing for prescription drugs[1] and Amazon.co.uk was selling weapons that were illegal in the UK[2] for just two other examples I could think of off the top of my head. Oh yeah, and they sold cyanide, too.[3]

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/banned-weapons-being-illegall...

[3] http://articles.philly.com/2015-09-05/news/66217129_1_cyanid...

Seems like Amazon's fault, not Apple's. Note:

> Sold by Airstrip1 and Fulfilled by Amazon.

Also, check out on /r/surface. Microsoft's Q&A is a total clusterfuck. Lenovo is pretty bad these days too. I've had three T450s laptops in my possession at one time or the other, and all have had terrible backlight bleed.

The one in my teardown was also purchased on Amazon, but from a different seller. The buyer got a refund from Amazon, so you might want to try that. The build quality of yours looks a bit worse. If you're going to throw it out, want to break it open first and let me know what's inside?

I don't want to mess with cheap Chinese electronics, especially with a toddler around. But I'm happy to send it to you instead of the New York landfill. Email me your address if you feel like cracking open another one: [email protected]

The reviews are murderous on that item.