I disagree and would like to see evidence to support this claim.

I admit my evidence is anecdotal, but when I assisted with computer repairs at a University, regardless of whether or not a user had broken the warranty sticker companies would do whatever was in their power to refuse service or provide improper/inadequate service on machines. As I often worked with foreign exchange students who really needed their machines repair as opposed to buying new ones, I would often act as an authorized intermediary for the students and would work with the manufacturer warranties directly. Numerous times consumers would be accused of having violated the warranty because of "broken warranty stickers" when we hadn't so much as removed the battery on laptops that still had detachable batteries. The machines would be returned to the student having been opened by the manufacturer and then the blame would be put on the student.

Combine this with the fact that standard warranties are very short and even a paid for warranty often won't cover the most common damage to portable electronics (water damage), and I guess I'm wondering what you're even paying for.

Warranty support is a sham for many companies, and often times the focus of warranty support is to find a way to dismiss the claim rather than honor it. There are some that are very good with their warranty support, but also quite a few that are horrible. Apple, for as controlling and mean as people make them out to be, only have moisture damage stickers inside their products, and their exclusions only include mistreatment of the device and non-certified third party service that causes damage (third party service itself isn't forbidden, just if they wreck the machine, Apple eschews their responsibility). Other companies put warranty stickers right atop screw heads, preventing things like swapping hard drives, RAM, or other easily replaceable components without voiding the warranty, quite illegally as the article demonstrated.

So even if there is a cost reduction that can be demonstrated, if it comes at the cost that I can't swap out HDDs on my own without voiding my warranty, I think the extra cost is better, since you're paying far more than the extra few $$$ in order to get the largely non-usable warranty.

I work for an MSP. This is HP's motivus operandi. We had a number of machines that constantly blue screened. Reviews of the crash dump were impossible because in the middle of the dump the system would lock up. We also had a number of Dell machines in the same Active Directory domain running the same software that had no issues. After about 3 months of testing (and about 5 'lost' tickets) the client was getting pissed due to a lack of a resolution. We did everything they asked. The final response was that Internet Explorer was not supported on these machines and we needed to stop using it (In this case, basically "Don't use the machines you paid for and they won't bluescreen"). Not IE 8 or 9 mind you, IE11 on Windows 7 machines. I asked them to update their website to reflect this, as I'm sure many customers would like to know, they never did. (It was bullshit, the problem was bad ram, when I replaced it with some I had laying around everything worked fine) It happened that IE11 was a requirement for the web app they use. Eventually we were able to get the VAR to eat the costs and send us replacements, but HP never claimed any responsibility whatsoever. It's on my never buy list now, what a nightmare.

One of the fun parts of working at a mega-enterprise is being able to screw vendors like this to the wall.

Example:

- 15 minute callback from a L2 engineer, 98% compliance or hardware replacement.

- PC vendors had to hit specific targets for failures in the first 90 days -- exceed a certain number of failures and everything gets replaced.

- 72 hour call-to-resolution with penalties that climbed up for SLA misses.

The upshot is that the vendor actually tests our shit in the factory. The downside is that folks like your customer who lack leverage get the reject parts.

> Warranty-void-if-removed stickers reduce the cost to the company of providing the warranty

Obviously, since now they can ignore manufacturing defects in a whole swath of devices.

I had a MacBook Pro where I replaced the DVD drive with an SSD, and Apple refused to fix their known-faulty graphics hardware[0] since the Mac had "unauthorized modifications". There was no way that SSD had any impact on the graphics corruption, but Apple did indeed save money on not having to repair it.

[0] https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/

That's odd because my old MBP had the same issue and I had also replaced the drive with an SSD. I was fully prepared to put the original hardware back in, but the Apple tech diagnosed and fixed the video issue without any comment on my changes.

Do you live in the US? All the positive Apple Support stores I hear come from the US. This was in the UK. I've also had meh Apple Support experiences in Sweden and Japan.

I do live in the US. I have owned MBPs for years, and with or without AppleCare I have always received good service from Apple. My only complaint is they often have to send the computer away to do a mainboard fix, and it takes a few days.

Ive had excellent support in the apple stores I've been to. Out of warranty support, people going out of their way to help, etc.

Lucky.

I've had a battery that was 10 cycles out of warranty and OS X started throwing up scary warnings but nope, it's out of warranty. A charger that just up and died, they did replace it but not after a 20 questions interrogation. When it's a clear problem they've been friendly, but the repair still takes a week since they don't have the parts or expertise in-store.

And I'm super-friendly to support staff - back in the days when I used Palm and Sony Ericsson gear, the would repair user-fault stuff for me no questions asked.

I've heard similar things from others in the EU. And all the love stories I hear are from the US.

Chargers are the other thing, I've gotten way more replacements than I should have, pretty much no questions asked. Both in and out of warranty as its a design failure not a case of normal wear and tear.

This can be down to the individual and their customer service 'ethics'. Having done helpdesk myself on a team I saw a few things going on - one colleague viewed all customers as idiots andwould push back/blame them in an authoritarian manner, another colleague wasn't actually that good at thinking off script so, although he would have liked to have gone the extra mile, he could not. Only a minority of the team empathised with the customer in a way where 'terms and conditions' were interpreted as needed. It all depends on who you get, what mood they are in and the time of day (5.25 p.m. and, with the office closing you aren't going to get a decent hearing).

It depends when. 4-5 years ago, Apple techs were great to work with. That started going downhill, probably after people scammed them out of too many phones.

Now you get this bizarre interrogation thing from them. You need to be really firm/aggressive or you'll be stuck there for an hour going through the various scenarios that you device has gotten wet. ("I am running late, get your GM and we can chat about why a failed iMac DIMM has nothing to do with water.")

"I would be interested to hear from the regulators what assumptions were necessary to justify the policy."

The article says this rule of law is from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty..., . So, its not some GS-13 level "regulators" who determined this law, but something that was voted on by a majority of both houses of Congress, and signed by the President of the United States.

If your interested in what assumptions were made, you can look up speeches of the supporting Senators, and other aspects of legislative history.

There are many ways one can mislead consumers in order to make more money. Governments typically try to combat this. In this case, by outlawing this particular lie.

So companies should be allowed to falsely advertise to lower prices? I don't follow the logic here.

>> "Warranty-void-if-removed stickers reduce the cost to the company of providing the warranty"

Yes and no, it's not black & white. I've personally repaired a lot of hardware myself and a lot of the hardware that's "voided" if opened gets returned by me instead of me fixing it myself.

While I can't speak for any random person opening hardware, if I break something trying to repair hardware, I accept responsibility for it.