I miss the good old days.

First company to do me a solid like that and I’ve stuck around since.

Had a mouse go bad 20 years back, called up support, they told me they’d send a new one. I was shocked, wondering what if I was lying and didn’t they want evidence?

They replied they took it on trust but I could cut off the usb plug and put it in the trash if it made me feel better (that is, of course, a very easy repair).

They paid for me to ship it to them, and then just sent me the next model up as a replacement as mine had been discontinued.

ATI was a great company back then.

Nowadays when I go to the Genius Bar I feel like I’m being cross examined so that they don’t have to replace anything. And the examiner doesn’t know the first thing about the computer but is just reading a script someone gave them. This is despite paying for the most expensive warranty.

I wanted to buy Apple Developer Program subscription. It wouldn’t let me add any of my credit cards, saw an option to add payment via UPI (Unified Payments Interface) in India. Added $99 to my Apple account and was still unable to pay for the membership. Spent around 7-8 hours speaking to customer support but no one had a clue what was wrong. I asked for a refund and was told money added to Apple account as credit can not be refunded.

I asked support and the dev for crypto and they banned me for soliciting third party payments.

I have been unable to find either an Indian dev for a small job or someone who can accept crypto.

Talk about fiverr support. Smh

Today you have to be careful when dealing with apple repair as they have been found to repeatedly engage in money grubbing tack ticks which border on fraud.

And that is ignoring the fact that in general they tend to not repair component but just replace whole components (because it easier) while hindering others from providing proper repairs (because money) even if it necessary for e.g. data recovery (because from their POV you are stupid if you don't auto-sync everything with the iCloud).

It's also ignoring the fact that apple had in the recent years repeatedly some very questionable design flaws (like strangely over sensitive power management chips, missing heat pipes and similar).

And ignoring that by soldering everything including the ssd on the main-board preventing on-main-board repairs a lot of damage from a problematic USB hub to a broken SSD will always lead to a whole main-board + ram + cpu + ssd + ... replacement which makes many repairs unreasonable expansive.

I dropped mine in water (pool if I recall) 2 times and had it replaced for free also (3G and 4 I think).

New Zealand has a great bit of legislation there.

"You have 2 or 5 years to make a complaint if you purchased from a professional vendor (Consumer Sales Act (in Norwegian)).

The statutory warranty period depends on how long the product is meant to last when subjected to normal use. Sofas and mobile phones are examples of products with a 5-year warranty period.

When buying from a private individual, the warranty period is 2 years (Sale of Goods Act (in Norwegian))."

You can't have been trying very hard. I have never had any problem.

It's a crazy amount of money. In 2017 that fund owned 1.38% of the global stocks. I heard at some point they had trouble because they couldn't use the money to build roads or whatever without affecting the global economy.

[0]: https://www.nbim.no/

To this day it is still the hottest piece of hardware I've ever owned. I swear you could cook on that card. It definitely didn't help that the fan died, and it melted itself into a broken state not long after I suppose.

All my contact with their customer support was stellar.

When I tried to get the 2070 replaced, they refused unless I paid full retail price for a defective card I had proof I'd returned.

I really regretted buying from them at that point, and wished I just had my original card back, which they couldn't provide.

I bought a B-Stock GTX 580 from them which was rendering artifacts iirc. A replacement 580 also rendered the same issue. The next replacement was a seemingly new GTX 960 which has worked without issue ever since. Having received a $200+ card for $80 + some hassle was a net positive experience in the end for me.

edit: This was in the US, FWIW.

How did you get that?

Here's their pricing and info -- https://eu.evga.com/warranty/extended/

People buying from scalpers is why scalpers can continue to exist. There's pretty much no way of stopping that, outside of making scalping illegal, then strictly enforce that. But, then, that pretty much kills the first-sale doctrine and I am not sure that is a good trade-off.

Registering for an extended warranty is a requirement that many companies enforce.

Update: Why is this being downvoted? Literally from EVGA's website: "Limited Lifetime Warranties are available to the original owner on applicable parts if registered by the original owner within 30 days of the date of purchase." [1] [1] https://www.evga.com/warranty/2011/graphics-cards/

As in, lifetime doesn't mean your lifetime. Or the time you own the card. It means whatever expected lifetime the item has as per the manufacturer. The manufacturer may define the "regular lifetime" of their item to be 3 years for example and then it would not have helped you at all.

I've never registered for any warranties in my life.

I'm not sure if this is a thing where you are. But where I am for example, there are warranties guaranteed by law that require manufacturers to warranty their items for a "reasonable" amount of time (regardless of what their actual terms say). What is reasonable is up to interpretation and different for different items. They do give a few examples for common items like a washing machine but otherwise it's up to consumers and companies to figure this out together and if they can't you can make an official complaint with the government. Helped me w/ NVIDIA who wouldn't replace a broken tablet shortly after their official warranty ran out.

EDIT: No idea on the downvotes, when I started replying there were no downvotes yet, when I submitted there was.

EVGA are particularly generous in this regard compared to others.

I wonder if anyone in a "reasonable lifetime" guaranteed by law jurisdiction has used that line of thinking.

What makes you say that?

Depending on who you ask, a reasonable lifetime for a phone is 2 to 6 years. But if I want to make my customers feel nice and secure I might offer a 10 year warranty, knowing that very few people will actually keep it that long.

I had an 6600GT which died. Over ~4 years, EVGA replaced it twice, the second replacement they gave me an upgrade (to a card one generation newer). Almost 10 years later, it still works.

So the manufacturer must honor the promised warranty, but they certainly have the option to offer an extended warranty at no charge provided that the consumer registers with them.

These cards won't be sold any time soon, they'll have been stolen for mining.

So it may not be immediately useful but can pay off down the road.

Once I started checking proactively I took delivery of a few hard drives that turned out to be "of questionable warranty period", again from various reputable distributors. I immediately had them replaced with no hassle.

I forget what eventually happened, but I never was able to play that stupid game and I only even bothered because it was "free".

If you are buying a new sealed video card, never used sold on craigslist/ebay, I'm guessing your not very suspicious and probably not looking for a warranty.

So you're essentially saying nobody is going to be looking for any warranties on any cards, which is quite wrong.

https://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/catalog/706b/Naytonohjaimet/... (in-stock cards)

https://www.jimms.fi/fi/Product/List/000-00P/komponentit--na... (cards sorted by stock)

It's not impossible. Central Computer, Silicon Valley's main chain of computer stores, has a buying office in Shenzhen. So a lot of stuff goes directly from factory to them. This avoids the detour through Alibaba to somebody's garage to Amazon.

Being amazon you have the easiest returns ever, just send a complaint and send it back, they will return the money and both shipping costs.