Dell pushed a bios update that silently turned my expensive laptop into a machine that could not be used as a laptop because when I did, ie, closed the lid without shutting it down and put it in my bag it fried the mobo and subsequently would not boot.
Out of warranty (just) no way to ask Dell anything about it.
Dell are horrible. I hate them. The price has to be insanely cheap for Dell not to be just a plain old ripoff at the best of times. Actual lies, like detailed here should not surprise anyone.
The amount of research that needs to be done to purchase even the most basic stuff online is beyond paralyzing. I hate shopping irl but I think I hate online shopping even more.
This is how places like Costco can be worthwhile even if they aren't technically the best possible deal - I trust that if I buy something there I won't be terribly disappointed or overtly screwed over even if I end up paying a bit more than I absolutely had to.
I would never have imagined there was any other policy in retail, at least for big-ticket items like TVs and appliances. Why should the retailer ever eat the returns?
Because Costco takes returns way past the manufacturer's warranty/return period.
So if random brand X wants to keep selling those toilets at Costco, they will sometimes get a deduction from their invoice because a curmudgeon brought in a ten year old toilet that broke.
(Costco had to change this policy on computers and TVs because word got out and people began abusing the policy so much the vendors revolted.)
That explains why some products are there for a limited-time only. Maybe they were shit or simply had a bad experience at Costco (due to bad faith customers) and decide to stop selling there.
Yup, and if it does end up being shit. They take it back no questions asked. Afaik, this may not always apply since people have been known to abuse the policies. You still hear of people returning dirty mattresses years later on reddit though...
You also don’t have to deal with the sketchy mess of commingling. Every time I think of buying from Amazon, I’ll force myself to see if there are 3rd party sellers for the product using Amazon warehouses. If there are, I buy elsewhere regardless of the price difference and shipping speed. Walmart is no better because they also commingle.
Eventually, I’ll just say F it and get rid of Prime. Two day shipping is gone for a lot of items anyways. 5 days of wait is better than constance vigilance to prevent getting garbage from 3rd party sellers
Does anyone remember killerapp.com? It had parametric search for tech products along the dimensions you actually cared about, and then a ranking of sellers by total price, including shipping and any applicable tax. Exactly what you wanted.
Compare today: we have major retailers demanding exclusive SKUs to prevent apples-to-apples comparisons, and it doesn't matter anyway because most people are Amazon Prime members and don't really bother shopping around.
Even if you can get an accurate matrix of models, you then discover that the metric in question is horribly gamed. TDP is now effectively useless because both Intel and AMD lie in their own ways. "55 inch class" screens. "QLED" hoping to trick consumers vs OLED.
I'm surprised this became a fine, since I thought that most people who've seen enough shady tricks like this have already been trained never to look at the "original" or "pre discount" prices, only the actual current price.
You are assuming that people see through this, but they don't. Furthermore, from my observations, I can tell you they are people who _like_ these kind of tricks. They kid themselves they got such a massive discount, feel happy about it and sometimes even think "Oooh I got $1000 discount, maybe I can treat myself and buy something else with that "saved" money?"
Their mental accounting tells them they suddenly have a windfall that they can spend frivolously on something.
> A Dell spokesperson told Ars Technica today that Dell is also paying customers interest and "taking steps to improve our pricing processes to ensure this sort of error does not happen again."
I won’t buy Dell gear again, at home or at work. I bought my kid a monitor for his gaming PC from Amazon. It was advertised as brand new. Dell shipped it in a brand new, undamaged, unopened box. Its HDMI port failed a couple of months later but with many months of warranty left. Then Dell denied a warranty claim because their inventory system had it listed as having been previously registered to someone else. I tried to escalate the claim but they refused it all the way to the top. Amazon was helpful: they let me swap for another brand and just pay the difference.
In before “how do we believe you?” I wrote this all up in a blog post, under my real name, with backing details. If I’m lying, Dell can sue me for defamation.
A Dell corporate sales person contacted me at work to talk about setting up a work account. It felt sooo good to send them a link to my blog post and explain that Dell was dead to me. I didn’t hear back.
Nordstrom was famous for refunding the money for things obviously not bought at the store, for example, tires, and clearly worn out shoes. (As told to me by a former sales clerk at Nordies.)
But too many people tried to make a living out of scamming Nordstrom's patient indulgence of this, and they changed their policy.
The tire story was the result of Nordstrom's absorbing a local department store chain in Alaska. They weren't just taking in a product Nordstroms doesn't stock.
The dumb version of the story was good PR at first and was disseminated among the staff but contributed to unreasonable customer expectations.
Not to defend Dell, because they don't deserve it and should have stood by their product, but it's possibly true that the monitor was used, and not their fault that it was. 'Sold by Amazon' products are AFAIK commingled with the same product from other sellers that are Fulfilled By Amazon.
If it wasn't purchased from an authorized Dell retailer then Dell really has nothing to do with it. With the way 3rd party Amazon Marketplace sales works, who knows what happened here.
The monitor is within the warranty period and failed. Dell didn't deal with their warranty issue in an honest and direct way. They suck. No other details matter. The end.
No, companies warranties start to expire from the point of original sale not whenever you happened to get it. What you’re complaining about is no different than expecting a used car to still have the original manufacturer’s warranty, that just not how warranties work.
The real moral of this story is to never buy electronics from Amazon. Amazon sold you a fraudulent product and you’re blaming Dell for Amazon’s failures.
I strongly doubt the warranty period expired from first sale. I strongly doubt there was a previous sale. More likely Dell screwed up their warranty database. But sure, Amazon suck very hard. Dell are at least as bad. Who do you talk to /when/ they make a mistake in their favour.
Much easier to tell people to f.off when they're not standing in front of you in your shop holding the crap goods. Amazon and Dell both push that with suppliers & customers.
> More likely Dell screwed up their warranty database
Amazon is well known for this exact kind of issue due to intentionally commingling products they frequently can’t separate returns from new products. It’s so bad everyone I know well that shops at Amazon has run into obviously used Amazon items sold as new, but not for any single brand.
Dell messing up their completely automated warranty database on the other hand requires an extraordinary series of events.
There’s no way Dell is more likely to be the culprit.
I think your prior about the probability "dell messing up" needs some adjusting based on experience there.
If Amazon are crapping on dell's brand that is 100% Dell's problem to solve. As soon as they see the receipt they should honor the warranty fully and then go hard on Amazon because they look bad. But they do not care at all about their customers seems to be a common conclusion based on experience. Whether amazon suck does not make dell's conduct any more acceptable.
Dell are known for their total contempt of their customers.
Yup the only option they have is to treat customers like dung and aren't they committed to it? It's impressive. No other possible legal choice.
That's a new one you're not a customer because middleman so can be no issue with warranty ever. Dell's PR would love it if they cared, which they clearly don't because why bother.
As to PR, you should buy a 500$ used car and then take it to the manufacturer I am sure they would be happy to make warranty repairs because that’s just great PR for them…
"expired" meaning Dell arbitrarily decided that they didn't want to honor their warranty because of course they didn't. Bought as new but so what? Resale doesn't magically make their products any more or less crap.
If Amazon committed fraud here, Dell are the victims and can deal with it. But Dell have a reputation and it is deserved. Ring them up sometime to discuss it with them, go on, try talking to them about anything.
Why are you sticking up for a bazillion dollar company behaving badly?
FWIW, it could be an Amazons fault. Someone bought the monitor, used it, decided they didn't want it and returned it. The seller looked at it, decided it looked good enough, and put it back in his inventory at Amazon as new.
You'd have no way of knowing. People used to (maybe still do?) buy expensive graphic cards, take them out and put back a cheap one with a flashed ROM. Then shrink-wrap the box again and return it.
You wouldn't blame the manufacturer in that case. I never buy expensive things from Amazon because you can never trust what you're going to get, especially with inventory comingling.
If you bought directly from the Dell website, I'd share more of your anger. I also dislike Dell in general though, so I wouldn't buy their stuff anyway.
Or, potentially, of any other computer hardware reseller. I’m surprised OP is mad at Dell, typically you’d expect the reseller to handle such an issue. Amazon allowing to replace it isn’t doing anything extraordinary here.
Amazon has a return window. After that, they tell you to take it up with the manufacturer. When Dell refused to honor their warranty, Amazon covered it even though it was outside their window.
> “…it could be an Amazons fault. Someone bought the monitor, used it, decided they didn't want it and returned it.”
While this may be true, it’s Dell’s lost opportunity to honor their product warranty in a generous way. Obviously it’s turned this customer into a permanent antagonist.
What’s more, the product Dell has in their warehouse should cost Dell less than the advertising, or marketing costs to get new customers.
In Australian, a local government competition body regularly pursues this sort of fake-ass pricing. They are a great laugh once they a fined, but it is not so funny before. Here is one that is as ridiculous as the Black-Friday fake deals.
edit, here is the gist:
In July 2020, the Court found that Kogan had misled consumers by advertising over a period of four days that they could use the code ‘TAXTIME’ to reduce prices by 10 per cent at checkout, when Kogan had increased the prices of 621 products immediately before the promotion.
In most cases, the prices of these products had been increased by at least 10 per cent. Kogan then decreased those prices soon after the promotion ended, many back to their pre-promotion prices.
I just assumed retailers do this constantly and buyer beware. Is this not standard behavior? MSRP is so often completely made up with frequent arbitrary sales. Curious what law this is breaking.
In Australia there are certain requirements on how long a product must be at a price before you can advertise it as discounted, and say things like "save 50%".
This is to prevent this exact practice where a store either lies and slaps a discount sticker on it without any discount to mislead a consumer, or from them putting up the price for 24 hours and then discounting it.
There is no exact length of time, the law says "reasonable". So it'd be up to a court to decide.
Probably the worst purchase I made. The one saving grace is that SupportAssist actually works, and does make post-crash/post-windows-death recovery very simple and easy.
But that's the thing. I can tell that they put effort into this OS recovery tool, explicitly because this Laptop is a disaster of a product. Temperatures? Burning. Fans? Locked down. Freezing? Constantly. Crashing? Commonly. Blue screens? Less common now, but used to be frequent.
Just had to do another OS recovery yesterday. But hey, it breaks constantly like a Russian Lada, and can be "fixed" relatively quickly and easily.
DELL uses pricing based on some unknowable calculus based on competitor products. So they show their monitor as a "sale" relative to competitor XYZ's monitor.
Reality is that the product is just cheaper and worse than the competitor.
This computer was purchased based on one of these "sales". In terms of raw performance, it seemed like a decent deal. It was not. The issue isn't just their monitors, so I am a bit confused as to why this fine singles out monitors.
I don't like Dell as a company, but I've owned XPS laptops for years and haven't been able to find something I like better. The only real problem I have with it seems to be a Windows problem that other laptops also have (modern standby). My other complaint was with Waves MaxxAudio, but it hasn't bothered me on my latest XPS the way it did on the older ones. Not sure if that problem is fixed or if I just got in some sort of lucky configuration that made it go away.
I actually get around modern standby by simply replacing sleep with hibernate on everything. It takes longer to start up, but at least the PC isn't burning hot, or wasting battery.
Waves is... incredibly annoying. Could be worse I suppose, but I wish it wasn't a thing. The computer will randomly shut off the audio jack so it makes audio issues even harder to diagnose. The number of times where I was monkeying around trying to figure out what was causing it. Ugh.
I find that it usually involves 3 steps. The audio\mic quality downgrades, then entirely shuts off the mic, then shuts off audio.
I have a Inspirion(?) G7 7790. It's an old machine by today's standards, but it has had many problems from the start.
I remember the boot roulette with my XPS. The laptop randomly just wouldn't turn on. I learned that biggest chance for it to turn on was to disconnect power, plug it back in and quickly press the power button and hold.
Sometimes it took half an hour of this dance.
Eventually it stopped turning on.
The "good" thing was that when this happened I bought a cheap post lease Thinkpad and just put my XPS's nvme in. I could resume work straight away it just worked.
I paid £100 for that Thinkpad and it was miles better than then flagship XPS.
That being said, I decided to take a plunge and bought M1 Max. This think is next level and smokes any laptops I had before.
But Dell in comparison is just complete junk and that company should be banned from making laptops.
My last attempt to switch back to non-Apple laptops was a fully loaded XPS 15 right around the time I wasn't willing to commit to an M1. I was excited to get back to a dedicated GPU and the vapor chamber cooling design allegedly worked very well and the screen was supposed to be better than Apple's. I'd definitely put it up there with the worst purchases I've made. As you mentioned, the vapor chamber does nothing. Even at idle the laptop was HOT. For some reason the combination of Microsoft / OEMs still cannot make a laptop which just sleeps when you close the lid. Throw the laptop in a bag and when you get to your destination and the laptop is literally too hot to touch because it's been doing something in there the entire time despite being closed. That fantastic screen was also completely ruined by Windows / Dell drivers and software. Dark scenes, which HDR is supposed to excel at instead were crushed down to muddled greys with heavy banding. That's not a laptop I would have kept if it cost me $500, never mind close to $4k.
Just to point out: this amounts to a little over $1200 (US) per sold monitor. And Dell was ordered to provide affected customers full or partial reimbursement on top of this.
Another Dell tomfoolery: their laptops advertised with 100w usb-c charging actually does only 60w charging, unless you buy Dell's superduper usb-c charger. Regardless if you have usb p.d 3.0 or higher.
Fines should be at least 100% of _revenue_ from these activities to actually punish the business. At the very least 100% of _profit_ from the activity. Anything less is cost of doing business since it's by definition a net profit.
70 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadOut of warranty (just) no way to ask Dell anything about it.
Dell are horrible. I hate them. The price has to be insanely cheap for Dell not to be just a plain old ripoff at the best of times. Actual lies, like detailed here should not surprise anyone.
We have some very strong consumer laws especially around deceptive pricing and expectations of the life of appliances
So vendors won't ship them shit, because they know they'll eat the returns.
I'm sure they do additional curation on top of that, but making them stand behind the product probably gets 80% of the way there.
So if random brand X wants to keep selling those toilets at Costco, they will sometimes get a deduction from their invoice because a curmudgeon brought in a ten year old toilet that broke.
(Costco had to change this policy on computers and TVs because word got out and people began abusing the policy so much the vendors revolted.)
Costco op.
Eventually, I’ll just say F it and get rid of Prime. Two day shipping is gone for a lot of items anyways. 5 days of wait is better than constance vigilance to prevent getting garbage from 3rd party sellers
Compare today: we have major retailers demanding exclusive SKUs to prevent apples-to-apples comparisons, and it doesn't matter anyway because most people are Amazon Prime members and don't really bother shopping around.
Sounds like my 9 year old "It was an accident!!"
In before “how do we believe you?” I wrote this all up in a blog post, under my real name, with backing details. If I’m lying, Dell can sue me for defamation.
A Dell corporate sales person contacted me at work to talk about setting up a work account. It felt sooo good to send them a link to my blog post and explain that Dell was dead to me. I didn’t hear back.
A company trying to weasel out of its warranty obligations is hardly something I'd cast doubt on anymore (unfortunately).
But too many people tried to make a living out of scamming Nordstrom's patient indulgence of this, and they changed their policy.
Warranty fraud is a major problem.
The dumb version of the story was good PR at first and was disseminated among the staff but contributed to unreasonable customer expectations.
The monitor is within the warranty period and failed. Dell didn't deal with their warranty issue in an honest and direct way. They suck. No other details matter. The end.
The real moral of this story is to never buy electronics from Amazon. Amazon sold you a fraudulent product and you’re blaming Dell for Amazon’s failures.
Much easier to tell people to f.off when they're not standing in front of you in your shop holding the crap goods. Amazon and Dell both push that with suppliers & customers.
Amazon is well known for this exact kind of issue due to intentionally commingling products they frequently can’t separate returns from new products. It’s so bad everyone I know well that shops at Amazon has run into obviously used Amazon items sold as new, but not for any single brand.
Dell messing up their completely automated warranty database on the other hand requires an extraordinary series of events.
There’s no way Dell is more likely to be the culprit.
If Amazon are crapping on dell's brand that is 100% Dell's problem to solve. As soon as they see the receipt they should honor the warranty fully and then go hard on Amazon because they look bad. But they do not care at all about their customers seems to be a common conclusion based on experience. Whether amazon suck does not make dell's conduct any more acceptable.
Dell are known for their total contempt of their customers.
Not honoring the warranty is they only defense here as it forces Amazon to fix the issue or risk being charged with fraud.
That's a new one you're not a customer because middleman so can be no issue with warranty ever. Dell's PR would love it if they cared, which they clearly don't because why bother.
Not an option.
As to PR, you should buy a 500$ used car and then take it to the manufacturer I am sure they would be happy to make warranty repairs because that’s just great PR for them…
If Amazon committed fraud here, Dell are the victims and can deal with it. But Dell have a reputation and it is deserved. Ring them up sometime to discuss it with them, go on, try talking to them about anything.
Why are you sticking up for a bazillion dollar company behaving badly?
You'd have no way of knowing. People used to (maybe still do?) buy expensive graphic cards, take them out and put back a cheap one with a flashed ROM. Then shrink-wrap the box again and return it.
You wouldn't blame the manufacturer in that case. I never buy expensive things from Amazon because you can never trust what you're going to get, especially with inventory comingling.
If you bought directly from the Dell website, I'd share more of your anger. I also dislike Dell in general though, so I wouldn't buy their stuff anyway.
While this may be true, it’s Dell’s lost opportunity to honor their product warranty in a generous way. Obviously it’s turned this customer into a permanent antagonist.
What’s more, the product Dell has in their warehouse should cost Dell less than the advertising, or marketing costs to get new customers.
edit, here is the gist:
In July 2020, the Court found that Kogan had misled consumers by advertising over a period of four days that they could use the code ‘TAXTIME’ to reduce prices by 10 per cent at checkout, when Kogan had increased the prices of 621 products immediately before the promotion.
In most cases, the prices of these products had been increased by at least 10 per cent. Kogan then decreased those prices soon after the promotion ended, many back to their pre-promotion prices.
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/kogan-to-pay-350000-fo....
This is to prevent this exact practice where a store either lies and slaps a discount sticker on it without any discount to mislead a consumer, or from them putting up the price for 24 hours and then discounting it.
There is no exact length of time, the law says "reasonable". So it'd be up to a court to decide.
You can learn more here https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/pricing/price-displays
Probably the worst purchase I made. The one saving grace is that SupportAssist actually works, and does make post-crash/post-windows-death recovery very simple and easy.
But that's the thing. I can tell that they put effort into this OS recovery tool, explicitly because this Laptop is a disaster of a product. Temperatures? Burning. Fans? Locked down. Freezing? Constantly. Crashing? Commonly. Blue screens? Less common now, but used to be frequent.
Just had to do another OS recovery yesterday. But hey, it breaks constantly like a Russian Lada, and can be "fixed" relatively quickly and easily.
Reality is that the product is just cheaper and worse than the competitor.
This computer was purchased based on one of these "sales". In terms of raw performance, it seemed like a decent deal. It was not. The issue isn't just their monitors, so I am a bit confused as to why this fine singles out monitors.
Waves is... incredibly annoying. Could be worse I suppose, but I wish it wasn't a thing. The computer will randomly shut off the audio jack so it makes audio issues even harder to diagnose. The number of times where I was monkeying around trying to figure out what was causing it. Ugh.
I find that it usually involves 3 steps. The audio\mic quality downgrades, then entirely shuts off the mic, then shuts off audio.
I have a Inspirion(?) G7 7790. It's an old machine by today's standards, but it has had many problems from the start.
The "good" thing was that when this happened I bought a cheap post lease Thinkpad and just put my XPS's nvme in. I could resume work straight away it just worked.
I paid £100 for that Thinkpad and it was miles better than then flagship XPS.
That being said, I decided to take a plunge and bought M1 Max. This think is next level and smokes any laptops I had before.
But Dell in comparison is just complete junk and that company should be banned from making laptops.
So definitely a costly affair.