Why car manufacturers are better than laptop manufacturers

    This is the story and conclusions about the small responsibility of computer equipment vendors in detecting a system defect in their products, on a real example asus ux32vd laptop

    Preamble



    I am sure that every% username% knows about such a wonderful practice of car manufacturers as stopping sales and recalling a particular car model due to a detected defect in the entire batch. You don’t need to go far for an example, a simple search query like “ recalling cars due to a defect ” will give us such a result.

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    And if you look closely, it is unlikely that you will find a car manufacturer who did not have such a case.

    I believe that this is extremely bold, mature and responsible behavior of the manufacturer, because every time they receive serious reputation damage for the sake of safety and satisfaction of those customers who received a defective product.

    Let's see what happens when model defects are detected in computer equipment, for example, you can search for press releases of large vendors. I was surprised to find that such cases are extremely rare and not all vendors have,

    Here Sony recalls a batch of Vaio laptops due to overheating and burns of customers or Toshiba recalls laptops due to a defect in Intel chipsets

    If you look closely, such news is extremely rare and similar practice not all vendors have it.



    My case



    In October 2012, I decided to purchase an "ultrabook" so that it was light, thin and as powerful as possible. The obvious choice is to take air from the apple, but the products of this company are not close to me, and their performance characteristics are far from the most peppy.

    The choice fell on the asus ux32vd flagship ultra beech, which was just entering the market, due to the excellent hardware description and advanced features, such as quick hibernation from Intel Rapid Storage to the SSD dedicated to this business, the presence of a discrete and really powerful nVidia 620M graphics card with 1Gb and so on.

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    After reading all the available reviews at that time, I did not find much negativity, took $ 1,500 and went shopping. There was no limit to joy, it worked incredibly fast, I checked the battlefield - it flies, it goes into hibernation in a couple of seconds, it holds the battery, it delivers 13.3 "FullHD. It’s a little hot with heavy use, but in Siberia this is not a problem for 9 months a year.

    The laptop worked for a week and died, of course, both screws (SDD + HDD) didn’t fly away, and as it turned out, the SSD is completely, the HDD is at the level of logical errors. Of course, this was not a good turn of events and I returned ux32vd to the store money.

    Searching for a replacement from other manufacturers, I did not find anything worthwhile and could no longer agree to the absence of fullHD, i7 and a sluggish graphics adapter from my competitors, I decided to wait a bit and left for the winter in Thailand. There already, I decided to try again, the same model, are there many chances to get a defective thing twice? Googled again, there were a couple of similar cases, but nothing systemic. Ordered 1: 1 the same in the US, but only the latest revision, and even with Win8 on board. Delivered by the way from LA to Koh Samui in 4 days.

    A couple of months passed and problems started, Intel Rapid Storage refused, refused to go into hibernation, loading the OS and shutting down was equated to criminal - from 3 to 5 minutes for each operation (as it turned out, due to an attempt to poll the SSD and the lack of an answer). And soon, the SSD is dying again, for good. Here, as they say, it “dawned on” that the fool himself, that the model is raw and defective. Through repeated googling, I found hundreds (I think there are thousands) of 1: 1 reviews and symptoms of this model that appeared in the last month, practically saying - buying this ultrabook you are very likely to encounter the fact that the SSD will die.

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    What does asus do?



    Asus, like many other manufacturers, continues to sell and observes an avalanche-like return of the model, but does not stop sales. With any treatment, asus offers to send the defective ultrabook to the service center at its own expense (in US) and promises to replace the motherboard within 2-4 weeks (ssd is “wired” in it) and return the product back. Ingenious!

    I definitely do not understand for what reason, asus does not like its customers so much and shifts the logistics problems of defective goods (which is $ 100-200 in a particular case) to their factory to replace the motherboard. Although, after all, it is much cheaper than recalling the entire batch at the expense of the manufacturer, stopping sales and yes, as an adult, suffer well-deserved, mind you, reputation losses.

    The funny thing is that even US asus support recognizes a defect in their off-chat, and the support employee agrees that his employer, to put it mildly, is not good and not ethical. Below is the proof of the chat room without the name of the employee (he is not to blame).

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    Conclusion



    Now a lot of words are being said about how the IT industry sets the standards of management, marketing, quality of support, customer focus, etc. Well, I have to admit that so far this is far.

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