Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 22:47:54 +0100 From: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: New European Warranty Message-ID: <20020118224754.A804@tisys.org>
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Hi folks, the following has nothing to do with FreeBSD (that's why I post it to -chat), but I've been thinking about it a little recently, and that's why I thought I might bring it up here. As some of you may have noticed (especially European folks), a new law from the European Union took effect on January 1st that requires retailers to grant customers a two year warranty on products. Before this regulation took effect, warranty periods varied from country to country. In Germany, for example, retailers were required by law to give a six months warranty - if they wanted to go beyond that, they could do so at their own decision, probably even for an additional payment from the customer. Now, basically, this new 2 year warranty sounds good, as it means (in comparison to prior German law) that I do now have four times as much time during which I can get a product that failed exchanged. Unluckily, I have read (and noticed myself) that some retailers and manufacturers raised the prices of their products in order to cover the increased chance of warranty claims from customers. So I may have to pay more and never benefit from this new regulation, and that's the point! In the computing field, I have made the following observations: If you buy a mainboard, CPU, graphics card or whatever, it is likely that it would fail *very early* if there is actually some manuafcturing defect. In this case, it would very likely fail within the first six months, so the old warranty regulation would be enough. If an item doesn't fail "early", it is unlikely that it will fail in the years to come, i.e. the two years that this new warranty covers. I guess that after *many* years, probably 10 or more, a mainboard, CPU or graphics card would naturally fail, as the failure rate increases at such age. In other words: The failure rate for such devices is somewhat high in the beginning, then gets low for a lot years, and as the device really becomes old, the failure rate increases again. Basically, under these viewpoints the two years warranty is useless. There are some devices that fail more often than a CPU, for example hard disk drives. However, I know that manufaturers have generally given a somewhat extended warranty on these - 3 years is common for Western Digital drives, for example. In the end, what I've been wondering about is this: What's the good thing about this new warranty regulation? The folks that made it up probably wanted to protect the customers, but realistically, if I have to pay a higher price on about *every* item I buy and only benefit from the extended warranty in 1% of the cases or so, doesn't it do more bad than good? Comments are welcome ;-) Greetings Nils -- Nils Holland Ti Systems - FreeBSD in Tiddische, Germany http://www.tisys.org * nils@tisys.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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