Asymmetrical Information

Approaching the situation as an engineering problem, one interesting solution I can come up with is "have 2 identical laptops". How ridiculous is that? Well, I dunno. Quite conceivably, 2 no-name laptops might cost less than one comparable major brand product (I bought a quite passable Acer laptop for $400 couple months ago, no-names might go cheaper than that). Of course it WOULD help to be able to upgrade RAM or HDD yourself, perhaps on advice of a knowledgeable friend... Overall, I don't think that going with a major brand gives you anywhere near as much as the plain redundancy (2nd box) would, but I didn't do the apples-to-apples cost comparison.

components fail, especially (weirdly) when they're new.

This is known as "infant mortality". A certain number of items -- hopefully a very small number, provided your design is good, your suppliers are doing their job, and your manufacturing processes are up to par -- will inevitably have a short-term failure mechanism of some sort. After a brief period of use, the failure occurs.

In our imperfect world, the ideal result is a small cluster of failures within the first n months of service, extremely few failures during the expected service life, followed by a gradually increasing cluster of failures as you get deeper into the territory of the normal wear-and-tear failure modes.

Also, you have learned the hard way that Sony Is Evil(tm). Use it wisely...

components fail, especially (weirdly) when they're new.

This is known as "infant mortality". A certain number of items -- hopefully a very small number, provided your design is good, your suppliers are doing their job, and your manufacturing processes are up to par -- will inevitably have a short-term failure mechanism of some sort. After a brief period of use, the failure occurs.

In our imperfect world, the ideal result is a small cluster of failures within the first n months of service, extremely few failures during the expected service life, followed by a gradually increasing cluster of failures as you get deeper into the territory of the normal wear-and-tear failure modes.

Also, you have learned the hard way that Sony Is Evil(tm). Use it wisely...

call me crazy here sandy, but wasn't onsite repair a least an option in your warranty? Because you may just want to check that [if you haven't already, of course...]

and?

It seems that customer service only rises to the highest level of pain you can stand... which is why you may spend 4 hours talking to Bangalore, before they will ship you something that comes from an office only 2 miles away from your own...

which is why after working all day as IT geek in a large corporation, I go home to a house with a neo-luddite's take on tech... a TV, DVD player, ancient stereo, and a coffee maker what works. Oh, yeah, lights... I have lights. [CFL's even ;) ]

As far as I know, there is no such place as "Clarendon, Virginia". There is the Clarendon neighborhood in Arlingon, VA. There is no such postal address called Clarendon, VA.

"In our imperfect world, the ideal result is a small cluster of failures within the first n months of service, extremely few failures during the expected service life, followed by a gradually increasing cluster of failures as you get deeper into the territory of the normal wear-and-tear failure modes."

Right. This is also why extended warranties are so profitable for sellers and usually a bad deal for buyers; they cover the time period where failure is least likely.

Cain is correct, according to my postal database there is no such city as Clarendon, VA for the purposes of addressing mail. My initial thought was they reversed your city from your zip and it happened to be different from the city you're told you live in (happens in Greater Denver all the time) but that's right out the window so, uhhhh, yeah I guess they're just wildly incompetent. No big shock, I guess, it is Sony after all...

I seem to remember a few people suggesting Thinkpads, which come with fantastic warranty service.

Tsk.

It's this sort of experience that leads to the usually vulgar, frequently incoherent comments found on many tech-support-related blogs (ie, 'u suk', 'sony rulz', and the like).

The worst part of this is that a laptop hard drive is an end-user-replaceable part. They could have just shipped you the hard drive. I probably would have just up and bought one (laptop hard drives aren't that expensive, and it would have saved you 5 weeks of agita).

I don't know why this is becoming the norm rather than the exception. The way companies handle customers and hardware failures these days - it can't be saving them that much money. Especially for the level of irritation customers have. There is no such thing as brand loyalty anymore because companies just can't get it together and train their support staff properly.

http://snarkolepsy.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-alienware-wastes-my-time-and-money.html

Someone needs to do a serious economic study of why customer service is so bad.

As someone mentioned, A Laptop's HD is one of the few things that's usually user-replaceable. You can get one for around a 100 dollars and "pressure" a geek-friend into installing it for you.

I generally avoid consumer service if I can. If there is something that I can do without asking them, I usually just go and do it.

> I don't know why this is becoming the norm rather than the exception

I have a strong suspicion though: the hi-tech hardware has gotten EXTREMELY cheap recently. Analyzing computer price changes over time is hard since the turnover of the products and technologies is very high but my gut feel is that if we compare today's prices with what they were, say, 5-6 years back we'll see that today's hardware with the same relative standing is at least 2x cheaper. Low end desktops at $200 or less or laptops of $400 or less were unheard of. Ditto the high end: $1K for a box with 3 drives in RAID-5, 4x the reasonable minimum RAM and high end-ish dual[-core] CPU? $2.5K is what I seem to remember...

That electronics is getting cheaper is no news; however the recent price drop feels out of the ordinary to me (and I've been buying and building PCs for the last what... 15-odd years?) The costs have got to be slashed somewhere.

so... on the other claw, as has already been said, Megan, how do you feel about doing your own repair? Sounded like from your story that you wouldn't have had a problem re-installing the OS [which is actually the hard part]...
so, do tell, is the machine under warranty [I had assumed so] that won't let you do your own drive...

and do you feel like stickin' it to TheMan and fixin' it yourself?

My Dell story:

I live in Boston but I was in Cali on business and "brick" / AC adapter to my laptop died. I called Dell - Bangalore - Thurdsay afternoon and explained my problem. They said all was under warranty and they would send me a new "brick" ASAPx (yes well see how long this takes).

Well, I take the redeye home Thursday night and get to my place back in Boston at 8:30am Friday. At 9:30am the doorbell rings - it's the Fedex guy with my new "brick".

I swear to God - if Michael Dell had personally gone to the warehouse, got the part, hoped in his jet and flew to Boston - I really couldn't have got it any faster.

I was very impressed

You'd think that Sony's help staff would at least be smart enough to Google the name of the customer...

Mechanisms tend to fail according to two intersecting functions. The one we usually think of, 'old age', is due to components wearing out. Brake shoes, running shoes. Wooden pencils. Hot air popcorn poppers. The longer the device is in use, the more wear. The pencil lead is consumed by paper, the heating element oxidizes, parts rub against each other or another surface, and are worn away. Eventually the wear causes something to break or wedge or otherwise stop working.

The 'used up' curve starts off near zero failures for a time, then grows larger until everything in the manufacturing batch has failed, hopefully years down the road.

The other function is the 'infant mortality' curve. When you make things, including the individual layers, transistors, diodes, and connectors that make up an integrated circuit, you are going to have a few things that are made incorrectly. An area is too wide, too narrow, runs hot, etc. But not broken enough that the part fails the quality check. It even works correctly or nearly correctly for a while. But the broken area overheats, or arcs, and the circuit fails. Most manufacturing errors like this fail quickly, which is why the curve for infant failures starts high, and dwindles off fairly soon. Most mis-shaped areas will either fail soon, or continue working just fine. If the lead in the pencils fall out, you figure that out right away.

Is it too late to just return the Sony for a full refund (it was defective, after all) and go and buy a Dell? (Informing Sony that this is what you are doing because of their poor customer service?)

Wow, that's awful. I can understand the need to cut tech support costs but this sort of random shuffling around doesn't seem like it saves anyone any money. Instead of one tech support call and one postpaid shipping box Sony has had to pay for multiples of each. Plus they have an unhappy customer, an unfavorable search result, and a laptop that's still not working.

I sometimes end up feeling sorry for the foreign techs. I often get the impression that they're sincerely trying to help, but they usually don't know any more than I do. And, as you say, they have no authority to actually do anything that's not on their script. It must be a frustrating job.

I got a bit of a lemon from dell. Luckily for me, I also got a 3 year warranty.

2 new motherboards, new keyboard, new screen, new touchpad. Multiple power bricks.

But yeah, they send out dudes to my house to fix it every time. They've really been great, in the service respect. Wish they had built a decent computer a bit more, but oh well.

It was widely reported recently when Michael Dell let slip exactly how much his company was being paid to stuff consumer desktops and laptops with all the trial offers and expireware. IIRC, it was on the order of $65 per unit. Some estimates are that this is the entire profit margin on their machines. So Dell gives you a machine at cost, as do most of the other manufacturers.

Face it, except for high-end or niche machines, PCs are commodities like razorblades - and just about as disposable.

Would it be cruel to say, "You should have gotten a Mac?"

My iMac failed a month in, but they sent an onsite tech guy to fix it. Now if I could only blame the coffee I spilled on my 3 week old Powerbook as a "technical problem" that would work under the warranty...

> Some estimates are that this is the entire profit margin on their machines.

So the software on Dell's machine actually has negative cost basis? And when you boot your new Dell off a Linux Live CD and wipe out the hard drive you do what to your taxes... and theirs... never mind :)

Dell's not always better. They're not even always that good; we had the "guaranteed next day on site" service once, and spent two months trying to get them to fix a computer. We eventually gave up...

Would it be cruel to say, "You should have gotten a Mac?"

Yes, probably. :p

I don't necessarily blame Sony for a hard drive failure -- though I don't entirely excuse them, either, depending on what type of drive they opted to use in their systems -- but my luck with Sony products over the past five years has been very negative, whether audio, video, or computer, and their service has been terrible each time.

Ultimately, I don't think Sony is the company they were 20 years ago. If the price premium for Sony products was ever justified, it's not now; the quality of their products isn't exceptionally good today. If anything, it's a little below average.

From very bad experience, I've found that Sony's 'service' in computers really sucks, big time! You have to pay a premium on top of the hardware, because of their high-profile name.

Whatever you all do, don't buy anything from Best Buy that is in their name. I bought a large drive (two 100 GB harddrives) back in 2002. When I had to take it in a few weeks later...they 'forgot' to put in the second hard drive! Many, many high tech bad stories.

I'm sure we can come up with many horror stories in all different makes and models.

I agree that Sony's service is... below average. My ne laptop wouldn't boot. I got my box first try, and got the laptop to San Diego (San Diego? One place in the whole freakin' country that can fix a laptop) and got it back (fixed) eight days later. They did offer me in-home service for $175 (for a computer that was under a month old). In addition, the returned computer contained a false message that they had replaced the broadband wi-fi card. But my story is several orders of magnitude better than yours

OTOH, I had superb service about 8 months ago from Sony on a

Started getting weird errors. Followed the online troubleshooting and determined it was hardware-related for sure.

Sent an email, got a response with clear instructions and a tracking number to use. Boxed the camera up, sent it Priority from Chicago to Massachusetts, and resolved to wait 6 weeks or something.

In less than a week, it was back in my hands, repaired flawlessly with a new sensor, run through numerous tests with supporting paperwork, and even cleaned of all the smudges and dirt that had been on it.

I was astonished.

That was strange. First paragraph of that comment got eaten, even though it was fine on "preview."

Should be:

OTOH, I had superb service about 8 months ago from Sony on a

$200 Cybershot camera. Boy, that ain't my mistake.

My experience with Apple has been pretty good -- as long as you're not living in a developing nation. I called them on Monday, the box arrived on Tuesday (morning). I shipped it on Tuesday afternoon and it came back on Thursday.

One other point about just buying the hard drive yourself. If/when sony sent you a replacement laptop you could put it in an external case and have small external hard drive to image your system on, so if your hard drive ever failed again you could just swap the external drive.

ech - No frigging way are they selling the machine at cost. I can build a machine in the mid to high-end market(The low-end gets tricky, and won't be as far ahead) at about 50% better than what you can buy off of dell for pretty damn close to the same cost just pulling parts from Newegg, not even shopping around a bit. It takes maybe an hour, max two to fully assemble a machine, and the majority of that time is installing the OS and stuff, which can be simultaneously done on multiple machines. If 1/3 or greater(given that they buy stuff in bulk) of their costs is in operations, they seriously need to get their act together.

Most all pc's except Apple are built to break.

At my location, 600 + pc's, half of them Macs, easily 6 to 1 service calls on the Dells. Good service for sure, but every other week?

Most all pc's except Apple are built to break.

Apple has the advantage of selling a very narrow range of middle/high-end machines for a tidy sum of money, and maintaining this capability through cachet. They good and well better not break too much.

Things are a little different in the PC market, where a very wide range of hardware exists to serve an equally wide range of consumer preferences and price points.

There was a movement towards good quality service in the 80's when Reagan was president. At that time Japan was whipping the US at manufacturing almost any product and the meme was quality quality quality. The US established the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and Total Quality Management was all the rage. I was the Quality Director at a company that applied several years in a row for that award.

That movement died. It was replaced by cold calculation of the cost of satisfying dissatisfied customers and by globalization and mergers reducing competition.

I talked to a guy that managed a call center for a high tech company and they had calculated that once a customer called it cost them "x", and the longer they talked to a customer they never recovered that money and were better off just blowing the customer off rather than attempting to fix the problem.

In other words, they save money by providing poor or no service. It doesn't matter if you say you'll never buy another Sony (or Dell or whatever) product again in your life because they'll sell it to someone else for cheaper than it would cost to fix your problem. Screw you.

This change in business culture has been going on since the early 90's - for at least 15 years. Service and quality - across the board, computers, cars, appliances, TV's, everything - in this country has never been worse in my lifetime...except possibly for some manufactured items like cars in the 70's, but at least they weren't rude about it then.