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Fujitsu Offers Free Laptop Upgrades For Life
Barence writes "Fujitsu Siemens is offering its customers free laptop upgrades for life with its Lifebook4Life scheme. Customers buying a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook will be offered a free upgrade three years after their original purchase, and every subsequent three years for the rest of their life — as long as they purchase an extended three-year warranty. Customers will have to hope inflation stays low, though: the value of each new notebook cannot exceed the value of the previous one, adjusted 10% for inflation. Fujitsu says the scheme is profitable, and a raft of small print ensures plenty of people will find they've excluded themselves from the scheme for all sorts of reasons."
"Free laptop upgrades for life"... sounds like "unlimited bandwidth" and "Plays4Sure".
No thanks.
http://outcampaign.org/
It's a scam, that's awefully direct:
"Fujitsu says the scheme is profitable, and a raft of small print ensures plenty of people will find they've excluded themselves from the scheme for all sorts of reasons."
Or this a case of another bad summary...
[J]
Hit any of these, and you'll get excluded permanently.
From TFA:
If customers fail to register their notebook within 21 days of purchase, they lose out, and if the initial sales receipt is lost then they will not be able to claim a replacement notebook. If at any point a customer fails to take an upgrade, then they will also be ineligible for any future laptops.
"Customers ... will be offered a free upgrade ... as long as they purchase"
The complete ignorance of the majority of people where money is concerned is what has us in this whole financial crisis. It's NOT FREE IF YOU HAVE TO PAY SOMETHING, DAMMIT. At best this is a "membership" or "subscription" deal that has lots of strings attached to make sure it's very easy for you NOT to get your upgrades (like say losing the original receipt or not registering within 21 days (from TFA)), and forces you to pay an undetermined amount for the rest of your life to the manufacturer.
Reading the fine print you will probably find out that they can change the price or cancel the plan whenever they want without notice. And of course what guarantee do you have that your "replacement" will be a competitive model?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A lot of people don't understand that it's heat that kills a battery (and not "overcharging", let's talk about Lithium Ion for now). My Dell 700m batteries (2) each hold a charge of 5 hours after 4 years of usage. How's this possible, you may ask? I seldom charge the battery while using the laptop. I usually run it off A/C with the battery removed, and then at night, I put the battery back in and let it charge while the machine is powered off. This method has worked for me and my father very well.
Manufacturer's won't tell you that, especially since a killer profit is to be made for post-sales accessories.
Batteries are a big profit center for companies. One of the things we worked hard on the OLPC to achieve is extended battery life.
You can trade somewhat lower capacity for longevity. Basically, if you are charging the battery, and take it to full charge, you are in fact damaging the battery slightly. So we don't fully charge the battery, so we can get many, many more cycles out of them (we use LiFE, batteries as well, which are much safer than LiIon.
So that extra 10% or so of "run-time" ensures you'll wear out the battery quite quickly, and you'll buy expensive batteries for the life of the laptop.
So you see marketing on how long your laptop will run, but not how long the battery will last.
In our case, the kids may be literally days or weeks from anywhere you might ship replacement batteries to (presuming they aren't stolen on the way), even if they or their school could afford to replace them.
One of the parts of a low power machine such as ours is that our batteries can be much smaller and cheaper as well, if they do need replacement (or you want a spare).
"Even if they came to the US, stay away from them. They're like the European equivalent of Packard Bell."
Except they are half Japanese and this type of "support" is common practice in their Japanese server market. They simply don't "grok" the western way of doing IT but they must be doing something right in Japan if they can afford to walk away from a billion pound government contract in the UK without the mass redundancies you would expect to see in a western company.
AC and terribly biased because I work for Fujitsu. Unlike EDS and IBM (who I have also worked for), Fujitsu still have this quaint cultural thing whereby they respect ALL their employees, not just the high-flyers but also the guy who scrubs their toilet.
From TFA:
This offer is far from comprehensive, though, as it excludes case cracks, small numbers of dead pixels, broken keys, smashed screens, software issues, virus infections or failed batteries that are older than one year.
Basically, the normal wear and tear of a laptop is excluded. This seems particularly negligent regarding failed batteries, as I've noticed that most laptops become almost unusable after a few years. Even with a RAM upgrade after 3 years, it is unlikely to last much longer than that, especially if broken keys and worn out batteries aren't included. (Are batteries even designed to last that long?
Man, you've taken the article out of context. You're implying that what you're describing relates to the Lifebook4Life program - it does not.
For anyone too lazy to read, here's what they -actually- said.
From TFA:
The company is also launching another interesting scheme with its Esprimo range, offering a complete refund of the original sales price if the customer needs to send the notebook back to Fujitsu Siemens for any repairs.
This offer is far from comprehensive, though, as it excludes case cracks, small numbers of dead pixels, broken keys, smashed screens, software issues, virus infections or failed batteries that are older than one year.
They're offering full refund on the -first- sign of trouble. It's only fair that they exclude normal wear and tear. No company can make money by giving you back all your money every 3 years because you cracked the case, come on!