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NewEgg Confirms Shipping Fake Core i7s
adeelarshad82 writes "After originally rejecting the story, online retailer NewEgg confirmed that a shipment of Core i7s were indeed fake, and apologized for the affair. NewEgg has also broken off its relationship with IPEX, the supplier of the phony lot. The retailer said that it has already contacted affected customers and would continue to reach out and replace the counterfeit parts. We discussed the fake Core i7s over the weekend."
Depends on the demo.
Chip manufacturers will often give away defective chips as demos to those thinking of using them in circuit boards. Non-functional demo chips are used in the design phase as the boards are laid out and the first parts are placed.
Imagining wasting a working chip just to find out if you're soldering things on correctly.
Partially-functional chips (might work but still failed testing for obscure reasons) are also used as demos for building prototype boards.
Neither case applies for NewEgg, however.
The CONTRACTUAL entitlement mindset is a VERY good thing. Commerce depends on it.
Parent is naive. Corporations will try ANY legal argument to get money from consumers and the government. The idea that a citizen should foreswear such BS entitlement arguments while they are exploited by corporations that freely make (and benefit from) them is ridiculous and absurd.
I get why Intel doesn't want to *retail* them, but what's the point of a wholesaler when you have a retail distributor as huge as Newegg?
And the same is true of other products sold via other retailers.
It almost seems like "we/they" put up with a needless set of middlemen who only mark stuff up.
I'm not so sure it was all about a PR stunt. The original thread had quite a few response pointing out the defamation laws that could have been used against them if they had moved too quickly to out a supplier. I'm sure the legal team had a few days of hard work making sure they were (reasonably) safe from a suit before they allowed any statement out that named names.
The fact that such obviously counterfeit parts made through Newegg's supply chain is a little bit unnerving... I know that Newegg said that these were "Demo Boxes"... but from the video that I had seen, these boxes included badly made tamper-evidence stickers and holograms. This leads me to wonder if "functional counterfeits" of Intel/AMD processors have been sold by Newegg.