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BFG Tech Sending Out RMA Denial Letters, 'Winding Down Business'
SKYMTL writes "Once one of NVIDIA's primary board partners, BFG Tech has now officially started denying RMA requests for their supposedly 'lifetime warranty' graphics cards. According to a letter from BFG, they are '...winding down business' and are 'unable to replace' any non-working product. A sad turn of events for the thousands who bought BFG's graphics cards and power supplies."
Apparently the company itself did not have a life-time warranty.
Table-ized A.I.
That's the problem with a BFG, it's got a lot of firepower but you might end up killing yourself.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
My lifetime?
The product (estimated) lifetime?
The company lifetime?
The receipt lifetime?
Always check which lifetime they mean. Words are wonderful: there are so many definitions to choose from.
BFG made good gear.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Let me speak from experience and say that they are not even responding to open support tickets, so i doubt anybody gets as far as an RMA anyway
A "lifetime warranty" is for the lifetime of the product, not your lifetime.
You'd think people would have figured that out by now. If the warranty doesn't have a specific period spelled out in terms of days, years, months, etc. then it's essentially worthless. All the company has to do is "end of life" a product, and voila! no more warranty. And when a company shuts down, the warranties are gone forever regardless.
Here is an interesting thread from HardForum:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=ad39475190e27b7270fad7c8f5202588&t=1539921
It has an image of the letter, gives a plausible reason why BFG is going down (Best Buy wouldn't carry some of their products).
Is it actually legal to sell someone a product with a warranty and then refuse to fix it because business is winding down? Don't closing companies have to keep a certain amount of money for problems like this? Can I put a lien on their property if they fail to meet their contractual obligations and I'm shorted money because of it?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Sadly, I don't much care about those consumers affected by denied RMA requests. The larger picture here is that this is another example of how console gaming has brought stagnation to the gaming industry. Companies who profitted from deploying bleeding edge hardware that was demanded by a constant churn of increasing software demands are no longer able to stay afloat. Consoles lock graphics to a much longer generation than does pc gaming. It's hard for companies like BFG to stay afloat when stuff stays the same for five or more years.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The new meaning of BFG.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This isn't just confined to the computer industry or firms that are having financial troubles.
10 years ago or so we bought $5000 worth of leather furniture (http://legacy-leather.com/v2/bigskytrad.html) from http://www.schneidermans.com/. At the time we purchased a LIFETIME warranty, that included lifetime supply of cleaning solution and care products for the top-grain aniline leather.
About year 2, we had one cushion destroyed by a neighbor's small child and a permanent marker, which was replaced promptly and without any issues.
About 2-3 years later we got a package from Schneidermans saying "oh, sorry, here's your package of care products; we've decided to discontinue the 'lifetime' warranty; we would refund your money for the warranty but you got a replacement part so we consider the warranty used and the contract fulfilled. Sorry."
It was probably my fault for not causing a big stink about it, but RL was pretty complicated at the time and I didn't.
But I've always felt screwed that they sold us a lifetime warranty and then arbitrarily decided they just didn't want to support it later.
-Styopa
This seems to be just bad luck. You likely had cards from a bad batch. Large-scale manufacturing processes are quite apt at producing lots of scrap.
A guy I know used to co-own a printing shop. He used to say that sometimes they'd have a very expensive wastepaper production line. Same goes for printed circuit board assembly: all it takes to sink millions of dollars per hour into scrap at the end of the line is to run a poor reflow oven profile.
There is no reasonable way to make a graphics card "less robust" without putting real money into it. You seem to have no idea how mass electronics production looks. Those cards were likely coming at an average rate of one every few seconds off a big production line somewhere. Any sort of per-item tweaking has to be kept to a minimum to make it economical. The cards go through the assembly/reflow/clean, some are picked up for automated optical inspection of solder joints, then they are tested by an automated test cell that emulates the relevant busses, boots the card up and acquires the output video signal to check if it's OK, loads the flash with firmware, etc. Then a bunch of ladies attaches the brackets and packs them into boxes, and off they go.
The production line is far removed from the distribution channel. If a card like yours is failing, there's no way to digitally re-manufacture it.
No, the company didn't want to fuck you, nor did they do anything nefarious. The manufacturer -- likely a contract manufacturer -- messed up and you ended up with unreliable cards from the same batch. Or, maybe there was a thermal design issue -- either the board layout's interaction with reflow process, or runtime thermal management. That's all there is to it.
Now for well deserved ad-hominem: please refrain from making up conspiracy hypotheses (they ain't theories, damnit) when you have little clue about the involved technology. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Fuckups at electronics production lines are commonplace, and there are some very, very well paid consultants who can sometimes get 7 figure salaries doing "nothing much" but knowing an Asian language or two and traveling from place to place, explaining how to fix production lines whose output is part or all scrap. I wish I had the link to one example: there's one consulting company whose founder methinks writes a blog, the latter often featuring a rather hot, real engineer babe who knows Mandarin, and kicks ass at troubleshooting SMT production issues. My browser history doesn't go that far, otherwise I'd dig it up.
The babe's main claim to fame IMHO, apart from being hot and knowing Mandarin, is that she has a real understanding of the involved technology -- understanding in the Feynman sense. She doesn't treat SMT production lines like gods who need prayer and offering, nor does she anthropomorphize them ("the line is having a bad day today") -- contrary to some of the locals who run the show, who sometimes suffer from lack of training and don't really understand what's going on. When you understand, you can try making hypotheses as to what's wrong, tweaking things, and seeing if stuff improves. That's the definition of understanding, in this case. Otherwise, you pay for hot babes to come and help you out ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.