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Kingston and PNY Caught Bait-and-Switching Cheaper Components After Good Reviews
An anonymous reader writes Over the past few months, we've seen a disturbing trend from first Kingston, and now PNY. Manufacturers are launching SSDs with one hardware specification, and then quietly changing the hardware configuration after reviews have gone out. The impacts have been somewhat different, but in both cases, unhappy customers are loudly complaining that they've been cheated, tricked into paying for a drive they otherwise wouldn't have purchased.
It amazes me when companies sell down their good name. It takes a lot of time and money to earn it, and it never brings in as much when you do this. So not too more companies on my "avoid" list. Luckily there is a lot of competition.
I'm sure they'll just call it a Hardware Revision and write it off.
Kingston has been my go-to brand for at least a decade. I've used some others for performance, but Kingston was always rock solid, with great customer service. It saddens me to hear this.
As my Father used to say:
"You're not actually sorry for doing it, you're just sorry for being caught doing it."
Good advice - when checking reviews for a product (e.g. on Amazon), always sort them by time and check how the ratings change. Many products get good reviews first, then it dives. You won't see this otherwise.
False advertising etc... Doubtless they've found some legal loophole to let them get away with it but it shouldn't be tolerated.
Sue them. Let the lawyers latch onto their faces and lay lawyer babies in their stomachs that will after a short period burst out of their chests to fill the world with yet more lawyers.
These guys have it coming. You don't cheat your customers.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
They must be... because I can't think of a faster way to poison the well and scare customers off than cheating them. The Kingston move is downright shocking... whoever is making the calls for their SSD parts needs to be fired ASAP, and some serious damage control needs to be put into play if they ever want to continue selling SSDs.
So the solution is that the professional reviewers at places like C|Net or ArsTechnica need to have a policy of redoing their testing on older models when newer models are released. If they find that the older model no longer performs as they originally reviewed it, then they need to loudly warn that the manufacturer is known for reducing the quality of the product without announcing a change.
I would like to see the paper (email really) trail where these companies plotted to screw over consumers. After all, there is no way that this happened by accident and being deliberate means communication. I thought highly of these brands until now. Now I can only wonder how long this has been going on and how many product lines are affected. They have lost my loyalty and cannot earn it back. I will warn everyone I know to avoid all of their products and I will explain why. I have a feeling this is going to snowball into a much more publicized scandal. I just hope I don't find out any of my still currently beloved companies have been committing the same fraud.
Also, I say naive because how could they have thought in this day and age that they would not get busted? I guess they were blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Electronics are produced in batches. Given availability of various components, each batch will not be identical. This is nothing new. As long as the new components still meet the same specifications, the consumer hasn't been harmed. Now if the intention of the company is to build a fast model specifically for review and substitute an inferior product for the mass market, that could be fraudulent. On the other hand, at the time of review, if the current model was all built with those components, then the review is valid.
We are talking about consumer grade products here. If you buy a name brand laptop and then the identical laptop six months later, it will very likely have different chipsets and versions of roms. There are companies that will sell business grade or even military grade, where all components are guaranteed to be the same regardless of when you buy it. Those usually cost a lot more.
So is there evidence that Kingston and PNY were being fraudulent or is it simply variations between batches? What's the real story?
I cannot for the life of me fathom a company, in this age of internet and instant news, doing this. I have purchased some things from Kingston before and I was fine with the company. However, after reading this, they are on my lifetime shit list. That is also true for anyone reading the story. And you can bet that Digg, reddit and a few other popular sites will be running the story shortly.
In other words, Kingston is fucked, with a capital F.
Even if the company president comes over and cleans my house for a month, the bad name will prevail.
These guys are morons.
I needed a half-dozen 8 gig USB keys to serve as flash boot and installers.
I figured I might as well get USB3 versions since about half the time they would be written on USB3 based systems. I found a Kingston on Amazon, it was cheap and I bought them without thinking, figuring they were decent.
When I went to use them I had a WTF moment when they were so slow. Benchmarked them against a PNY 128 and another off-brand, both USB3 and the performance with them was as expected but the Kingston one was performing like a slow USB2 key.
Went to Amazon and read the reviews and found out that everyone was bitching and each review had a vendor followup from some flack at Kingston explaining that they were USB3 but considered "value" USB3 and that if I wanted "performance" USB3 I should buy another Kingston product at a ridiculous price.
Nowhere on the packaging does it say "slow, USB2-style speeds".
Anyway, this is just more news that Kingston is happy to bait and switch.
On a very related note, about a year ago I bought a Kingston 16 GB Class 10 SD card, but when I benchmarked it, it performed like a Class 4 card. After searching online, I found other people also complaining of this.
Irony: captch = recall
Well, time to disqualify them as SSD providers in our corporate system. Offhand it looks like it'll trickle down to a pretty significant loss of orders for them. For commodity SSDs our system just looks up all qualified vendors and goes by cheapest price. These guys were there previously, and now not....
It's a bit more subtle a scam than you think. Kingston/PNY haven't changed the specs of the product at all, all they did was ship hardware that's cheaper/closer to spec. That is, they never promised the crazy performance reviewers were getting, they just overbuilt the first run of components and then switched to something cheaper that still met spec requirements. Hardware manufacturers reserve the right to reformulate product all the time without indicating as much, so long as the spec is still the same. So basically, they spec a $100 box, but put $200 worth of components in it for the first few customers and review units. Once the good reviews go out, they pull the expensive components out of the box. But it's "technically not a scam" because they "technically never promised such a good deal", they just accidentally happened to give reviewers a good deal.
From a reviewer's point of view, however, I'd be incredibly skeptical of parts that perform too good compared to what they should be doing on paper. If you have something that is supposed to get 200mb/sec writes, but is actually getting 400 or more, then you should probably question the manufacturer and perhaps even score the product lower for being overbuilt, on the expectation that future hidden product revisions will stop overbuilding it.
Thanks for elaborating. It's all clear now... PNY only created a single SSD in production with a completely different controller and firmware. It's like a practical joke played on the customer, and he should laugh instead, since PNY spent all that money to send him the only SSD of that model ever to be made with a Sandforce controller.
Damn witch hunts!
Any product that has been in production for a while will incorporate engineering changes during it's production cycle.
These changes can arise from some perfectly legitimate reasons including:
1. Fixes for problems found after production starts.
2. Improvements in manufacturing process to improve yield etc.
3. Changes needed to compensate for changes in upstream sources.
The idea that something essentially a prototype given to reviewers will not be changed once it's been in production for a while is nuts.
HOWEVER if the product is changed in such a way that the result is inferior as this article seems to indicate then the manufacturer has a lot to answer for.
I suspect most non-geeks who have SSDs get them as part of pre-built systems and have no choice about which parts to use.
Geeks tend to overestimate their influence dramatically in this sort of situation.
Now, system manufacturers, on the other hand, have their own reputations and margins to protect. If they are buying units by the thousand of a device that wasn't the one they previously evaluated, and then they start seeing a surprisingly high rate of failure, that is not good news for the device vendor at all.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This has been happening for many years in computer monitors and televisions also. There will be an initial version sold for a few months that gets the reviews, and then the specs are changed - completely different LCD panels made by different manufacturers are substituted silently, often with different technology. Anecdotally early versions of an Acer monitor having a MPVA panel, and then the exact same model then shipping with TN panels that pale in performance compared to the original. With monitors, you are buying an AO Optronics panel in a box labeled Samsung, so when the same model gets you something inferior to both specifications and original reviews, it borders on fraud.
Considering the Benchmark Brief the article in question actually quotes not only presents numerous benchmarks of the two versions, all clearly showing the performance impact, but also states outright at the start "In order to achieve a balance of price and performance, we must maintain the flexibility to source NAND Flash components from various Tier 1 NAND manufacturers. At times, this will mean that there is a difference in benchmarked performance, where certain builds outperform our advertised specification (450MB/s Read / Write) while other drives will meet the advertised specification." it's bit hard to see where the article immediately comes to the conclusion this must be a malicious bait-and-switch.
Any rational person must conclude that IS a possibility, but given Kingston has gone to trouble of assigning the two versions different product names (V300 120S & V300 120A) and publishing a benchmark brief showing the performance loss using no fewer than 7 different benchmarks, it's hard not to accuse the original article, its Slashdot submission & posting of shady deception.
That 20c saved isn't passed onto the customer. It's pocketed by the corporation.
Quality is no longer a characteristic business compete with. Why spend another 20c making a better product? It's the age of Amazon.com, and all anyone cares about is the lowest price. So, corporations have a new recipe for success:
1) Buy your competition to reduce competition.
2) Collude with your remaining competition so that everything is made in China and is sold at the same price.
3) Nickel & dime the consumer to maximize your profit.
By the time the business goes bankrupt due to piss-poor products and a loss of customer faith, the execs have already leached away all its capital. Once an exec makes it to the top, what incentive do they have to do what's best for the company or the consumer?
No, your analogies suck. We have never bought an SSD expecting it to randomly meet the specs. If you buy anything expecting i to randomly meet the expectations advertised, you are a stupid consumer.
We buy parts like SSD drives based on the specs. We expect them to meet the specs... every single item of that model should meet or exceed the specs. Exceeding the specs is a nice bonus, but not required.
A better analogy is buying an intel quad-core i7 CPU, rated at 4ghz, but getting a dual-core i3 part (no hyperthreading) that runs at 2.8ghz, but stamped with the exact same i7 part number, the only change being a revision number.
If I was a reviewer, I'd continue to review Kingston and PNY parts, with a huge caveat notice that this manufacturer is known to degrade performance by more than 50% in regular production models by substituting inferior parts. I'd also offer projected benchmarks of those crappier production parts based on previous incidents. Eventually, the manufacturers would get the message.
The "on the box" specs for the PS3 also changed in that time; not so much with Kingston and PNY.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
But it's "technically not a scam" because they "technically never promised such a good deal", they just accidentally happened to give reviewers a good deal.
It's a scam and they're liars. It's really as clear and un-subtle as that. When they deliver a review unit, the expectation is that it will be representative of the products that end users will by buying. They'll have gone over it with a fine toothed comb, sure, to make sure it doesn't have any obvious defects. But the nature of a review is that the reviewer will be getting the same product that you and I will. Without that implicit contract, the whole concept of a review is utterly worthless.
In fact, Kingston and friends burned their reviewers' reputations, not just their own. If I buy something because Joe Smith says he liked it and it turns out to be a piece of junk, I'll never trust Joe Smith's opinion again. If I'd written about one of these units - particularly for a major review site - I'd be raising holy hell, warning all of my readers, and distancing myself from it as far as possible. It'd be along the lines of "Kingston lied to me and I passed it along to you. For that, I am very sorry, and I will never review another of their products." and updating the original review to add a giant red disclaimer and explanation at the top.
This isn't subtle. It's a flat-out lie to customers and can only reasonably be seen as such.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Had the same issue with Jaton during that generation of nVidia GPUs.
Pretty much made me only go with ATi/AMD from now on.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Do "first looks" with no recommendation on pre-released items and only do full reviews on items purchased from a random retail outlet.
This is old news in the industry that dates back to the "Computer Shopper" days. Basically be skeptical that the product sent to you prior to release for free will actually be the same product sold to consumers when it is released.
The first clue should be that the pre-release products reviewed are available several months prior to the final product actually ships.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
*Please* tell me you filed a complaint with the BBB and more importantly your state AG! I would also name the retailer as a co-conspirator if they left this fraudulent product up for sale even after the manufacturer confessed.
As a builder, I can say Kingston and PNY are off the list. It's true that "you only get one opportunity to make a first impression", but the first impression is when you actually buy and use the product, not when you're reading reviews about it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Apple uses tight tolerances when they just bring a product on the market. Later when complaints arise of instability and crashes they release a firmware or OS update that gives more room to components that are not within spec. I suspect they do this to lower the return/repair rate.
We develop software for iPhone, for this we keep first release of all iPhone models and don't update them and a second one that follows all updates. To test our software on all firmware versions. When benchmarking we find that even in tight loops it becomes slower after some firmware updates, these slowdowns can only be attributed to a GPU and memory timings. We found this to be true for the 4, 4s, 5, 5s and 5c, with the largest slowdown mostly within the first or second firmware update.
Similar behavior I have found on my Macbook air. Before and after OS update I benchmarked the SSD and it became 17% slower, I reverted the OS from a backup just before the update and it was still slower. The only explanation I can think of is that they changed the SSD firmware or some hardware settings to slow it down.
The problem with the race to the bottom is that everybody ends up at the bottom. Usually sooner than expected.
I keep hearing about this so called race to the bottom (most often espoused by self proclaimed communists) yet my computer equipment today is a lot better than that which I owned 10 years ago (around the time I first started hearing about this race to the bottom.) Not only is it much faster, but it has a longer useful life. I think 10 years ago I was still on 120GB IDE HDDs that pulled a whopping 32mbyte/sec sustained rate. Now for the same price, I can buy SSDs at the same or higher capacity that will pull 10 times that data rate.
In other words, in this "race to the bottom" of yours we've achieved your choice of a 10 fold performance increase or a 30 fold capacity increase. What is this "bottom" you think we're racing to, exactly? Because it sure doesn't look like it's getting worse. As for TFA/TFS; somebody has pulled a fast one, more news at 11. I don't see any evidence that this is a growing trend.
But soon after that, there is a bounce. Now WalMart is the last place you shop when you do not care about quality. A one time use option. And people prefer "anything but WalMart" for stuff they want to keep. So who has higher margins on a pan, WalMart where people shop only on price, or Sur La Table where people are willing to pay for quality. (Which, amusingly enough, costs less when you factor in replacement costs.)
I keep hearing about this so called race to the bottom (most often espoused by self proclaimed communists) yet my computer equipment today is a lot better than that which I owned 10 years ago (around the time I first started hearing about this race to the bottom.)
You're clearly not a laptop user. I fondly remember the days of 16x10 screens, caps lock and num lock LEDs, standard and stable keyboard layouts, inaudible CPU fans, etc.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Your memory sucks.
So how often did a review sample perform worse than subsequent manufacturing changes?
Apple knows all about this
Must have been bad specs on the memory. He seemed willing to pay for good equipment.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
What, you don't like the Fn key being pressed by default so half your keyboard doesn't work? Tough buddy.
Ah yes, I remember my first laptop. My first one was a Dell Inspiron 8000. Weighed about 9 pounds, and had a nice birth control feature when you used it in the manner that the word laptop implies. Bought it sometime back in 2001 during my Army days for somewhere north of $2,000, and that was after a military discount.
Some three years ago, I bought an HP DV5 something or other, weighs about half as much, runs much faster, much cooler, lasts longer on its battery, and cost about $400. This doesn't even take into account that in the past year intel chips have dramatically increased their energy efficiency; such a system I don't own yet. But alas, none of these have the birth control feature, so clearly we're on a race to the bottom.
(By the way, you badly misquoted that in your signature. Really, Ben Franklin (who likely didn't actually say that, it turns out) wouldn't have written such horribly broken English.)
Didn't mean to insult with the signature bit BTW, just letting you know so you can fix it.
The race to the bottom is also called free market price competition, and the race to the bottom in quality comes about as a necessity from the race to the bottom in price. If you don't participate, you're out of the game. It's like having good morals vs. being slutty. If you always have good morals and you are never a slut, you're out of the game too. How to find that magic balance point, ehh? Quality vs. price? Cuz either extremes get you out of the game. How to maintain quality in SSDs while winning the race to the bottom on price? How to maintain your good morals while also being a good slut?
They should not do so, then no one will believe them. Consumers now are very smart
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Had bought a supposed (on the box) 128MB GeForce4 TI4800 made by PNY. Turned out to be the TI 4200, 64MB.
As in, the card was made with a different GPU, or the card was substituted in the box? If the latter, you weren't shopping at Fry's, were you? I once bought what I thought was a PCI Ultra-Narrow SCSI card, I got it home and opened up the box (rookie mistake) and found an ISA SCSI card from yesteryear.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Since when is it immoral to be a slut? Sluttiness may result in preganancy, disease, loss of friends, and a whole host of other issues, but it certainly doesn't make one immoral. In fact, there are times when I find sluttiness to be an endearing quality.
In the bible it says it is immoral to be a slut. Read Ezekiel 23. Moreover it says anonizing(masturbation, pulling out when you come and coming on the ground instead, wasting sperm) and sodomizing (this includes anal sex, but also oral sex, any kind of sex where you may come somewhere else but the proper hole, i think also sex between two men or two women, but tittyfucking is probably anonizing, I'm not sure it has ever been defined as such) are also immoral. I'm not sure about the chapters, I'm not enough of a bible thumper yet. But as far as I understand the only appropriate sex is one between a husband and wife and ejaculating into the vagina, except when she's on her period when there should be abstinence. That's what the bible says, as far as I can tell. It was written in a day and age where people died young and the world had plenty room for new people. These days we talk about global overpopulation problems, and the answers to it, besides contraceptives that we can't manufacture properly, are anonizing and sodomizing, or abstinence. Also abortions, but now you're talking heavy duty decisions and very serious stuff. Abstinence is difficult, and there may be proven health benefits to having a sex life, if nothing else, masturbation at the very least.
Well, who cares about that irrelevant book?
Apropo who cares, I recently got a shortwave radio again, and guess what, only bible thumpers are available on it anymore. Ehh, even a decade ago you could listen to BBC world news, but they no longer broadcast to Europe or America on shortwave. Can you believe that? Shortwave and BBC used to be inseparable! And you assumed even in an apocalypse you could get at least some somewhat unbiased news from them and know whats going on in the bigger world past your daily local newspaper brainwashing, you'd get a different perspective of the world.
I was going to buy a couple flash drives so I read reviews on the target product... and a disturbing number had the same complaint when using a USB3 flash drive on a USB2-equipped computer:
Data corruption.
This wasn't just the usual crowd of knobs who don't know shit about hardware; it was largely reasonably savvy-sounding folks.
Anyone know what the issue might be?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I have a 12 year old PC that is still running as well as the first day. Crap that I buy today often doesn't last 3 years.
In the civilised (non-US) West, this is simply known as "American Business Practices" (when our own businesses do it, we call it "flagrantly dishonest", or "obtaining financial advantage by deception"). It's part of the shonky, US-originated raft of shady business practices - e.g., "Up to" (X% off, Y% improvement in dandruff, Z% reduction in fine lines). In fact, the Yank practice of "puffery" is now so widely understood, as to be considered worthy of running as a defence ... e.g., S&P's defence of the DoJ's lawsuit; S&P's defence in Australian courts (which, given that Australia is part of the civilised (i.e., non-US) West, got thrown out with costs, then rejected on appeal).
If a company sells a product and then sells another (inferior) product by the same name and model number, isn't that fraud? Not just in the casual sense of the word, but in a legal sense?
Apparently not, or they would have gotten their asses sued off. I'd like to hear a definitive explanation of where the border lies between "we changed our product some" and "we're cheating people" and the rationale, from someone more knowledgeable than me.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.