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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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."
What, you don't like the Fn key being pressed by default so half your keyboard doesn't work? Tough buddy.
I was going to say Samsung, but in the end the lawyers won that particular battle