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.

Comments

And another on the ban pile

[houstonbofh]

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.

Re:And another on the ban pile

[timeOday]

It's surprising. Kingston? I thought they were a good brand.

Re:And another on the ban pile

[Striikerr]

When a company pulls this kind of trick, they are dead to me. I don't understand why companies think that they will get away with such actions. It may slip through once but it only takes one time getting caught and then people will start looking back at past hardware releases to see if they did the same thing before. The damage to a company's reputation can be devastating, all to earn some extra profit.. Such a shame.

Re:And another on the ban pile

[Anonymous Coward]

They were, now I'm just wondering who else who hasn't been caught yet may be also doing this as usually it can be a whole cartel of them.

Re:And another on the ban pile

[CRCulver]

Why do you figure? As a top-ranked Amazon reviewer familiar with the reviewer "community", a hell of a lot of reviewers will give only positive reviews because they are afraid that any negative comments will stop the flow of free electronics and media coming. A lot of reviewers make a decent living eBaying products that we are sent gratis with a request for a review.

Plus, when you are getting a steady flow of free stuff to review, you are busy enough with the latest arrivals that you don't want to spend time going back and reworking a review you've already written. That's already ancient history for some.

I imagine these same problems exists at many independent tech review sites too.

Re:And another on the ban pile

[L4t3r4lu5]

Don't be an idiot; Nobody expected Joe Public to boycott Sony over the rootkit thing, the OtherOS thing, or the myriad of other shady things they've done; They're too ubiquitous in their sectors.
"Hey, I'm thinking of getting a game console, PS4 or XBox One?"
"NEITHER! Consoles are DRM laden privacy invading boxes of Satan! Buy a PC, run Linux, be happy with indie games!"
"Uhhh... PS4 then."

However, boycotting Kingston on your recommendation is very easy to do.
"So I'm looking to upgrade my PC. Any recommendations?"
"More RAM! Oh, I told you that one before? Ok then, put in an SSD. Intel, Samsung, Crucial, Corsair, G.Skill, OCZ, SanDisk, Toshiba, and Zalman are all reputable brands. In fact, for what you're going to be doing with them, pick any brand but Kingston for your budget. They were caught shafting consumers by swapping cheap parts into their high end stuff after reviews were published."
"Ok, not Kingston. Got it."

Re:And another on the ban pile

[CRCulver]

Amazon can only show a message on reviews of products received for free through the Vine Voice program, where reviewers choose the product through Amazon's website. However, a lot of reviewers receive their free product directly from the manufacturer or publisher, and Amazon has no way of knowing. FTC rules require that a reviewer disclose that he is reviewing a free sample, but this law is often ignored.

Re:And another on the ban pile

[Predius]

Actually, if you read the article...

None of the drives died at their 200TB rated endurance, although the Samsung DID fail a data retention test. The Intel let go at 700+ TB of writes along with two other drives, but did so with plenty of advance warning and died in a way as to allow for one last read off of the data without corrupting it with a bad write. Hard to fault them there.

Re:And another on the ban pile

[tlhIngan]

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.

When a company pulls this kind of trick, they are dead to me. I don't understand why companies think that they will get away with such actions. It may slip through once but it only takes one time getting caught and then people will start looking back at past hardware releases to see if they did the same thing before. The damage to a company's reputation can be devastating, all to earn some extra profit.. Such a shame.

Both of you are mistaken - in a lot of cases this is simply because production runs are different.

Kingston and PNY are well known brands that buy a lot of excess parts. They build their storage using what stuff they have available. If Samsung overproduced flash chips that Apple can't soak up, they can either idle their factories (expensive), sell the excess on the market (depressing prices), or sell it to a company who does wholesale purchase of excess, like Kingston or PNY.

Option 3 is generally preferred because option 2 can impact contracts (i.e., if Apple sees Samsung is selling the same product for far less than they paid, they're going to demand a refund).

So basically, Kingston and PNY build products based on what they have on hand - perhaps today it's slower flash chips from Toshiba, tomorrow Samsung had an overrun and they can put in super speedy Samsung chips, etc.

While most electronics manufacturers generally try to go for the same parts over and over again (or with few substitutions - e.g., Apple buys hard drives from Seagate and WD (and their acquired companies like Toshiba and HGST), flash from Toshiba and Samsung, etc), there are other companies that build product based on what's on hand.

And heck, it's also one reason why Kingston and PNY product is so damn cheap - because by taking the excess stock and building what's on hand, they get parts at a good discount, but the variability in parts is much greater. Part manufacturers are happy because it means they don't have to dump product on the open market where their customers may demand the discounts as well, and they have someone to absorb overruns.

It's just like the McRib, really. McDonalds brings it back when pork prices are low and there's an excess they can obtain far cheaper than the open market (but they can take it all rather than buy it in small batches).

The downside is, of course, that product variability is high. Perhaps they get a stock of superfast Samsung, decide to use it to launch a new line, then Samsung has better supply management and the source of cheap excess disappears. Then they're now handling excess of a slower chip some other manufacturer has excess.

Heck, you can buy several different seemingly identical products and they'd all be different inside - the only way to guarantee would be to check the batch numbers.

And this applies to their products as well - RAM, SD cards, etc.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang actually did an analysis of this when they were buying SD cards in bulk from Kingston and getting issues. On Micro SD problems. It's a very detailed analysis of what REALLY happens with Kingston. PNY is probably extremely similar in behavior as well.

If you want consistency, you need to go with someone who builds it in, like Sandisk (Toshiba), Lexar, etc. who order parts direct, rather than an aggregator who builds simply based on what they were sold.

It's less a bait and switch, and more of "well, we had these parts today, and when we run out tomorrow we'll use those parts".

Re:And another on the ban pile

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's surprising. Kingston? I thought they were a good brand.

Kingston is a fairly serious company; but it's unfortunately not too surprising to see them involved in this story(and, specifically, with a NAND downgrade, rather than a controller swap). The company has its fingers in just about every step of the flash and DRAM supply chain, except actually fabbing the stuff(they do testing, they do IC packaging, they assemble DIMMs and the various USB, SSD, SD, CF, etc. flavors that people want flash in, they do support and logistics for PC outfits that want memory to shove into their products, and so on).

Unfortunately for them, the companies that do fab flash tend to have SSD interests of their own at this point. This puts Kingston in a slightly tricky position: too much on the line to just go full OCZ; but always having to scrape around to get flash at prices that they can still make a living on.

There's a very neat piece about the...interesting issues... that this causes with some of their SD products.

Re:And another on the ban pile

[Jane Q. Public]

In fact, on top of the simple dishonesty, it's insulting that they assume we buy products on the basis of reviews but don't bother to measure them, or aren't aware enough to notice performance differences ourselves. We're not idiots.

I don't think some people are really appreciating the real import here. It it was done deliberately in order to deceive consumers, then it's not just "selling down their name", it's almost certainly FRAUD. A crime.

I may not be an lawyer or a prosecutor, but if I were, I'd probably be going after them. And if I were a judge, I would make it a point to be harsh on them. This shit has gone too far.

Re:And another on the ban pile

[Predius]

The drive did go into read only, until power cycled. As documented.

I get the planned obsolescence gripe, but it didn't lock out until over twice it's advertised write capacity had been burned through, and again, at no time did it corrupt data. You light the fuse with the first write and advance towards the time bomb with each additional one, so planned or not the drive only has a finite life span. Would you prefer the Samsung's failure mode instead?

Re:And another on the ban pile

[viperidaenz]

I too don't understand why they design a good device then cheapen it by cutting corners.

Corners cost money.

As my Father used to say:

[Zanadou]

As my Father used to say:

"You're not actually sorry for doing it, you're just sorry for being caught doing it."

Many, many companies do this ...

[fuzzytv]

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.

This is fraud.

[Karmashock]

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.

Reviewers need to report this

[crow]

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.

What's the real story?

[Dcnjoe60]

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?

Kingston selling shit USB3 flash keys

[swb]

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.

Re:Kingston selling shit USB3 flash keys

[rainmaestro]

SanDisk does that same crap. There's a huge difference between the write speeds for Ultra and Extreme models even though they are both rated USB3. Learned that lesson the hard way.

A bit more subtle than you think

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not subtle at all

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Re:Not subtle at all

[MMC Monster]

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.

More and more I only believe Consumer Reports. They don't accept donated items for review. They purchase their own from a normal middleman to make sure what they get is what a normal person would get.

That being said, it's remarkable they're still in business.