It’s almost like the writing on the wall was trying to tell us something! Amazon is a bloated poorly self-regulated market with a low barrier to entry that prioritizes convenience over quality, while obfuscating the truth of the seller you do business with.
I sincerely can’t figure out how to use Amazon anymore and I’m very tech literate. Top that off with their labor practices literally being criminal and you have a spicy pizza pie.
It takes a bit of effort to avoid amazon, and it does cost a bit more in money and convenience, but it is possible to not buy from them.
(It’s virtually impossible not to use their web services though unless you are a member of an uncontacted tribe in the, you guessed it, Amazon jungle).
It takes a bit of effort to avoid amazon, and it does cost a bit more in money and convenience, but it is possible to not buy from them.
Ha, here in Austria the government has effectively made it impossible for small vendors to sell their stuff. Amazon is pretty much all that’s left.
What did the government do to cause that?
It’s a new packaging law. Every non-Austrian merchant who wants to ship goods to Austria has to have a local notary acting as a representative who has to register the packaging used for shipments with the local authorities and is personally held liable for this. There are local notaries that offer this service for foreign merchants for about €800 per year. However, Austria is such a small market that this most likely eats up all of the revenue from Austrian customers for small merchants, so most just stopped shipping to the country. Of course, large merchants like Amazon easily can handle that fee.
That would go against the EU rules about Free Movement of people and goods (because it treats sellers from other countries differently from austrian sellers).
Maybe it only applies to sellers from outside the EU?!
It also affects merchants from inside the EU. People here are pretty sure that it does violate Free Movement, but since those proceedings for violations can take a few years, for now we’re stuck with it.
In 2025 the EU wants to introduce a similar system for the whole Union, but unified (so one representative for the whole EU). When that comes, the Austrian system will probably be disbanded, and since the EU is significant enough of a trading partner, the whole issue will probably be fixed. However, until then we’re stuck with a law-enforced Amazon monopoly.
Wow, that sucks…
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I second the other commenter just stop using it. I haven’t order anything from Amazon for the better half of a decade. There’s no product worth buying that can’t be found off Amazon.
You have no duty to reward poor practices with your business.
I can’t figure out how they facilitate fraud and violate consumer laws, en mass, and nothing’s been done about it… I mean, apart from the blatant capitalist oligarchies we live in.
Yeah, I recently ordered something on AliExpress and noticed that I felt less suspicious about their listings than I usually feel when I browse Amazon.
I stopped buying electronics on Amazon after getting bricks instead of a GPU for my PC and they treated me like shit when I went to return it. I filed a complaint with the state about the fraud and their unwillingness to correct it. Complaint didn’t do shit but I was pissed. Now the only stuff I buy on Amazon is random household items and stuff for the kids that’s under 100 bucks.
I use B&H for new tech stuff now. Sometimes the Bay of E for used.
B&H seems to be the best bet since Newegg went down the drain. I’d always gone to them for camera gear and never had issues. I’ll be going to them for electronics from now on.
Just be aware of their return policy, it’s not quite as no-questions as Amazon usually is. But it’s serviceable.
But it isn’t an unreasonable policy or anything I think. They’ve also price matched their own price for me after a week or two which seemed very customer oriented. No complaints and I’ve used them for a few years now.
What happened to new egg?
Pretty sure they got bought out by some Chinese company with terrible customer service
Their customer service wasn’t great in the past.
There was a time when it most definitely was.
They are like the anti Amazon in terms of shipping for religious reasons, given their observance of shabbos they don’t ship on Saturdays at all. Good to know that their warehouse staff has a weekend day off to rest.
Don’t use B & H. They have had numerous discrimination lawsuits filed against them and don’t seem to be changing their behavior. It’s just a different kind of evil than Amazon.
Ever heard of MicroCenter? There’s only a few but if you live nearish one, go check them out. It’s like a toy store for tech nerds.
I am aware of them, but am nowhere near one unfortunately. Not much locally. The nearest thing they’ve had like that was Fry’s Electronics. Could buy anything there, but maybe not the best price. They’re gone now too.
B&H
what’s the full name?
I have a microcenter. I only go there for PV
I only buy random cheap shit I can’t find anywhere else. Nothing of substance.
Just got a new watch. Best Buy. Why risk some bullshit knockoff or return from them? Amazon is trash. Basically the American ali express and all the negatives with it
Microcenter is my go to. I live about 45 minutes from one but any PC parts that are expensive I get there, I also open in store to check for GPUs that were returned to the store to make sure someone didn’t swap out with a cheaper part. I don’t build too often so I don’t make my way over there too often.
Is buying returned products a comming thing? Does not the store check that what you returned is what is actually supposed to be before giving you your money back?
I’ve definitely got a few things at Microcenter that were obvious repackages. I bought a cpu once to find the pins covered in thermal paste. Clearly someone made a bad choice and just returned it. I believe for the most part their returned items are sold at a discount after a review but people repackage things well and some get away with returning something as unopened. If I’m spending 150 or more I just open in store to just in case I find something odd I can return it and they never question it because I never left.
I’ve been getting some PC peripherals from GameStop’s site lately since Amazon’s lack of reliability has me unwilling to trust them for electronics
I didn’t realize how many issues there were with Amazon, I’ve never had a problem, guess I’ve been lucky. Unfortunately, while there is finally a microcenter being built in Charlotte, it’s not going to be open for a few years. In the meantime, what I can’t get at eBay is still easy to get at Amazon, and return it if it’s a fake.
Edit: nevermind, microcenter in Charlotte is slated to open by early 2024!!
The state AGs are slow on complaints but next time reach for the CFPB, they don’t mess around and you’ll get a call from a human (from Amazon) in a short amount of time.
I spent hours on hold with a company (not Amazon) and they kept giving me the run around. After filing a complaint I got a call back in less than 2 days by someone who immediately fixed the issue.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been dealing with a gym membership that got transferred to a different gym without any notification to us and no way to cancel the contract.
Appreciate the advice I didn’t think about the CFPB.
One thing I noticed, about a third of the time they have lower prices for Legos compared to the official Lego site. I buy a bunch of Legos for my kids and been wondering about this. Are they very clever frauds or do they just have a better logistics system?
Fraudulent parts on Amazon is a mix clever and just plain dumb I got bricks instead of a GPU. For work I’ve gotten a handful of hard to notice frauds. We got some Samsung SSDs the older sata drives not NVMe. One was a different shade of black and looked altered. It had the guts of a USB drive with a usb to sata homebrew conversion. That one Amazon took back no questions but it was a company purchase so they probably treat those differently.
For Legos if they were frauds I would imagine it would be noticeable. It’s probably a discount because of the volume they purchase.
If you buy legos often I’ve had some good luck going to goodwill stores and getting them super cheap. It’s not going to be a set. Usually it’s mixed pieces in a vacuum sealed bag or bin if there are a lot.
If you’re building systems, I would assume you’re the kind of person that knows how they work.
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The system tells you what CPU it has on boot.
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The BIOS tells you what CPU you have.
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MemTest86 would have told you what CPU you had when you tested it after assembling your system.
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Windows tells you what you have in Settings > About and Task Manager.
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Apps like CPU-Z have been downloaded a billion times and tell you what CPU you have.
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Geekbench would have told you what CPU you have and how it performs.
The article mentions someone paying a bunch for a specific CPU back in April, but then never bothered actually checking it until recently… What the CPU had written on it is meaningless. I couldn’t even tell you what my current CPU looked like before I installed it. It could have said Pentium 2 or 486SX or Core i-13. What mattered was that it physically fit, the system booted, and my software said “yup, this is what you paid for.”
The issue is if it never occurred to you that you might have been scammed you might not ever think to look.
I built my first computer last year, with all NiB internals, my main concerns when assembling it was does it work. If it underperformed (due to a bootleg part) I might not have been able to appreciate due to a lack of reference point.
This kind of practice is perfect for targeting the person using PC part picker to build a computer without an indepth knowledge or a relative buying it as a gift for someone else.
Would it not be possible to fake most of those by spoofing the model the CPU reports, like what happens with GPUs?
Theoretically possible? Yes, of course. Well beyond the ability of most people including those that print a different model number on the heat shroud? Also yes
Yes, and to be more clear, in order to do something like this, you’d need to manufacture a chip to do so. It doesn’t have to be a full CPU, but it does need to intercept any signal looking for the id and pass the rest to the real CPU you’re using. If there’s any cryptography involved, the problem becomes NP hard to solve unless you can get ahold of a private key, but then you might need to intercept even more signals to keep everything coherent.
And you need to solve any problems involved in having two chips (or more) work together seemlessly. And if you want to fit it on one package, now you need to make a custom one that routes the pins as you need them to be, when the current design already tries to make optimal use of the space. If you could do this, you could probably make more money working with one or more chip makers legitimately.
Odds are all of this will be more expensive than the difference between the price of the high end chip you’re pretending to be and the low end chip you’re really using. Unless you can sell them at a scale that will attract the attention of the companies that you’re trying to steal revenue from who have the tools to make detection easy regardless of what your custom chip does.
With GPUs you can do things like dump its BIOS, alter the identification string, and then re-flash the card.
I’ve modified a lot of GPU BIOSes to tweak GPU and memory clock timings or enable Mac support.
CPUs aren’t that easy to modify. I am not aware of any consumer tools that can simply re-write CPU’s internal code.
Regardless, the first time you run a benchmark and it shows that your CPU is really X and not Y, you will know something is wrong.
The article mentions someone paying a bunch for a specific CPU back in April, but then never bothered actually checking it until recently…
They may not have bought everything at the same time and were unable to check until their build was complete.
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This reminds me of the black market IC thing that caused so much chaos about 15 years ago.
