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).
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.
Amazon turned out really weird. I feel like the idea of Amazon should be consolidating reputable retailers together, but they decided to open the floodgates to random people and now it's little better than wish.com. Maybe they should split the site up and push all the random sellers onto a different platform.
Yep, just bought a new pixel directly from the Google store on Amazon. They shipped me a refurbished one that was carrier locked to Verizon. It's been 3 weeks since I shipped it back and they still haven't checked it in n for a refund. Prob never buying anything worth more 200 bucks from them again.
I just got straight to the source on Ali for all my chinesium stuff, although if you don't want to wade through the express it can be a chore. And express vendors can be as expensive as Amazon.
Ebays not bad, especially for used gizmos. And anything important I just get it from a legitimate retailer.
It really is. On eBay the seller has a rating. On Amazon the item has a rating. You're just sort of randomly buying the thing you want and hope to get a good seller.
I ordered four m.2 chips for a raid and one of them was not like the others. Clearly a diff brand chip with a sticker transferred to it. Had I not bought multiple chips I might not have caught on.
Fuck amazon for anything of value. I now use it only for things like books and cat litter.
Regarding that ... I recently bought a hefty biography on Oppenheimer - should have had more than 500 pages, great reviews. What arrived was a 50-page small format booklet. Not even books are a "safe buy" on Amazon.
I don't buy books from them any longer because their packaging is so poor that most of the time books arrive to me damaged from being tossed into a too large box for shipping.
If you're building systems, I would assume you're the kind of person that knows how they work.
The system tells you what CPU it has on boot.
The BIOS tells you what CPU you have.
MemTest86 would have told you what CPU you had when you tested it after assembling your system.
Windows tells you what you have in Settings > About and Task Manager.
Apps like CPU-Z have been downloaded a billion times and tell you what CPU you have.
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.
Considering how expensive individual components can be, it’s always a good idea to ensure you got the exact model you paid for while there’s still a chance to return it or report fraud to your credit card company. Even with NiB items mistakes can be made and the wrong item could be shipped out.
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
Yeah, I think this is the real danger. "I don't know why this i9 isn't performing like expected" is a problem where the cause may be much harder to trace if people can reliably change what the processor reports itself as. And even then, the question only even gets asked by those who actually benchmark it.