NewEgg Confirms Shipping Fake Core i7s 314
adeelarshad82 writes "After originally rejecting the story, online retailer NewEgg confirmed that a shipment of Core i7s were indeed fake, and apologized for the affair. NewEgg has also broken off its relationship with IPEX, the supplier of the phony lot. The retailer said that it has already contacted affected customers and would continue to reach out and replace the counterfeit parts. We discussed the fake Core i7s over the weekend."
Counterfits are everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Lost customer (Score:1, Insightful)
After originally rejecting the story
And there's the problem.
All they needed to do when the story broke was say "We are looking into it".
By rejecting it while it was obviously true, I've lost faith in them.
Re:NewEgg handled it well, (Score:5, Insightful)
True, that's an amazing amount of professionalism and quick action on their part. Pity shame that for some Slashdot readers, that won't be enough, and they won't be happy until they see Newegg executives' heads on pikes, even if it wasn't their fault. Mmm, tasty, frothy bile...
fake fakes? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if anyone who got an i7 will try to make a fake fake to get another i7. Some one in Newegg's shipping will have to check the fakes to make sure they are real fakes. My head just exploded.
Re:New Egg (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Glad (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the entitlement mindset.
Newegg is doing their share by rush shipping replacements. This whole affair isn't their fault and they got on top of the situation quickly enough, what more do you expect?
Re:New Egg (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:fake fakes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Newegg has to track outgoing inventory to prevent internal theft, so it is a good bet they probably associated an inventory item with an outgoing order. So, if they know which order the customer is returning, they can probably trace it back to the original supplier in some manner. If they have a good tracking system, they could probably bring up that detail immediately.
Re:D&H Distributing (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly why trustworthy reporting outlets try to verify sources before reporting as fact. However, this becomes difficult in this time of now, faster, beat the other guy, instant publishing.
Re:NewEgg handled it well, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IPEX is not an authorized Intel distributor (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there ANY place to buy equipment with assurance of getting it through a 100% manufacturer authorized supply chain?
If there's humans making less money for their work than they think they should, then there will be no place with 100% authorized (secure) supply chain.
Re:Glad (Score:3, Insightful)
They are RUSH shipping the customers replacements. That is good enough to be fair. Lets put you in the same situation. You bump into me you say I am sorry. Well you wrinkled my shirt. So you should pay for my dry cleaning.
You cut me off in traffic and cost me five minutes because I hit a red light. I want cash.
Yes it is nice if they bend over backwards. In this case if you paid for rush shipping I could see them refunding it. In the end if you think they didn't do enough then don't buy from them. But this give me this or that is just a case of mistaken entitlement.
It is nice when they do it but it is not a requirement.
Re:D&H Distributing (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have a news item about something that happened at company, and low level person there gives you some information, are you just going to ignore it? Please.
Re:Glad (Score:5, Insightful)
They vetted the supplier.
It turns out they did a bad job of it.
It's their responsibility because the items were sold on their site.
Now, making good on their fuckup isn't the entitlement mindset, it's excellent, self-serving business sense. Allow me to explain, it's really quite simple:
You can buy a customer for life far cheaper than you can think by simply owning up to the problem, fixing it, then going beyond that.
It could be as cheap, and as easy as free overnight/cross shipping of the replacements. You absolutely lose money on the spot. But you're very likely to see the customer again. It's simply thinking long term.
That kind of service will get noticed and will bring people back next time because they know that even if shit goes wrong, they'll be well taken care of.
It's the same reasoning why most of my video cards are eVGA. Their customer service to my friends has been so stellar I know I'll be taken care of if their shit breaks. Yes, I wrote that correctly, I've never even had to deal with their customer service, yet they're my first choice for video cards. All because of stellar service they gave two of my friends. For a paltry $300 or so they bought three repeat customers. It's just another form of investment, and I'm living proof that it works. Hell, I just gave them great PR, and I hate PR.
Re:New Egg (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah gee. Here's the appropriate response to the fp: http://instantrimshot.com/ [instantrimshot.com]
Re:Lost customer (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd seriously lose faith in a company that blows everyone else away in customer service because of this one thing? Are you serious? So it doesn't matter that they exchanged the fakes and bent over backwards to fix the problem?
Grow the hell up and come back to reality. This entitled generation crap is beyond annoying, expecting everyone and everything to be absolutely perfect and cater to your every need and the second they don't then BAM they're horrible and evil.
Re:BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems like they're justified. HardOCP's blunder probably just cost them millions - but there's no way to measure it exactly.
The media seems to wield its power haphazardly at times.
At least with sites like TheInquirer, the damage is small if the article is wrong. They have a reputation, after all.
This is sarcasm....somewhat.... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because they let *gasp* even MERE MORTALS post reviews!!! I mean, Joe Sixpack and Mary Mundane can purchase goods and post reviews at Newegg!!
It would be different if only we Tech Gods and Wizards could post reviews, I tell you!
Like is said:
'A picture is worth a thousand words.'
Forget the comments, just look at the videos on YouTube...crotch bats, toolbox surfing in a suburban neighborhood, etc.
The same type of people that are making the comments are also posting videos, shopping online, and yes, even voting.
Re:Glad (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:New Egg (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Glad Newegg confirmed they're fake! (Score:5, Insightful)
They were leaning on that "oh, our bad, we got some 'demo units' by mistake" excuse pretty hard.
My guess is they were just passing on what thier supplier had told them until they could prove otherwise.
It's kind of a difficult position to be in. Newegg probablly didn't want to lie but they probablly didn't want to be publically seen as doubting thier suppliers either until they could prove that the supplier was indeed shipping fakes.
Re:Counterfits are everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:New Egg (Score:3, Insightful)
Correct. The problem, as usual, is with PayPal.
Re:New Egg (Score:3, Insightful)
just use your cc. you can get a prepaid cc for like $5-10 if security is that much of a worry. They charge you like $1 a transaction or so and $3 to add cash. Not a terrible deal for a completely anonymous credit card......
I mean seriously. You are far more likely to be fucked over by paypal than you are to have your credit card # used for something illegal when you buy from newegg. Unless you totally don't trust SSL or anything.....don't they have a phone number too?
Re:Counterfits are everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Much more common in tech related gear is partial fakery. The classic flash memory trick is 256MB(or whatever the value) of actual flash(and probably bottom bin stuff, at that) with the formatting or firmware claiming to be 4GB(or whatever the larger value) and doing various things certain to make the customer sad when you write more than 256MB to the device. If you get lucky, you'll get an actual 4GB of bottom-bin crap, with an "OMG LExar high speed!!11!" sticker on it.
With CPUs, basically no counterfeiters have the technical capability to produce plausible fakes from scratch for less than intel or AMD can produce the genuine article. However, there is a long history of selling overclocked and remarked low-end parts as higher end ones. That has become more difficult these days(with multipliers locked on all but the most expensive chips, you really can't overclock without the connivance of the motherboard. Intel's fancy new power-control microcontroller probably makes it even trickier). However, there is a cute way of getting around that: Modifying CPUs is hard and expensive. You need careful technique and serious rework kit. Basically not worth it. Modifying a motherboard's BIOS just a bit, to change the values that it reports for certain processor related parameters and maybe does some silent overclocking, is within the reach of a few decent software/firmware engineers. Thus you do sometimes see for sale(usually aimed at unscrupulous small computer shops, rather than retail users, CPU + motherboard combos consisting of a cheap CPU(bottom of whatever the range is at the moment) and a none-too-exciting motherboard with a BIOS hacked to claim, in all visible ways, that the CPU it is paired with is actually a much faster and more expensive unit.
Frankly, I much prefer complete fakes. They are a nuisance, certainly; but they are immediately obvious on inspection. The dangerous fakes are the ones of commodities where quality and realness are matters of degree, rather than binaries. Real/Visibly just a crude model is easy. 4GB/512MB+firmware lies can easily take some data loss to discover. Real/cheap under-specced capacitors were used, resulting in a higher 3 year failure rate can take ages to diagnose. Real/diluted to 25% of its actual dose and sold as real can get people killed and encourage drug resistance in various nasty pathogens.
Re:Caveat Emptor (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the day, before this became a lot harder, there were quite a few low end(but authentic) CPUs with faked high end markings on them, and sometimes with multiplier tweaks to match, floating around. That was back when there were more CPU vendors that were socket compatible and actually vaguely competitive, so there was probably some rebranding going on as well. I don't know if Newegg was around early enough to have been at risk of those.
These days, the only really viable way of making "functional counterfeits" of either Intel or AMD would be to have insider access to their lower binned dice before their inferior model status is lasered into them. If you have that kind of access, sneaking chunks of quite valuable product out of some of the world's most sophisticated fabs, you could probably make more money selling secrets or suitcase nukes...
Re:Glad Newegg confirmed they're fake! (Score:5, Insightful)
The marketing team doesn't need to pull out the processor, install the HSF, etc.
They just have to look at the box and see if the packaging is appealing. You don't need functional equipment for that, you don't even need dead equipment for that, you just need something that looks like the product.
Re:New Egg (Score:2, Insightful)
The deal here goes probably along this lines:
D&H has some exclusive Intel deal with Newegg. Newegg probably buys all of it's Intel stock from them. Neweggs success depends 100% on their relationship with their providers. Getting a good deal usually involves getting a few executives in a nice golfing trip, promising big sales volumes, and buying certain products exclusively from $company.
Some smartass at newegg said "Hey, we are paying X for this Intel processors, but this guys are selling them 15% cheaper!, I can increase our revenues substantially, and get a promotion!". They bought from the wrong guys. When the news got out about the fake processors, the guys at D&H immediately thought "hey, that's us", and tried to (stupidly) bully people to shut them up (while double-checking all their deliveries to Newegg for fake units). Newegg will probably has a lengthy apology to give to D&H, and will have to suck a few cocks to get things back in track.