There's nothing wrong with a better way of doing things. Besides, PCClub made money hand over fist with that policy. It instilled our consumers with a lot of confidence that we would take care of them should something go wrong, which made for serious customer loyalty(this was before the founder died, his son took over and promptly run the company into the ground). For the most part I do this at my shop, but we do test things to determine what the problem is first.
Guess you had the finances to do so then, which is a luxury. Back in my retail days we always worked our butts off to provide the best service and return experience possible, but our hands were tied in
a lot of cases due to long handling times and a lot of insecurity regarding actually getting things through. Though I guess that also depends on the products you sell - phone RMAs are notoriously troublesome, with a huge proportion just being some odd software bug (at least back then) which given that software isn't covered under warranty, meant most of these cases got returned to us from our service partners with an attached parts+labor bill. Nothing huge, but pretty disappointing for customers obviously.
Laptops and PC hardware is a tad easier, functionality (and thus bugs) is simpler (a PSU doesn't have
that many functions, after all), so there we had some leeway, but we still didn't know which suppliers and brands would refund us and which would repair the part or send us a refurb unit - neither of which would cover the costs of giving out a new retail unit to a customer. And when you're barely running double-digit margins (in a major shopping mall with high rent to boot) that's not the type of expenses you can live with. So at least in part it was down to inconsistent RMA practices with the various suppliers and service partners - if we knew we were getting a refund, we could generally give out a replacement before getting it confirmed, but those were a minority of cases sadly.
I don't think the consumer protection laws give a crap.
Obviously not. And most of those that I've come across are great in their intentions and goals, but middling at best in execution. Norway has some pretty fantastic ones - for example, all products have a mandatory 2-5 year quasi-warranty (it's a different word but the effect is the same) depending on the 'expected lifetime of the product'. That typically means 2-3 years for phones and 5 years for nearly all other electronics. Plus they guarantee the right to a refund or brand-new product if the issue isn't rectified in two repair attempts, which is a great out for people stuck with weird and barely diagnosable issues. They also guarantee the loaner products I mentioned above. The issue is how this works in practice - for example the '2 attempts' thing is interpreted so that there is
always at least one attempt at repairing anything of any value (phones etc.), even if it was obvious that replacing the unit would be the overall better solution. Similarly, "two attempts" is interpreted to mean that you need the issue verified a third time, i.e. you don't get your refund until you've RMA'd the unit a third time and the issue has been documented once again. So well-intentioned but broadly formulated laws can sadly lead to some rather poor results.
I think the 6T is a lower end version of the 6, I think all T versions are lower versions. I can't live without the 3.5 jack as i have nice AKG headphones. I'm just gonna keep this till it's dead, not paying stupid UK prices for high end Samsungs. Also i'm using Nova launcher on my 6
Yeah, that makes sense. I was a little late to the party so the T was all I could get at ~$730cad. I would have much appreciated the 6, with the 3.5mm jack and bigger notch. Call me weird but I fuckin hate the wedge notch on the 6T, it just looks weird. Maybe I'm just used to the big iPhone 11-style notch on the 6.
At least back when I bought my 3T, the T was a half-year refresh of the non-T, i.e. a new flagship with updated specs but no major design changes. 3T was a 3 with a better SoC (and updated camera?), and I think they kept that scheme going for quite a while. T models have never been lower end from what I've seen (though one can of course discuss whether jumping on the 'courage' trend of removing the headphone jack makes it lower end). Of course, that was back when Oneplus flagships were actually affordable too.