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Comment by robotmay | Hacker News Reader

This isn't the only bad PR tactic I've seen from Casio lately. There's a piano reviewer on YouTube who noticed a flaw in the action of a new digital piano they make, and their responses varied from claiming he was lying to _reportedly_ spamming his videos with negative comments. Here's the 3 relevant videos where he first raises the issue, responds to Casio, then just straight up dismantles the piano and proves it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7xHgXFEJUE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKAfScFK0QU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqNK3w-2C6I

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“Casio has gone with a very very small form factor and they paid a lot of attention to the form of this instrument — the shape of it, the size of it, the design of it — but the function of it wasn't as important to them. They made a lot of sacrifices with the action simply because to them having the world's most compact digital piano was apparently their Holy Grail.”

Reminds me of a certain laptop vendor.

I guess that's probably Apple in this context but Fujitsu is worse.

Fujitsu specifically mention in manuals that lid must be always left open or else laptop could be damaged from heat. I've heard MacBook throttles under every imaginable conditions, sure, but never heard that they destroy itself from heat in lid-closed mode(a feature), so,

It's fairly common across laptop vendors: few really do any proper thermal design on the products. We had Dell laptops melt on our frontend devs when docked.

At least Fujitsu gives you a warning about the design defect.

> melt on our frontend devs when docked

User error. Keep the dock on the desk and it'll melt on the desk, protecting your frontend devs.

Some laptops are designed to be open when running, like the asus rog zephyrus.

My ROG runs HOT as hell.

You may need to redo the thermal paste on the CPU and the graphics card. My g73jh needed a re-paste about every 3 months. The frame of the laptop wasn't strong enough to prevent the paste from de-laminating when I moved the laptop around.

So that's what the problem was! I had a g73 10 years ago and it burned through a graphics card and then ram while on warranty. It did get a bit better once I flashed a modded low power vbios i found on some sketchy online site.

Eventually it just stopped booting and I switched to a MBP.

Unless there is some implement preventing you running it closed, I would disagree about "designed" part.

Some cooling openings are open only when the laptop is open. So the laptop is very thin for transport and well cooled when open. You can run it closed but it's not cooled very well.

I don't know about the latest models, but Intel's CPUs have had overheat throttling and shutdown (known as PROCHOT) since the Pentium II. AMDs of the time didn't, and there's a famous TomsHardware video showing what happens if the heatsink was suddenly removed from one.

It's been my understanding and experience that CPUs will automatically throttle and then completely shut down if they get too hot, so seeing damage mentioned is a little surprising. I've encountered ill-designed laptops which would overheat and shut down if left at the BIOS setup screen for too long because the OEM software (drivers) to control the fans would only be present if the OS was loaded, but that didn't result in any actual damage.

My MacBook Pro suffers the orange blob screen problem - which I was told by an Apple guru upon inspection was only possible as a result of me closing the laptop while the fans were on (i.e. it was hot), and that therefore this is a user fault and not eligible for replacement under warranty ..

Whelp, Casio has officially made its way onto my list of brands to never buy.

You beat me to it. Using our wallet is the only type of reply businesses understand.

That's like expecting a butterfly's wing flaps to stop a hurricane half-way across the world. A lot of businesses are actually incompetent at understanding the reasons consumers haven't bought their product. Naming and shaming on social media is more effective, but likely they'll just rebuff the claims and dump more money into marketing, as marketing is often very effective at covering up a shoddy product.

Voting with your wallet is the weakest position. Make a lot of noise as to why you're voting with your wallet, so they get the message. However, in a lot of cases, they won't care, and your action is just a droplet in an ocean, inconsequential.

So you're saying vote with your wallet but also publicise the fact you are so doing on social media?

Isn't that exactly what the user you replied to did? How else could you have replied to them?

A passive comment on hackernews is not really going to do jack, you need to keep on making noise, and try to get them to acknowledge your concerns. This is actually pretty time consuming and starts to cost you time/money. There are probably like 14 other channels talking about how great this piano is vs 1 channel showing valid criticisms, and probably few CASIO consumers who truly care about the plight of a hacker hacking an old calculator enough to do something more than likely forget about it in 24 hours. If you really don't like a company's practices, you basically have to become an activist to get an effect. Silently or tepidly "voting with your wallet" often does jack. This is more a critique of the concept that voting with your wallet is very effective, as the market often sucks at punishing crap companies and can often be manipulated with wads of marketing cash.

Of course making also clear the reasons is vital, those aren't mutually exclusive actions. My only concern about naming and shaming on social media is that it's their battlefield, not ours: for each legit customer honestly criticizing a product they could pay a hundred influencers whose fee is a fraction of the TV star they would hire a decade ago.

whelp

noun

the young of the dog, or of the wolf, bear, lion, tiger, seal, etc.

The intended meaning was clear.

Dictionary error. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=whelp

How about never to buy new? Casio has cool, old synthesizers (CZ1) that would never give them another dollar if you buy used.

That's a shame, because Casio is truly one of my favorite companies in the world.

I don't have any real knowledge about their music products, but the value, style, and quality at the low end of their watch lineup (whether you define "low end" as < $100, < $50, or even < $20) is insane.

Casio is big enough that the guys from the watch division and the guys from the piano division have probably never even met

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