This argument is not especially helpful as a defense against a claim of fraud. It does nothing to explain why you'd give reviewers devices with different performance than the devices you sell.
This argument is not especially helpful as a defense against a claim of fraud. It does nothing to explain why you'd give reviewers devices with different performance than the devices you sell.
Pragmatically, when you have enough complexity that explaining the fraud is difficult, it's still fraud but they're likely to get away with it.
I find it trivial to imagine someone (who's actually invested in the problem, and not just trying to make you go away) peering at you and asking "OK, so this one has 02031 etched on one of the components on the PCB, and this reviewer says it should be 60523, and you want a full refund because you consider that fraudulent? Does the box say which kind it's supposed to contain? No? Fine, I see that when you copy this enormous disk image, um, it looks like it's working? Sure, I can wait another 40 seconds. OK, yes, I see that the speed has dropped from about 2000 to about to 390. And you're saying they committed fraud because it's not supposed to drop? It is, but only to 660? Are you sure your disk isn't just filling up? Maybe you need to run Windows Update or defragment your hard drive...it just finished, was that delay really that bad? How often are you copying a file this big anyways?"
The point is that navigating the above conversation, much less winning it in a courtroom or having it so often that massive numbers of people boycott a manufacturer, is an enormous hurdle. Until it's more easily surmountable, it's immensely profitable for manufacturers to commit this sort of fraud.
This is why you have subpoenas and discovery. It seems likely that an internal email chain exists discussing intent to deceive. Even for unsophisticated jurors, that's enough of a smoking gun to make it an open & shut case.