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Comment by stymaar | Hacker News Reader

> there really are a lot of potential safety and reliability problems when using random third party versions of components.

What are you talking about?

If a seller sells you random junk that causes safety issue, they are liable of the damage like the OEM would if their product was bad.

Then, if the seller is in a jurisdiction where you can't hope to sue, then it's either your problem for picking this random seller on their website, or we should make it Amazon's problem to feature this kind of sellers in the first place. Surely the biggest retailer on the planet could afford vetting businesses selling on its platform to protect consumers' safety.

In any case, the fact that Bosch's ecosystem is closed offers no additional protection whatsoever, as shady sellers already sell counterfeit components (that may or may not work at all).

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> What are you talking about?

> If a seller sells you random junk that causes safety issue, they are liable of the damage like the OEM would if their product was bad.

No, the GP comment is right. I’ve worked on products where a lot of users did mods and used third party accessories.

Customers don’t care who, how, or why their product broke. They want to make noise and try to get a warranty fix for it. Customers would try to mod their devices, break it in the process, and then spend weeks trying to drag us on social media until we relented and shipped them a new one for free.

They’re not going to be pursuing damages against the Aliexpress vendor who sold them a flawed battery pack, nor the Amazon seller called WOBALUBAFY that has already disappeared, nor the YouTuber who hastily showed them how to solder some things together.

They always try to hide the evidence and claim the product failed by itself because the big American company has the deep pockets and the ability to send them free stuff to avoid bad PR.

Right, I see what you mean, but that's merely “saving the company the hassle of bogus support requests” and still has nothing to do with the claimed “improves reliability and consumer safety”. This actually confirms my intuition that the safety argument is BS (as always with this argument).

And even from a “bogus support request” PoV I fail to see how opening up your product degrades things, as the risk of a user having an issue with third party components should be lower, not higher, if the said components don't have to hack around proprietary restrictions.

Just call hem out on social media, show the evidence and then just ignore them.

The closed system doesn’t (only) prevent counterfeit systems, it also prevents someone from maliciously releasing a mod that could make the motor accelerate instead of break at some random time.

It’d be negligent for anyone to release a product like this without locking down the FW.

Many years ago, we did exactly that: our product had FW update support and our biggest concern was a rogue hacker creating a package that would brick the product.

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