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Comment by biot | Hacker News Reader

  > Can I fix the bad unit once I get it?
  > Yes you can, but it’s not easy.

Given that it's a fixable problem, I'm wondering why they don't ask users to return the product for a free repair/replacement. There could be a couple reasons I can think of for this. First, the headache and hassle of dealing with thousands of incoming packages they have to track, fix, and ship back... it quite possibly cheaper (parts, manpower, opportunity cost) just to send another out. Second, from a customer service perspective, immediately sending out new units is just the Right Thing to do.

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Two reasons:

1) It's a slick PR move and a gesture of goodwill to provide instructions for how to unbrick the device 2) For a $30 product, the cost of shipping a unit back would be approximately equal to the BOM so it's almost as cheap to just throw it away.

I bought a piece of hardware from Kickstarter which ended up being faulty. They asked me to return it so they could fix it and then send it back.

Theres a few problems with this.

1. Time - Its not my fault you sent me a broken product. Send me a new one and i'll send you back the broken one.

2. Its a terrible customer experience.

> SparkFun are going to make it right and will be shipping a replacement Microview for every defective unit that was shipped.

It sounds like Sparkfun is footing the bill for replacement anyways so it's much easier to just let them go through with that rather than setting up the equipment to quickly burn the bootloader into all the defective units. Setting up that equipment wouldn't be trivial either, if they're dealing with the full ~2k defective units they'd need something more durable than the breadboard setup the article showed. It's a lot of effort and another point of failure since they'd really need to test the units again after this process incase there were any issues with their repair process/equipment.

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