STORY: I purchased my wife a Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 9.7" in December 2017. In October 2019 she knocked the screen which caused a crack. I offered to have screen repaired, but she opted to buy a newer version (Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 10.5"). I decided to have the S3 repaired by Samsung for $380. At the time they supposedly ran diagnostic and declared it had no other faults. In August 2022 the power & volume buttons stopped working. I sent it to Samsung for repair. I was called by Samsung and advised that the fault was a MANUFACTURING DEFECT and it would cost $389 to have it repaired. I was advised that it would probably be cheaper to replace it. Even though the S3 Tablet is now 5 years old, it is still useful to me. Whilst clearly out of warranty I argued with Samsung that as it was a manufacturing defect the repair should be at no cost. (they donāt argue about warranty with manufacturing defects in their washing machines!). I lost the argument but they reduced the cost of the repair by $100 and I paid $289 to get my repaired S3 Tablet back.
My assertion is that companies should have a responsibility for their products, no matter how long, if the product has a manufacturing defect (which presumably they are aware of).
Welcome to the Community @bennie919,
While the parts that constituted the manufacturing defect were 5 years old prior to failure Samsung could argue that is the reasonable serviceable life of an S3. Regardless if they put in writing it was a manufacturing defect you could compose a well researched and presented formal āLetter of Complaintā addressed to a senior manager and ask for your $289 back.
At 5 years on it is not obvious which way it would go, and from your post it is not obvious if you went formal with a Letter of Complaint or just dealt with the service organisation.
You can find lots of information on the Community searching on āLetter of Complaintā and be sure to refer to the ACCC pages (also linked in many places) regarding your rights.
If you follow up please keep your topic updated with how you go.
I have given up on getting a better resolution, from Samsung. Their āargumentā is essentially that the S3 had exceeded it usable life. However, my view is that when I buy a product, and pay full price, I donāt expect it to have a manufacturing defect that could fail at any time. Itās just luck that it did not fail until this year.
Iāll leave the matter there but, as usual, buyer beware.
It is annoying that smart products, whether a phone, tablet, watch or computer is built and sold knowing it has a short technological life. The manufacturers know that in a few years most consumers will seek a new product with more bells and whistles. A small minority of consumers try and buy quality products which will last what they think is a good service life.
Short technological lives causes significant e-waste resulting from the desire to keep up with the Joneses. 5 years for a tablet irrespective of a manufacturing fault or not is seem as a good service life and possibly outside the Australian Consumer Law/consumer guarantee. If one considers a tablet has a similar life expectancy as a smart phone, even Choice has indicated that around 5 years is a good lifeā¦
For many products, especially those in the technology area, will have shorter lives than those who try and buy quality long lived products. It unfortunately is the consumer world we now live.
It depends on how you view āmanufacturing defectā. A complex device like a tablet or a car has many components. It is common in industry to build each component so it lasts for a similar time but not for a century. A part that lasts that long will not be useful unless all the other parts that are required also last that long as the device will fail anyway. This approach attempts to give the longest product life for a given price and save wasting money on parts that have been over-engineered and outlast the others.
In that situation any failure during normal non-destructive use can be viewed as a manufacturing defect because they could have done better. Conversely we could describe the parts as having a design life span. In the extreme case we call it planned obsolescence when, by design, the product fails after a while to make you buy another.
Should we pay three times the price for a product that lasts ten times as long? Looking at the piles of material going to landfill I say we should. Looking at the pace of development in cars or electronics in the last 50 years I say no I want a new one now and then.
I once had an ancient Toyota Hilux diesel that had been to the moon and back. The major mechanicals and body looked like they would go for many more years and according to my mechanic probably would. It was quite uncomfortable, had zero safety features and in slippery conditions reverted to one wheel drive and would get stuck at the drop of a hat. I was quite happy to get rid of it and get a more modern design before it had a major failure even though it might well have gone on for another decade. Having a design lifespan is not all to the customersā detriment.
From a security perspective they are right. It appears that the last operating system supported on the tablet was Android Pie, released on this tablet in 2019. It is not clear whether Samsung has continued to push security updates, but from personal experience I would say probably not.
Mobile devices are generally designed as life-limited disposable commodities. They get manufacturer support for a few years, and after that you are on your own. Consumers are getting increasingly annoyed at this, and over the last few years there have been several efforts to make devices that are not ālocked inā to a particular platform and can be maintained separately, and/or repairable/long-lasting. Of course, these attempts have largely (but not entirely) failed because they do not have the support or funding of a multi-billion dollar enterprise such as Samsung or the ecosystem of apps that Apple and Google can boast.
Your Samsung S3 tablet is nearly five years old; for Samsung that means it is dead to them. Samsung has moved on, and expects that you do the same. Other manufacturers will provide support for five years plus, and that is one of the reasons I finally made the move to a more expensive Apple ecosystem - but again we are expected to treat these things as commodities and replace last yearās model with the new version. As consumers gradually lose that āneedā for the latest, companies are struggling to meet profit targets in the hardware business and so increasingly rely upon subscription āservicesā to make money.
Hopefully we will eventually reach a point where a mobile deviceās lifespan is measured in decades rather than years (or months) - but that needs consumer push-back and in some cases government support to stop companies from continually trying to sell us the same thing in a new wrapper while dumping support for old models.
