Another Bungie Act of Kindness

Yeah, that's definitely some good customer rapport!

I'm sure some employee at the repair center has his case on his own Xbox now.

Either that or he's gonna eBay it.

The case was washed.

Yeah, right.

I'm sure someone didn't just swap it out for a different casing seeing that it had monetary value...

I got a free coffee from Starbucks yesterday, because i forgot my wallet, they gave it to me.

That was cool.

When will people realize that it's cheaper for companies to simply send out new products instead of 'repairing' them. Which is exactly what happens to all tech stuff that gets *gasp* sent in and returns after many moons - it's being swapped. Pissed me off to no end when I sent in one of my first iPods and got back a refurbished one. They hadn't even copied my music over

remember good old days when there were very few bugs in games?

I got free coffee from Starbuck's once because their register was getting rebooted!

That's usually not true.

Only when nimble Chinese children's fingers do it and they make you wait for four months. In Europe or the US, 15 minutes technician time are probably more expensive than just sending you a new item.

Not true. The level of technical ability required to troubleshoot and repair these small electronics is extremely low, entry level, in fact. Therefore, they get paid a very low wage, even in Europe and the US.

Well you guys are both right.

They don't really "repair" anything they just figure out which part is bad... and replace that part. So nothing is really getting repaired, they just replace the offending component and send it back.

Yes. We call this "repair", believe it or not.

Same thing they do to cars.

I have a friend working in the cell phone repair business. He was pretty much a straight out of high school guy with no degree and a year of community college, (didn't even finish) and he got hired to test and swap out parts on Nortel phones. Trained in a few weeks, then put into the production line.

Monkeys could do the work nowadays. Electronics are now built in such a way that makes it very easy to repair, otherwise the company is spending millions training and retaining expert staff. Not to mention they would be back to square one six months later when a newer model comes out.

I'm guessing you haven't worked on cars much. You can clean or fix lots of car parts without trashing the part. It is true though that it is becoming less common.

If something is wrong with an electronics part these days, they never replace a capacitor or re-solder something, they just replace it.

You're guessing wrong.

Remove the phrase "lots of" and replace it with "very few" and you'd be correct. Not too many car parts these days that a simple cleaning will fix.

A lot less common.

Exactly. They do the same thing your car dealership will do if you bring your car to them.

However, if you do the work yourself, you're going to save yourself the $$$ by trying to clean/fix without replacing in the very rare occasions that this is possible. Likewise when I work on my own electronics, if I am able to T/S down to component level, I'll solder a new cap/choke/resistor onto a PCB.

I absolutely love working with circuit boards and soldering irons.

You work(ed) for Intel, didn't you? So you definitely know more about this than me - all I can say is that every time I had something 'sent in', I got a new item back. Maybe I'm just so thorough in destroying my stuff

What some companies do, I believe, is receive a repair order, then send out a refurbished item as soon as they can. Sometimes they'll swap in your personal data, other times, back that shit up first. Then they'll take your unit and refurbish it, then send it out as the refurbished replacement to someone else that sends their item in for repair.

Good memory! I'm not technically allowed to claim that I work for Intel, but yes, basically.

I actually work for Nikon Precision Inc., but I have a green "vendor" badge at Intel (as opposed to a blue "employee" badge) and an Intel Fab is the only "location" at which I work, on shift, alongside the blue badge employees. I repair chip manufacturing equipment.

Well, really it all depends on how chintzy the specific manufacturer is. Not all small electronics manufacturers are created equally. iPod Nano with Flash memory takes a shit, you'll probably get a brand new one. iPod Classic with an HDD, you'll probably get your iPod repaired. Pocket calculator breaks, throw it away, it's junk. Dell laptop tanks, the bad part is gonna get replaced.

In so much that you can replace a valve on an engine and not scrap it. You can't manufacture the valve yourself, and it's almost never a cleaning issue.

There's a word you two seem to be ignoring: "or".

Anyway, more to the point, there used to be places called "TV Repair" shops. You could take in broken TVs and radios, and the guys in there would solder new stuff onto the boards, rather than trashing entire boards and swapping in new ones. That was considered by most everybody to be repair.

I mean, I see your point, at some level, they are still replacing very small components, but if you want to go down that route, basically nothing is repair.

Does anyone sit there and smelt nails or screws from ore, and chop down a tree to replace a broken chunk of molding? Do they get raw materials from the earth to mix grout and then fire tiles themselves when they repair a broken bathroom floor? Do they smelt and shape a pipe from raw materials when they fix a leak? No, they don't, but it's still repair.

It all depends on where you want to draw the line of what is a repair and what is a replacement. Really, I guess I make the distinction between actual soldering of components and using your hands to plug things in.

As for auto repair, here's a really simple example: Let's say a guy gets a dent in his side panel. A lot of the times, they can reshape + repaint the panel. I guess that's not repair though -.-.

^^^ The problem is that you seem to think that replacing a sub-component of a larger assembly is not really "repair".

The problem is not that we somehow think that to "repair" something isn't "really repair" or whatever weird argument you're advancing.

I'm saying that replacing something of sufficient size (well more importantly, sufficient COST) isn't repair.

Let's say that if you have a motherboard, and it stops working, and you replace it, you aren't repairing either.

So let's say you turn in your 360, and they throw in a whole new logic board, that's basically the entire "guts" of the 360. So I'd say that is pretty much a replacement.

However, if the motor that spins the game disc broke, and they put in a new one, I'd call that repair. But in reality, they will trash the entire drive and plop in a new one.

And, I still stand by my original statement that you guys were both right (it's somewhere in between a repair and a replacement).

Hmmmm... that depends on what you consider to be "sufficient size" or "sufficient cost".

Replacing everything except for the logo label is probably "replacement" and not repair, but replacing integral internal components while leaving others as OEM definitely counts as "replacement".

I see where you're coming from, but I guess it's all just a verbal dance.

If your PC dies and the motherboard is found to be bad, you replace the motherboard. You haven't repaired the motherboard, you've replaced it. But you have repaired the PC that the motherboard came out of.

Can't agree with you. There's a lot more to the system than a "logic board", so simply replacing the "logic board" is not the same thing as replacing the Xbox 360.

Replacing the drive doesn't repair the drive, but it most certainly does repair the Xbox360.

Likewise, replacing the motor doesn't repair the motor, but it does repair the drive that the motor is a component of.

Well, thanks, but any time you take a larger device that has failed, then you replace a subordinate device in the larger device such that the larger device now functions, you have repaired the larger device. There is no ambiguity to this engineering principle.

The motherboard with the CPU on it (in the case of the 360), is the main device. All other devices in the unit are subordinate to it. You seem to have a good understanding of this type of thing so I'm sure you know what I mean. I'd say that replacing the "core" of the unit is more like a replacement than a repair. Of course, the popular term is "refurbished".

This is why i feel that such a thing is really not a repair. It's sorta like keeping the frame of a car, and replacing the entire powertrain. I mean, it would be a new car with an old "shell". This is basically what most electronics RMAs are. The real "inner workings" are pretty much entirely swapped out.

I'm not sure I completely agree with your outlook on the situation, but I do at least see where you are coming from with it.