[throw_this_away]

I get the sentiment, but why should a hardware company let the user keep the device and their money? Issuing a refund and finding a way to retrieve the device so it can be resold makes much more sense to me. Especially for a small company....

Giving away your product for free to every customer that complains seems like a quick way to go out of business.

If you buy a faulty ipad from apple, they'll certainly give you your money back, but they'll make you return the ipad.

[qume]

Super simple - turn your worst anti-evangelist into your biggest supporter. For the value of a used, possibly defective device with a $99 retail (therefore costing probably $20-35 to produce).

It's hard to explain, but I've lived through this so many times, and seeing an angry customer turn into a better marketing resource than any adwords campaign, and getting the warm fuzzies at the same time, is good business in my book.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If you buy a faulty ipad from apple, you can certainly get your money back, but you need to return the faulty device too

Sure, but Apple won't remotely disable your device until you turn it in for a refund. If you want to preëmptively cut off services, you should initiate the refund. That leaves the customer with a free (albeit broken) product. This is partly why few companies remotely disable devices after purchase, particularly as a retaliatory measure.

[throw_this_away]

Yeah, definitely not advocating for remote disabling of anything. Only responding to the sample support response and suggesting that it's worthwhile to retrieve the device and issue the refund. Not just issue the refund.

[jo909]

Not a 99 dollar retail price device. I'd guess the hardware earned the developer maybe 10, 20 bucks?

Loosing one or two less future sale probably makes up for the loss.

Understanding that one customers frustration and improving the experience for other new future customers could literally be priceless.

[problems]

They're probably making way more than $10-20 on that thing - you can buy wifi capable dev boards for $10 out of China. If you're producing in bulk, you can probably build that even cheaper.

The marginal cost to make more units is dirt cheap, I'd be surprised if it's >$20 - the cost to develop the whole system in the first place is the hard part on the technical side of things. Then there's the business side which they just blew pretty bad. Giving the customer the hardware costs them almost nothing - write it off to make the customer happy. As long as you don't have to do that too much, it's perfectly sustainable.

[xanderstrike]

If the company only makes $20 bucks on it, then they're losing $80 by giving it away. That's how profit margins work.