[skeoh]

I absolutely love this. It would be easy enough for Valve to say "do not open the Steam Deck" and leave it at that. Instead they present clear, sensible reasons for recommending against opening the device while acknowledging that this advice won't stop anyone who really wants to open one up.

[lmilcin]

Of course they are still saying "do not open". It voids warranty.

But they are not going out of their way to make it hard.

[colejohnson66]

In the US, the FCC has made it clear in recent years that “warranty void if removed” stickers are illegal. Manufacturers can only void the warranty if they can show that any defects are caused by your tinkering.

[lmilcin]

Well somehow I missed that (and also I am from Poland which means the sticker is still enforceable here).

But being amateur electronics engineer myself I actually agree with the "warranty void if opened". Handling electronics safely is not trivial and if you touch electronics with your bare hand you can easily damage it due to static discharge. And there is going to be no way of telling who is exactly responsible for the damage.

I have myself destroyed a bunch of things before I have learned the lesson.

I have also seen a lot of electronics that have been "handled" by repair shops. I repair things for fun, but I know people who do it as their day job and frequently they have special rate for repairs when somebody has already tinkered with it. Mainly because of shit people do to electronics.

I just don't like when manufacturers go out of their way to make it hard for me to understand and repair something when I supposedly own the device and bear full responsibility for my mistakes.

[genocidicbunny]

I think you and the parent comment agree. Just opening an electronic device is not necessarily damaging to it. The damage is done by improper handling.

The FCCs argument is based on the notion that as long as you handle the device correctly, the manufacturer shouldn't be able to deny warranty _just_ because you opened it. You need to actually damage the device to lose out on warranty service.

[lmilcin]

What I mean is that it is almost never possible to prove who caused ESD damage. It just fries some unfortunate internal part of some integrated circuit.

And I can understand companies not wanting to deal with this.

When I design electronics I often think of how to make it resistant from people touching it on the outside (ports, enclosure, etc.) but there is about nothing I can do to prevent it getting killed due to direct touching the PCB.

And newer designs are only getting more and more fragile. This mainly due to more and more of the circuit being integrated in chips (so when you touch it it is more likely to hit directly a chip), faster communication paths (so they have less capacitance which could be helpful in filtering the shock) and finer manufacturing process (the chips themselves are less and less resistant to ESD).

[rightbyte]

What consumer electronics actually have problems with finger ESD? Ram? My computers don't have any "warranty void" stickers.

Also, being worried about handling PCBs by direct touch is just silly.

[occamrazor]

Poland is in the EU, the sticker is not enforceable. The seller (not the manufacturer) must provide two years of statutory warranty.

[Spivak]

Which is why they say in the video that the warranty doesn’t cover damage “that you do.”

[lights0123]

They actually made it very clear to say that "the warranty doesn't cover any damage that you do" by opening it, not the act of opening it.

[t-writescode]

As far as I understand, no warranty does, it’s just that car companies (where warranty work is usually talked about) err on the side of happy customers, even when it’s those customers’ faults (like burning a clutch too much because someone doesn’t know how to drive a manual. E.g. maaaaaaybe it might have been a bad clutch that caused it to die after 20k miles)