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What's your latest tech purchase?

That sounds utopian.
There's nothing wrong with a better way of doing things. Besides, PCClub made money hand over fist with that policy. It instilled our consumers with a lot of confidence that we would take care of them should something go wrong, which made for serious customer loyalty(this was before the founder died, his son took over and promptly run the company into the ground). For the most part I do this at my shop, but we do test things to determine what the problem is first.

How are they going to make an exchange if they haven't tested it and found an RMA-able fault?
I don't think the consumer protection laws give a crap.
 
I think the 6T is a lower end version of the 6, I think all T versions are lower versions. I can't live without the 3.5 jack as i have nice AKG headphones. I'm just gonna keep this till it's dead, not paying stupid UK prices for high end Samsungs. Also i'm using Nova launcher on my 6

Yeah, that makes sense. I was a little late to the party so the T was all I could get at ~$730cad. I would have much appreciated the 6, with the 3.5mm jack and bigger notch. Call me weird but I fuckin hate the wedge notch on the 6T, it just looks weird. Maybe I'm just used to the big iPhone 11-style notch on the 6.

My ATH-M40x have been little used as of lately due to the phone jack being broken. It is my go-to-sleep headphones and has really nice cowhide pads from ZMF. Would like to use it regularly again.

The X3 Pro is on for $385 which seems like a screaming deal if the gsmarena review is right. I think I might jump on it tonight. Don't care about 5G or 802.11ax, but I would love to have a microSD again. Don't think any midrange chipsets aside from Dimensity 1100/1200 will catch up to the 860 anytime soon anyways

I've been using Evie launcher since basically the beginning. Really simple and really fast, sleek and professional look
 
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Yeah, that makes sense. I was a little late to the party so the T was all I could get at ~$730cad. I would have much appreciated the 6, with the 3.5mm jack and bigger notch. Call me weird but I fuckin hate the wedge notch on the 6T, it just looks weird. Maybe I'm just used to the big iPhone 11-style notch on the 6.

My ATH-M40x have been little used as of lately due to the phone jack being broken. It is my go-to-sleep headphones and has really nice cowhide pads from ZMF. Would like to use it regularly again.

The X3 Pro is on for $385 which seems like a screaming deal if the gsmarena review is right. I think I might jump on it tonight. Don't care about 5G or 802.11ax, but I would love to have a microSD again. Don't think any midrange chipsets aside from Dimensity 1100/1200 will catch up to the 860 anytime soon anyways

I've been using Evie launcher since basically the beginning. Really simple and really fast, sleek and professional look

I paid £100 for my 6 :) not new but i don't care to pay more than a couple of hundred for a phone. I don't mind the big notch on the 6 tbh. I might have a look at Evie
 
There's nothing wrong with a better way of doing things. Besides, PCClub made money hand over fist with that policy. It instilled our consumers with a lot of confidence that we would take care of them should something go wrong, which made for serious customer loyalty(this was before the founder died, his son took over and promptly run the company into the ground). For the most part I do this at my shop, but we do test things to determine what the problem is first.
Guess you had the finances to do so then, which is a luxury. Back in my retail days we always worked our butts off to provide the best service and return experience possible, but our hands were tied in a lot of cases due to long handling times and a lot of insecurity regarding actually getting things through. Though I guess that also depends on the products you sell - phone RMAs are notoriously troublesome, with a huge proportion just being some odd software bug (at least back then) which given that software isn't covered under warranty, meant most of these cases got returned to us from our service partners with an attached parts+labor bill. Nothing huge, but pretty disappointing for customers obviously.

Laptops and PC hardware is a tad easier, functionality (and thus bugs) is simpler (a PSU doesn't have that many functions, after all), so there we had some leeway, but we still didn't know which suppliers and brands would refund us and which would repair the part or send us a refurb unit - neither of which would cover the costs of giving out a new retail unit to a customer. And when you're barely running double-digit margins (in a major shopping mall with high rent to boot) that's not the type of expenses you can live with. So at least in part it was down to inconsistent RMA practices with the various suppliers and service partners - if we knew we were getting a refund, we could generally give out a replacement before getting it confirmed, but those were a minority of cases sadly.
I don't think the consumer protection laws give a crap.
Obviously not. And most of those that I've come across are great in their intentions and goals, but middling at best in execution. Norway has some pretty fantastic ones - for example, all products have a mandatory 2-5 year quasi-warranty (it's a different word but the effect is the same) depending on the 'expected lifetime of the product'. That typically means 2-3 years for phones and 5 years for nearly all other electronics. Plus they guarantee the right to a refund or brand-new product if the issue isn't rectified in two repair attempts, which is a great out for people stuck with weird and barely diagnosable issues. They also guarantee the loaner products I mentioned above. The issue is how this works in practice - for example the '2 attempts' thing is interpreted so that there is always at least one attempt at repairing anything of any value (phones etc.), even if it was obvious that replacing the unit would be the overall better solution. Similarly, "two attempts" is interpreted to mean that you need the issue verified a third time, i.e. you don't get your refund until you've RMA'd the unit a third time and the issue has been documented once again. So well-intentioned but broadly formulated laws can sadly lead to some rather poor results.
I think the 6T is a lower end version of the 6, I think all T versions are lower versions. I can't live without the 3.5 jack as i have nice AKG headphones. I'm just gonna keep this till it's dead, not paying stupid UK prices for high end Samsungs. Also i'm using Nova launcher on my 6
Yeah, that makes sense. I was a little late to the party so the T was all I could get at ~$730cad. I would have much appreciated the 6, with the 3.5mm jack and bigger notch. Call me weird but I fuckin hate the wedge notch on the 6T, it just looks weird. Maybe I'm just used to the big iPhone 11-style notch on the 6.
At least back when I bought my 3T, the T was a half-year refresh of the non-T, i.e. a new flagship with updated specs but no major design changes. 3T was a 3 with a better SoC (and updated camera?), and I think they kept that scheme going for quite a while. T models have never been lower end from what I've seen (though one can of course discuss whether jumping on the 'courage' trend of removing the headphone jack makes it lower end). Of course, that was back when Oneplus flagships were actually affordable too.
 
At least back when I bought my 3T, the T was a half-year refresh of the non-T, i.e. a new flagship with updated specs but no major design changes. 3T was a 3 with a better SoC (and updated camera?), and I think they kept that scheme going for quite a while. T models have never been lower end from what I've seen (though one can of course discuss whether jumping on the 'courage' trend of removing the headphone jack makes it lower end). Of course, that was back when Oneplus flagships were actually affordable too.

I always assumed the T was lower than non, guess i was wrong, but why remove the headphone jack. My 6 is 8mb ram/128gb storage with mem card/dual sim slot.
 
I always assumed the T was lower than non, guess i was wrong, but why remove the headphone jack. My 6 is 8mb ram/128gb storage with mem card/dual sim slot.
Because it was trendy I guess? (Plus cost savings.) I could never really grasp the logic behind that. But I guess that's the default these days.
 
Keep that card as a spare though. It's always good to have a spare, just in case..


Cheap? $700 for less than 1TB is not cheap, or did I miss something?
These usually run at $1200 a piece. So yeah, they're cheap considering. Gotta pay to play with the good stuff.
 
These usually run at $1200 a piece. So yeah, they're cheap considering
Ok, didn't know that. So yeah, $500 off is a solid discount, until you take into account you're buying a 960GB SSD for $700!
Gotta pay to play with the good stuff.
That's insane. That 960GB drive had better be ultra high-speed, ultra-high endurance SLC NAND(admittedly I know little about the drive in question...)!

EDIT;
Just took a closer look at that Newegg link and then looked it up. Those are some seriously impressive specs! I like. Those prices though... And did you see the 1.6TB version? $3702!?!? WTAH..
 
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Ok, didn't know that. So yeah, $500 off is a solid discount, until you take into account you're buying a 960GB SSD for $700!

That's insane. That 960GB drive had better be ultra high-speed, ultra-high endurance SLC NAND(admittedly I know little about the drive in question...)!

EDIT;
Just took a closer look at that Newegg link and then looked it up. Those are some seriously impressive specs! I like. Those prices though... And did you see the 1.6TB version? $3702!?!? WTAH..
These drives keep speed til full, they never slow down and their endurance is waaaay above anything on the market, so they basically last forever. They are uber expensive, but you can feel the bump in speed. My gaming rig has Optane OS drive and my workstation has three Optane drives in it.
 
Ok, didn't know that. So yeah, $500 off is a solid discount, until you take into account you're buying a 960GB SSD for $700!

That's insane. That 960GB drive had better be ultra high-speed, ultra-high endurance SLC NAND(admittedly I know little about the drive in question...)!

EDIT;
Just took a closer look at that Newegg link and then looked it up. Those are some seriously impressive specs! I like. Those prices though... And did you see the 1.6TB version? $3702!?!? WTAH..
It's Optane. It's not flash at all. Endurance ... essentially infinite, I think? The most important part is massive low-QD performance compared to flash, as it's much, much faster per die and doesn't lean as heavily on parallelism for speed. But it's always been an order of magnitude more expensive than flash too. There's a reason Intel has always marketed Optane as in-between flash and RAM - that's where it falls in terms of performance as well as price. I've always wanted to try one, but the only "reasonably" priced versions are so low capacity as to make them near useless. And their hybrid drives are bottlenecked by a stupid bifurcated x2+x2 (Optane+flash) layout (on a single m.2) rather than having a dual-mode controller using the Optane as a massive persistent cache for the NAND. Guess we could hope for that to arrive at some point in the future - a 1-2TB SSD with 256GB of Optane tacked on and some smart allocation algorithms would likely be a fantastic performer at a survivable price, though given how they seem to be (only) focused on their NVDIMMs these days that likely isn't happening.
 
I have a 100GB Optane, which while small is sufficient for me. Clocked me $150-ish, which I figured was reasonable enough.
The random read performance uptick is definitely noticeable.

Personally, I see no use for a 960GB Optane (unless you're running a database server or something), it's just a waste. I wanted the 240GB one, but at that time that was $500 or something and thus priced way out of my range.
 
Keep that card as a spare though. It's always good to have a spare, just in case..


Good point. I'm keeping it, even though I have a few spares that are even slower ;) The card is going back into my FX rig, which I also use daily.
The HD7970 is still a viable budget choice today, comparable with the 1050Ti. It will run all the popular e-sports titles easily, and many older games can be maxed out at 1080/60:


fsu.jpg
 
Incoming later today - Samsung Galaxy Watch 3.
samsung-watch3.jpeg
 
New toy!
20210830_102431.jpg


Shitty phone, shitty camera, crushed blacks
22.jpg

Also got me some black PS5 plates, diggin it more than white.
20210820_154810s.jpg

 
TP-LINK NC450 https://g.co/kgs/uyjhZj

Hopefully to catch the idiot touching my car up the wrong way, it's streamed live so might maybe possibly catch them, that could get interesting quickly.
 
That's the one i got.
I ordered it by Amazon.de but it's sold by Amazon.uk
One?!?!?! :D ;)

Still on offer I believe... Pretty decent value I think!! The 1TB version is £110 which is a fair chunk of change compared to the £75 I paid for the Cruical P5 1TB a few weeks ago.... :)
 
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