neuroanatomist said:
dgatwood said:
Almost every electronics manufacturer in the world would have done a silent recall for this sort of failure, and would have done the repair for free, even outside the warranty period. It's a bit scary that Canon doesn't do that. Not doing so significantly tarnishes my opinion of Canon as a brand.
So if I'm reading this correctly, you're saying that almost every electronics manufacturer in the world would have done a recall based on two failures for which they have evidence? That's tarnished thinking, IMO. If a recall was initiated based on a minuscule fraction of failures, 'almost every electronics manufacturer in the world' would have gone bankrupt by now.
A silent recall != a recall. A silent recall is an internal notice that says, "If you see this problem, fix it, don't charge the customer, and don't tell them why." You'd be surprised how frequently these things happen. You'd also be surprised how frequently most manufacturer service reps silently authorize a warranty exception, even without a formal notice, particularly for products that are just a couple of months out of warranty, as these are. (Bear in mind that the 24-70 II didn't ship until September of 2012, so the
absolute oldest lenses out there are only five months out of warranty.)
For the most part, the cost of a gratis repair is less than the cost of a lost customer. So unless something is obviously caused by neglect, most companies give their service reps a lot of leeway to extend one-time repair coverage to customers even if their product isn't quite under warranty. And there are certain types of failures that simply shouldn't happen anywhere near the end of the warranty period.
Catastrophic failure of a lens coating is one of those things that should never happen, even within a decade of the end of the warranty. If it is happening to a few people in the first few months out of warranty, unless there was a process change to fix it, it's going to start happening to a
lot of people a few months later. And if there was a process change to fix this problem, then Canon knows about it, and it's gross negligence (bordering on willful fraud) to not have a silent recall for all lenses within the affected serial number range. Either way, sending a $555 bill is really, really
bad customer service by industry standards.
neuroanatomist said:
Apple issued a recall for MB Pros with the chip while nvidia was still denying the problem, and when nvidia finally acknowledged the issue it cost them $3B in market cap and their CEO was sued for covering up the extent of the problem. I guess you should also remember this thread the next time you're deciding whether to buy a computer with an nvidia chip...
Actually, Apple issued a semi-silent recall—a repair extension program that AFAIK wasn't announced to customers (except for the notice on their website). Most people only heard about it when they took their machines in for repair and got them fixed for free outside of the normal warranty period. They didn't ask people to send in their hardware if it wasn't having problems. And yes, I'm wary of NVIDIA hardware as a direct result of that incident, but personally, I place most of the blame on Europe for the ROHS nonsense that has single-handedly lowered electronics reliability more than all the other environmental initiatives in the last hundred years combined.
