Tivo wants to charge me $50 plus return shipping to exchange a unitwithin warranty!!

It's the same TiVo warranty for the past 7-8 years. It's the same warranty many consumer electronics items have. If you want better warranty coverage, you should have purchased extended warranty.

 

Yes all Tivo units carry the same Warranty for a while now, and the Warranty stinks.

The HD problem the OP has is covered by the Warranty Tivo has with the manufacturer of the HD (3 to 5 Years for a HD). So it costs nothing for Tivo to replace the HD, and then pass it off to some other person.

Does Tivo even offer an extended Warranty? Many Companies offer One, as well as CC Companies. Yes they can be expensive, and please read the fine print very carefully. But sometimes they are a good thing.

Maybe in Tivo's case, they should look into offering one, but mind you, then they probally could not work out a fair Month to month rate, and MSD and everything else.

 

Wrong! You'll talking bout drives sold to consumers (1-5 years), not to OEMs.

 

Advertisements

BTW, Amex should have paid for the $50, not TiVo.

 

I think we're going in circles. This has already been covered in this thread.

 

There is a difference between "would" and "should". TiVo was being nice.

 

1. As C3 said, the warranty is very clearly defined. Shame on your for not reading it and understanding.
2. As Arcady said, that hard drive that you plugged in is hardware (last I checked) Buh-bye warranty coverage!
3. If you were so upset that the Tivo has such a lousy warranty, then you shouldn't have bought it. "I didn't know" isn't an excuse here.
4. "Being nice" has no place in business. Tivo isn't in this to make friends, they're in it to make money. Folks like you that void their warranty and then complain loud and hard enough to get their misdeeds covered make that much more difficult. Not to mention the morality of the whole deal (you did of course mention to Tivo that you had connected an unsupported hard drive to your unit when you called in, right?).

You can roll your eyes and take a nap and drink your juice as much as you want to. Your selfish sense of entitlement has no place here.

 

And how much do you think the cable companies pay for those PoS SA8300HD's? I'd bet less than the cost of a Tivo HD -- far less. (Otherwise, they could bulk purchase Tivo HD's and rent them instead.) My problem with renting cable boxes is the never ending fee; you will pay for that box over and over. My two DSR6000 cost me nothing -- $99 - $100 rebate. My HDVR2 cost $279 (existing customer) and I've had it for ~5 years. @16$/month to rent a cable box, unless they give me a brand new/never before used cable box every 18 months, it's cheaper to buy the thing. Yes, hardware fails -- one of those DSR6000's is dead (the tuners are burned out), but it lasted continuously for SEVEN YEARS -- but it's not extremely common.

 

Perhaps you should have researched this before purchasing, then. Since it's obviously that important to you.

Well if that's the case then I'll just wire up a USB plug to a wall outlet and see what Tivo says about the warranty, then.

You're only complaining because you broke your unit, and now Tivo is expecting you to comply with their published policy. Poor you, for having to follow the rules.

Good on you for telling the tech the whole truth. Too bad you're wrong about the being nice thing. Being nice doesn't extend to giving things away for free that they don't have to.

Again, compliance with published policies != crappy service. What you prefer is to get something for nothing, even when you aren't owed it. That's an overblown sense of entitlement.

 

I guess you don't understand how OEM parts generally work. The manufacturers sell parts in bulk to a company that will use them to make a more complex device made up of many parts from many manufacturers. The company building the device then becomes responsible for warranty issues on all of the individual items inside their device and guarantees them under a blanket warranty. Because the company making and selling the complex device has taken on the responsibility of handling warranty claims on the individual parts, they get the parts at a discount.

Also, the drive is guaranteed for 1 year. By Tivo. That's the 1 year on PARTS. If the drive fails somewhere in the 91-365 day window, they don't charge you for the replacement part. They charge you for the LABOR to install the part.

I don't understand why you're so pissed at Tivo over this. The warranty terms are spelled out very clearly. If you were unaware of the terms, that's your fault. If it's so important, you should have taken 5 minutes to read the terms which are available to anyone who cares to look. They're not filed in a dark basement...locked file cabinet...beware of leopard...etc. The 3/12 month warranty is not at all unusual in the world of consumer electronics. Heck, it's better than many devices which are a straight 3 months. Or even 1/3.

If you bought a new refrigerator, would you just assume that it comes with a 3 year parts/labor warranty or would you verify that before making the purchase? Oddly enough, I picked that appliance and said "3 years" because I think that's a reasonable warranty on a fridge. Then I checked. Turns out fridges in the $500-1000 range tend to have a 1 year warranty on parts and labor. Some have longer coverage on the "sealed system". Good thing I did some research.

 

Don't you just hate the "It clearly states" comments. You can just imagine the smug face those people have when they are typing sentences like that.

When I buy a premium product at a premium price I do expect to get a premium experience. I do not include reading warranties or manuals as pleasurable enough to include in the premium experience.

A lot around tivo is based around the good will towards tivo (I live my tivo syndrome) because if you really think about it it is hard to justify to pay $800 for a box that does almost the same thing as my cable providers box which costs next to nothing.
Tivo definitely lost some points on this in my books and I will think twice about impulse buying anything else from tivo in the future.

 

You mistake incredulity for smugness. I don't understand how someone can make an $800 purchase (impulse or not) then be upset when it doesn't have some feature or guarantee that they never bothered to verify. Not only act upset but behave as if they were mislead or deceived.

 

If it "costs next to nothing", how come Comcast wouldn't rent a DVR to me unless I pay them $60 more per month?

 

It's funny, I guess it depends on who you talk to. Same sorta problem,couldn't get it out of the set-up mode, and if I did, it would only work for an hour or two. Called Tivo, they paid for shipping both ways, replaced my Series 3 with a brand new one, and I purchased mine in December. No hassles just quick, professional service. THANK YOU TIVO!

 

Being within the published policy and having a crappy warranty are not mutually exclusive, as this thread clearly shows.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but all the other CE devices I've bought in the last several years (aside from refurbs) (HDTVs, game systems, computer parts) have all had 1 year parts and labor warranties. I never even thought to look and see whether TiVo was still doing the idiotic split warranty.

Good that I bought my S3 using my Amex.

Personally, I think any company that has a parts only warranty (or period of a longer warranty) should be required by law to send you whatever parts are required to fix the item so that you can either do it yourself or pay a third party to do it. They should not be able to use the warranty as an almost guaranteed revenue stream.

IBM made me happy a couple of years ago when my laptop needed service (it had a 3 year warranty, too!). I told them what was wrong. They asked me whether I would like to send the laptop to them at their expense, take it to the service depot in town, or have them send me the broken part. I chose the latter. The next day I had a new hard drive in hand along with restore CDs. The only thing I needed to supply was a screwdriver.

After replacing the hard drive, I put the broken one back in the box, slapped the supplied return shipping label on it, and called DHL for a pickup. Before I had managed to tape the box up (I had to find some tape) they were at the door for the return.

That is good service. Not "send it back to us at your expense and we'll charge you labor to fix the problem we created."

TiVo could at least get with the program and have a parts and labor warranty like almost everybody else who sells electronics, even if they make the end user pay for their **** up by not paying shipping to get it back to them for repair. Had they built the box properly in the first place, no service would be needed, thus saving both TiVo and the customer cost and hassle.