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Comment by retired

6 hours ago

I’m unable to order this laptop without a charging brick which is now illegal in the EU.

Same goes for the standard one year warranty. Should be two at minimum.

I had my country configured to Belgium while testing this.

35 comments

retired

Reply
nottorp  5 hours ago

Do they actually have a business presence in the EU?

If not, how would those rules apply to them?

Edit: tbh, the new "user friendly" idea of automatically converting US prices to the local currency of the visitor in spite of the company not having any connection to the visitor's locale always makes me think of drop shippers, not of legitimate businesses.

Especially if i'm in a non USD non EUR country, I am fully aware that there are different currencies in the world, I already have an established process for converting between those currencies and it's likely to be more to my advantage than whatever Stripe offers so please cut it down.

  • yreg  4 hours ago

    They are mandated to provide 2-year legal guarantee under EU consumer protection law when they target EU consumers -> i.e. operate an eshop that ships to EU and sells in local currencies. Regardless of where they are located.

  • looperhacks  4 hours ago

    They sell to the EU, so they have to follow their regulations. If they don't, the devices can be seized by customs.

    Tbh there are more issues if they wanted to be compliant with EU regulations. I'm fine that they aren't compliant (they aren't in the EU, after all), but it's something to be aware of when ordering from them.

walthamstow  5 hours ago

Wait til you hear about Hacker News' level of compliance with the GDPR

  • klez  4 hours ago

    I'm curious: why is hacker news non-GDPR-compliant?

    • walthamstow  4 hours ago

      You can't delete your account by self-service, you have to email dang, which is probably non-compliance because it adds friction. It's a grey area, it'd have to be tested in court. I highly doubt anyone will bring a case though. That's like calling the police on your own drug dealer. (IANAL)

      8 replies →

teekert  6 hours ago

They are free to charge you extra for taking the charger out of the box. So I'd grant them a bit of civil disobedience on this one and just take that nice GaN charger.

I can see the EU's take on this, and maybe overall this will even be good. I have some nice Anker chargers and can charge everything we have at home with them (added some USB-C to ligthning/micro-USB thingies here and there), but I'd be a bit annoyed if the EU would force my company operating with small margins to have 2 versions of my packaging workflow.

Maybe they should just "encourage" good behaviour? With a law that is less forcing, ie just say: "If you offer a version without charger, the price must be the same as with charger. " That would (slightly) encourage leaving it out, while not forcing companies' hands.

The laptop is being shipped anyway, so I assume the charger in there may be a "sweet deal" if you need one. 65W GaN chargers are a nice sweet-spot at the moment (size/power/price-wise), ie Ikea has one at 14 eur), wouldn't mine having one or two extra.

  • retired  5 hours ago

    The easiest option to implement would be to have separate SKUs for the charger and the laptop. And not three SKUs: laptop with charger, laptop without charger, separate charger.

    If you ship to multiple countries you can reduce the SKUs even more as the laptop SKU isn’t country specific anymore.

    Offering a version without the charger for the same price would not reduce ewaste which is the point.

  • throwuxiytayq  5 hours ago

    > The laptop is being shipped anyway, so I assume the charger in there may be a "sweet deal" if you need one

    You do realize you’re paying for the charger, right? And you don’t like the option of not having to purchase the charger?