"All brands have units that slip through quality control, so that doesn't matter"
There's a difference between Razer and ASUS vs other brands when it comes to the level of checks their hardware goes through. Occasional, defective units do slip through for all brands, but when numerous customers receive multiple defective products in a row from these companies as replacements for an existing defective product, it goes from a statistical anomaly to a common problem.
"Can't I just use my warranty? That's the safety net for that kind of thing isn't it?"
Many brands that have history of poor quality control also have a history of poor post purchase support. ASUS less so (people do get warranty repairs through them), but I wouldn't hold your breath if the screen dies or something. Razer, on the other hand, can be near impossible to maintain contact with, has lost people's laptops in the past, and even totally ghosted people on initial contact for legitimate warranty complaints and concerns. Third party insurance might be useful, but keep in mind that you're likely paying for a single replacement that might involve paying a deductible.
"What about Lenovo, MSI, and HP's hinge problems? Isn't that bad QC?"
Hinge defects are RARELY quality control issues, they are almost always a result of poor design practices by numerous companies. Notably MSI, but many other consumer notebook brands have lines that suffer from this problem. Mainly 2-in-1s.
"Can't laptop companies accidentally produce a bad batch of products? Is it a QC issue then?"
Companies have been found to have produced bad batches of laptops in the past, notably a specific variant of the HP OMEN 15 sold to US BestBuys with backlight controller defects. Often this is a product of inadequate or nonexistent QC processes for a specific component or even the entire product, but ultimately it's a sign of little to no effort being put in by the company to prevent defective items from reaching consumers hands. A store shouldn't have an entire shelf full of defective computers purely because the factory produced them all at the same time.
"Only 3 people have had repeated defective units? How is that an indication of a problem?"
Essentially, when it's one person you can somewhat rationalize that this may be an anomaly and the customer is simply unlucky. However, the chance of it happening to that customer is very low in general (assuming QC is operating appropriately), and if it's happened to them previously with the same brand, it counts as a second case of the same issue. If a second or third person reports the same experience, it goes from a potential anamoly to a definitive issue with the brand real quick. You take an optimistic 0.01% (1 in 10k) chance occurance of multiple dead units in a row and multiply them together and you get the chance of it just being a fluke. After two or three similar experiences, it's safe to say that there's something very wrong at the company's factory.
Written by codehusky.com