So, looks like NZXT are looking to rip off gamers with their computer “subscription” service.
tl;dw A debt trap that’s such a bad deal that you’d be better off financing it with a payday loan. They lie about their terms and their PC specs. They advertise no contracts but absolutely have contracts, and the terms are awful.
And they are using paid influencers to promote said debt trap to those that don’t know any better, particularly children.
Probably the most insidious part of this to me. Seeing those clips of “influencers” pushing the idea of convincing your parents to get you a rental PC. Disgusting.
A debt trap that’s such a bad deal that you’d be better off financing it with a payday loan
Literally a lower monthly payment, lower total paid and you end up owning a computer if you finance your computer with a predatory payday loan than with this rental program (per GN’s math)
Edit: at $259/mo that’s already $3108/year or 2-3x the cost of a good midrange DIY PC. Also at an incredible 36% interest rate because this hypothetical individual purchased a $3000 computer on a credit card and only pays a bit more than the minimum towards it, that’s only $177/mo on a 24 month loan. Or if you just got a $1500 computer (a pretty dang good computer!) on a 12% APR personal loan (pretty common from banks) you only pay $133/mo for 12 month, own the computer and only pay a total of $1600
The only way to make this rental program look at all good is if you are literally using the computer to make money but have very littlemoney upfront for a decent enough computer to do the same job (basically the “rent it for 1 month and win a fortnite tournament” fantasy one paid promoter suggested) except, oh look, you can buy a laptop from Dell for $520 or less than two months rental cost if you really don’t have the budget and then use that to make your money to fuel your future baller PC purchase. And I can assure you, that business laptop can run Fortnite if that’s your concern, because Fortnite will run on any potato PC if you turn the prettiness down enough.
Edit 2: Also I just found a similar laptop in 1 minute on ebay for $255 to further kill that “spend your allowance to rent a computer for a month to win a fortnite tournament” fantasy
$259/mo??? I expected the price of a couple streaming services, but this is more like car payment territory.
I glanced at their site earlier (but after posting this comment) and it starts at $59/mo for a budget system with a 10th gen i5 and an RTX3050 so probably a $500ish PC when DIYed. And they have about a half dozen tiers above that up to the top $259/mo which is probably a $3000 PC if the parts were current. It’s still a bad deal no matter how you slice it though
Well shit, wish they’d posted it before black Friday. It was only an AIO.
Edit: Cancelled. It was the wrong size, anyway. Sad I’m not gonna have a small LCD on the right one, though. NZXT was by far the cheapest in that respect.
Just FYI, as per their own terms you can cancel up until it ships.
If you live somewhere with consumer rights, by law you can return it no questions asked within 14 days of receipt (actual length of time may vary, UK is 14 days)
So is Australia, and these contracts will end them in court here real quick with potentially two Government departments: ACCC and ASIC. Feel sorry for Americans.
I like my arctic liquid freezer aio. Wanted a simple one.
Same boat - just ordered an AIO directly from them and see the “we’re building your pc” emails. Hoping there’s not shenanigans with this.
Is this the first time Steve has said an uncensored fuck?
Its at least rare enough that it stood out enough for me to pause the video and go back to hear it again to confirm.
Same. My jaw dropped. Absolutely loved it.
deleted by creator
Yeah… i had to replay it too. He was quite upset.
Steve has no patience for people or company that lack empathy and abuse people.
Remind me his reaction to the email of Artesian CEO, he was quite upset too.
i dont remember this, got a recap/link?
This one: https://youtu.be/d9NzY8TDCAY?t=19m00s (’Steve Loses It’ chapter)
I appreciate you digging up the link and even timestamping the relevant area. Top class, thank you very much.
Also I forgot just how utterly massive of a cunt the Artesian CEO was. Man had significant Elon Musk vibes, Just didnt have the money or family money to stop his fall.
Who the hell is renting PCs? Sounds like a scam without even looking into this.
I mean, I could see if they tried to make this rent-to-own over 2-3 years. At half the price they’re offering.
But renting… where you’re paying over the entirety of the price in a single year, is fucking insane.
If renting, and updating it every 2 years, then for like 1/4th of the price then sure. I could see it being promoted how they are. Rent out older stock for 50% retail to at least get some value out of it while allowing people to pay ~$30 a month for a decent computer. (and then you could “upgrade” the lower tier with this to end up recouping 75% of retail over 4 years.)
But who the fuck is paying 10% of the cost a month to borrow an okay computer, even ignoring the full month cancelation fee, and ridiculous contract. (which is… ignoring a LOT.)
It is sad to see NZXT lowered to this as I used to have a decent view of them. They make some nice cases. CAM kinda lowered that view a bit, but I was in the beta for that and got a free water cooler out of it so I could overlook that (it’s improved a lot since beta, though it gathering data is still not great it’s less horrible than it was.). And pushing their own not as great products for the prebuilts still seemed okay for prebuilts for those scared to build on their own. But this is just… too much to overlook. Wild.
And looking into it as GN has done, makes it clear that’s only the very tip of the scam.
Had to rma my kraken z73 because of a known manufacturing flaw
Took 5 weeks to get a replacement.
Fuck nzxt.
Oh I made that decision when they tried to replace the screws on my recalled rizer cable instead of replacing the whole unit on a $500 pc case. Get fucked nzxt
Ok this just sounds like Rent-a-Center for computers.
Commenting to watch this later
There is a save button.
Sometimes the save button doesn’t give you context for why you saved it and it’s not something you check everyday.
There are also things called elephant trails.
People commenting to be able to easily come back to the topic are creating an elephant trail, which will exist regardless of the UI designer, if the software allows people to do it.
Except that the “ui designer” of most (all?) of the lemmy themes and apps have support for saved comments.
So no, it is just people being stupid and not understanding how websites work.
You can fight the elephant trails, or accept them being there. Your choice.
Yeah but I don’t ever use or look at that. Honestly, almost never go to look for shit later on here, so not a habit I have. So if I did save it, I wouldn’t see it til like 6 months from now and I’d probably just go… why the fuck is this saved? And delete it.
Commenting to downvote later
commenting to watch this later
Watching to comment this later
Lol at all the down votes… people could also have not engaged with your post… but apparently there is a right way to use your posting privileges and you broke the law.
I don’t understand why people get angry enough at this to down vote it
it’s not about anger, the point of downvoting is to put low effort or other random crap comments below any others that may actually contribute to the topic.
That doesn’t work for me on Lemmy because in the app I use it doesn’t sort comments that way. So I see the comments basically newest first. This is reddit behavior is what it is.
Your app should have a button to change the comment sort. I use Boost and it does.
Sync doesn’t do this by default (I haven’t changed any settings to this effect). I’m currently in settings now looking for a setting to change just to see.
Edit: Under settings there is an option for setting comment views (settings/comment options/comment views). However it defaults to new. Additionally it does the same thing in my bed browser using Alexandrite.
The point is though this doesn’t work for everyone using Lemmy and it’s definitely a carry-over habit from reddit and similar messageboard style sites.
if that was the intended layout of lemmy comments they wouldn’t have vote buttons at all.
Lemmy is meant to be a direct alternative to reddit and it copies plenty of design and user elements from there that don’t necessarily fit with the overall user use case here. There are whole instances without downvote buttons for example. This is an over-arcing statement that lumps together a bunch of instances and user bases that don’t necessarily comply with such a notion.
This is reddit behavior is what it is.
…
Lemmy is meant to be a direct alternative to reddit
There are whole instances without downvote buttons for example.
well this is not one of those instances.
