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From: filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us (Bela Lubkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amigas -- why the 90 day warranty?
Message-ID: <74.filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us>
Date: 28 Oct 89 17:53:27 GMT
References: <61.filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us> <1708@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>
Distribution: usa
Organization: R Pentomino
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X-Claimer: I >am< R Pentomino!

In article <1708@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> Jim Wright writes:
> [I (Bela) write:]
>| I would GUESS that the cost for a 1-year extended
>| warranty for an A500 or A2000 would be about $80; about $20 for an
>| external drive, also about $20 for a CBM-supplied hard disk; near zero for
>| memory expansions.

>I hope the price would be much lower.  If you figure the price of a
>plain-jane 2000 is $2000 (high), then that warranty says one out of
>25 machines will be a total dud requiring replacement.

What?  Hardly.  That cost is actually calculated assuming that maybe 1 in 5
machines will be brought in for warranty service (remembering that with a
warranty, people will bring the machine in for things that are really
ridiculous, like have mis-adjusted the contrast/brightness on the monitor).
So that's about 20 visits out of a typical 100 machines.  Let's assume $100 in
service charges on the average.  (That assumes many trivial problems, plus a
couple of bad custom chips, keyboards, drives, etc.)  Add in just one machine
going all the way bad and you're up to $4000 in expenses.  Add another $2000
in payments to the stores implementing the warranties, to cover the cost of
paperwork etc.  This leaves $2000 out of the $8000 as profit for Commodore.
That's reasonable by me.

Of course Commodore would be in a far better position to make a realistic
estimate of the cost of a warranty.  They should have a pretty good idea what
the 90-day warranty costs them.  A 1-year warranty would probably cost about
twice as much (monetarily; it might make up for it in additional sales).  I
could easily be WAY off on my assumptions.

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