Oh and prime video has ads now.
If the item is counterfeit, not only is sometimes the packaging/actual product identifiable by anyone that is actually a tech person, but lets assume that it's identical or whatever.
Unboxing?
When you open the AirPods box for the first time does the iPhone do that animation and say "Set up AirPods..." etc?
When you use it, does it sound at least kinda like the quality you expect from a 200 USD Apple headphone? Does Dolby Atmos work, the stems on both sides, the wireless charge on the box, the Find My features, live translation, transparency, noise cancellation? All of those features are present and working?
Going to settings -> AppleCare and Warranty should show the time of manufacture, of purchase, and the end time for the warranty (or if AppleCare, for AppleCare).
I guess I see a counterfeit passing my step 1: hardware, or maybe step 2: software (really shouldn't tbh? Apple should cover for this).
But the data on AppleCare and Warranty come from Apple's server. Even if they spoofed the serial number that would mean guessing a correct serial number for that same product type and spoofing the date of sale etc on AppleCare&Warranty.
I honestly don't see how this can happen. If the counterfeit is honestly so identical at that point it's just the same product, but even so.
I buy clothes, other tech stuff there. Is it really necessary to instill on me and hundreds of other OCDs the constant existential fear that everything we buy is actually an exactly identical and unverifiable impostor of the real item, but not actually real?
Edit: Just to clarify, I've indeed used warranty/AC+ on most of these items and all were real. For now.
The packaging is basically identical, unless you carefully scrutinize font DPI or alignment.
Have a look at YouTube videos; for a good AirPods counterfeit it's genuinely hard to tell things apart.
2. If you’ve never seen/held the genuine item or don’t have them side to side, it can be very difficult to tell which is the genuine one
Amazon sent me fake RAM a couple times years ago. It was a space blanket in a fake crucial RAM box. I’m 99% sure Amazon took the return and shipped the retuned space blanket on the next order.
I actually have a recent example : I do woodworking and for the last step of finishing some of the thing I build, I use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil. Beeswax has been harder and harder to find locally. Not so long ago, every hardware shop had some. Now it has been displaced by synthetic product. So unless you know a local beekeeper, you are sol. So, resigned, I went to Amazon. It had a trove of listing for "100% natural beeswax". Turns out, ALL of them are paraffin dyed to look like beeswax. You can report it to Amazon, they don't care. They will reimburse you, but never remove the listing.
* https://imgur.com/gallery/beeswax-test-with-uv-lamp-c3uBW3G
The beeswax I get from a local apiarist looks nothing like that under a blacklight, and in fact is quite (pale) orange. Carnuba wax mixtures fluoresce yellow. My box of paraffin fluoresces blue brightly enough to be visible in full sunlight, much brighter than the image. Rosin fluoresces bright, radioactive orange in case you're wondering.
None of that is a knock against Chinese goods. I bought a set of Chinese carbon bicycle wheels last year and they're great. But, I went straight to the source and didn't take chances with AliExpress or Amazon.
They sound like random letters stringed together rather than any attempt to build an actual brand.
The factories usually ship directly to Amazon warehouses and it is also fulfilled by Amazon (FBA).
This particularly brand (BTLOS) will come up on searches similar to "good Chinese carbon wheel brands" with reviews on FB, Reddit, etc.
And the cycling industry has had Chinese brands making inroads for a decade or more. So, Winspace, BTLOS, and a few others have come to be known entities (some do sell through AliExpress, some direct from their own site). And there's a niche group of product testers on YT or similar that review these things.
I assume there are analogous items in other hobbies, but I can't speak to any specific examples/brands.
The "problem" with China is they have a massive economy built on building to a price, no matter how low the price may be. They're perfectly capable of creating high-end electronics like iPhones and disposable crap that sells for pennies on Amazon or Ali.
There doesn't seem to be the same cohesive brand-building/reputation-buidling effort that we saw with Japanese and Korean companies in the 80s-00s+. Granted, Amazon/Ali didn't exist, and the market for "$1 junk" wasn't the same. No easy answers (if it's even a thing that needs solved).
But when those items arrive on Amazon the $1 crap gets sold for $9, and the $10 is completely absent because people think it is a ripoff compared to the "$9" one.
Labelling requirements have a long history of backfiring.
But what the Japanese makers did was they analyzed the failures and rolled the findings back into the manufacturing line so that they continuously improved the product. After quite some time at this, they took the "quality built" mantle for themselves.
My father, mid to late 70's, worked as an auto-mechanic for a local Datsun dealer (Datsun is the company we know today as Nissan). Datsun corporate wanted every failed part on every car repaired returned to them for analysis as to why it failed. The other Japanese brands all did the same.
Really out of my realm of expertise here, but I think there's something interesting going on here with how some economies evolved out of the "toil and suffer" phase while others don't?
Mr. Jones related an incident from "some time back" when IBM Canada
Ltd. of Markham, Ont., ordered some parts from a new supplier in Japan.
The company noted in its order that acceptable quality allowed for 1.5
percent defects (a fairly high standard in North America at the time).
The Japanese sent the order, with a few parts packaged separately in
plastic. The accompanying letter said: "We don't know why you want 1.5
percent defective parts, but for your convenience, we've packed them
separately."
-- Excerpted from an article in The (Toronto) Globe and MailI've had an "ok" experience so far. Not amazing, but not horrendous either. I kinda suspect it's just the specific staff member that has been assigned to me, and maybe a different member of personnel might provide a slightly better experience, but as I say, it's not been horrendous or truly awful. Just a little lacking. I generally find the Chinese to be far more eager to please and provide a good service but I think these guys are a little inundated so it's hard to keep up.
For all sorts of products like various electronic devices and kitchen gadgets, they are just iterating way faster on product feedback.
I think of some product I'd like to have, and discover somebody in China invented it 9 months ago and I can buy it through Amazon for $19. I buy it and use it for six months, then realize I really wish it had some other feature. I check Amazon, and now it's in its third generation with the feature I want plus two others.
I don't get why people are complaining. It's genuinely amazing, and a kind of entrepreneurial spirit I can only respect. Why people get hung up on the random-letter brand names is beyond me, who cares?
Apple manufactures a lot in China, you can get amazing stuff made in China and many do. The problem is trust (perhaps more specifically, provenance). Is this thing really what it says it is? It is just a strange phenomenon that China has an incredible un-matched industry in making cheap decent-looking imitations (in addition to the actual high-quality products that trusted brands sell).
how do they have your email? this makes me worried
IE, you're seeing and buying things they're selling directly, so they need to manage quality control, vs what is being sold on amazon, potentially a 3rd party seller who's cutting corners to make a nicer margin?
“Poorly made in china” was an edifying book to read.
vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.
However at least in Canada, AliExpress has fulfillment centres locally, so AliExpress can often get their items in customers' hands within a week.
So where's the advantage? Most times I can wait a week.
In UK, the average for my AliExpress orders is now 1 week.
Where I live (in a large US city) many things are same day delivery, an enormous amount are next day delivery and, weirdly, except for four-serving Strawberry Jell-O (which ships from Texas), almost everything is two-day delivery.
Not sure where you live, but my experience is completely different from yours.
Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.
Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.
Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.
Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.
I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.
The dark pattern on listing prices is real though. As it is the lower level of quality control - the same sellers will put the same product on both Amazon and Chinese stores, but the latter will get production batches that are lower quality (coil whine, etc).
eBay do that too. Really annoying. Some day I'll make a browser extension to highlight it.
The tricky part now is identifying the individual CN vendors which are not yet well known in the English marketplace, that are also known to make good quality things (and generally they're not cheap), I'll use Sofirn flashlights and headlamps as an example. Mostly not sold via Amazon.
The name brand and third party batteries from actual companies both performed great.
The garbage knockoffs were not a "small difference in better quality control", they had completely different battery cells, lower capacity, missing safety features, were easy to overheat, etc.
Also look at the reports coming in from governments around the world on clothes sold by some of these companies. All manner of illegal toxins. You report them, the seller changes some consonants around and relists under the new name.
I'd encourage everyone to do their own homework on this if they really think the differences aren't significant. And the problem is unless you test to failure or send things to labs you don't know if you rolled the dice and got lucky or not, until your house burns down or your toddler gets a weird autoimmune thing that you have no family history of.
Project Farm?
https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Wireless-Bluetooth-Headphones-C...
Prices are much better than the consumer-focused brands and normally everything is higher quality as well.
This dilutes the brand, and it is only a matter of time before the reputation of the cheap items will be seen as the standard for Tefal, which leads to the sales of their expensive items dropping, which leads to them trying to bring that back by lowering their price via lowering their quality. Congratulations: Tefal is now a brand where you can choose between cheap garbage and overpriced garbage!
Next steps: they shut down the European factories, struggle to compete on the budget market, and finally kill the business and sell the brand to a Chinese company interested in milking some cash out of what remains of its reputation.
If you manage to navigate your way through a bunch of FAQ pages to find the chat button, you'll be met with a basic AI chatbot that just tries to repeat those same FAQ entries back to you. If you manage to also navigate that and convince it that you need to talk to a human (you'll need to confirm it like 3 times), you might get lucky and finally be able to chat with a person who can barely speak English and will actively lie to you in an attempt to end the chat faster.
Here's a recent experience of mine: I managed to get a deal on a 4TB Samsung SSD, something like $330 before shipping on Amazon.com. I'm in Europe, so shipping would be pretty expensive, but even so it was still an amazing deal considering how expensive SSDs are now. So I ordered it, and two months later it was still not shipped with absolutely no word whatsoever from Amazon. So I got in contact with their support, they could never once tell me what was actually happening, they'd just repeat something like "I have filed a ticket with the fulfillment center and you will receive a shipping update within 48 hours" every time. It was always a lie - I would wait, not hear anything back, and contact them again. Did this 5 times, every time I'd get a similar response, once I was thrown around between 4 different support agents and none of them said anything of value. Eventually gave up and just canceled the order.
Once I used Inmail to get a DHL SVP to get his executive assistant to follow up why my package hadn't arrived... The assistant Cc'd me on messages a Friday afternoon and made it clear said SVP wanted updates. Monday morning the package that I had been told was on a ship being returned to the seller in the US arrived from a depot 5 minutes away from my office in London.
I'm guessing most people at that level are so insulated from their customers experiences that getting a request like that is totally novel for most of them - it's worked for me several times.