You offer lifetime warranty on your labor and lifetime technical support. Those are under your control, and you are showing lots and lots of confidence in them.

You offer 30 days warranty on shipping. You do what you can with custom packaging, but fundamentally shipping is outside your control. And shipping damage is unlikely to become visible downstream.

Where do your parts fit in the this scale? Obviously, you aren’t making them yourselves, so not fully under your control. But you do select for quality. So not totally out of your control. Somewhere in between. What message do you want to send to your potential customers here? What message can you afford to send?

And does it have to be the same message for every system? If you set different policies for liquid versus air cooled, SLI video versus non-SLI, or whatever other dimensions matter, and made those differences visible, customers would get the message difference as a caution about the relative reliability of the different systems. (E.g., if you offered two years on single video card systems, but dual card systems only got one year for the pair with a warranty that at least one would be working out to two years…) And it might help us buy better systems from you, thus improving the industry.

Have you considered offering a “free, 3-year warranty” on systems where the critical components (power supply, motherboard, memory, video card, hard drives, cooling) are chosen from your most reliable configurations… if you can, in fact, be particularly confident of a very low 3-year field failure rate in those systems?

Because that is, really, what people want. We don’t want to know you’ll fix it for free if it fails nearly as much as we want it not to fail until after we’re ready to upgrade anyway. We want it to still be working perfectly when it’s obsolete for our needs and we hand it down to our 10-year-old niece. Of course, no one can guarantee that, but a longer warranty makes us feel that you believe it’s more likely.

As a business proposition, warranties are insurance, and insurance is never a good deal if you can afford to cover the potential loss yourself. If paying 25% additional to get free replacement parts for the second and third years were a good bet, the computer would necessarily be a horrendous piece of unreliable junk; but because of the frustration, inconvenience and potential data and business loss, paying extra to achieve a significant drop in field failure rate on an already good build could be a worthwhile proposition. It’s not the “insurance” that’s attractive: it’s the vendor’s willingness to bet that the system will not fail.

A quick look at a sample page — the Obsidian, with no modifications to the initial configuration — shows a 29% cost to cover parts for the second and third years. Looked at from the perspective I just described, you’re not willing to bet on much there… considering that most failures surely cost considerably less than the price of the entire machine to repair, one would roughly have to expect the machine was as likely as not to break down within three years for this to make economic sense for the purchaser!

And you advertise the Obsidian as being “based around a core set of components validated for highest reliability.”

I never buy extended warranties, but I’d be more apt to buy from a company that offered one if prices were comparable.

The warranty on a new computer especially a high end PC is a major consideration. Most customers will use that new computer for at least 3 years, a large percentage of the computers still in use today are P4’s. As a customer I have to consider do I build the system myself or do I buy a system built be a company such as Puget. When a high end system builder only offers a one year warranty and the component manufactures offer warranties on their high end products well in excess of one year, I have to wonder why the system builder lacks confidence in their build. I can understand a one year warranty on mass produced low end- low priced systems, but when I buy a high end custom system at a premium price I expect the warranty to reflect the extra investment I have made.
One other thought on warranties and this is an absolute deal breaker for me I don’t know if you do this at Puget. If the case has one of those “Warranty Void if Removed” stickers on the case so I can not open the case for inspection I will not buy the system. You would not buy a car if you couldn’t check under the hood. There are system builders out there that hide poor workmanship and low quality components behind these warranty stickers.
So for me a one year warranty on a high end system is no where near adequate. A three year warranty at no extra cost should be included

Keith, what you’re suggesting is what we’re doing now. Charging people for a 3 year warranty and discounting for no 3 year warranty is really the same thing, right?

After much though, research, and listening to our customers, we’ve decided for now that investing in our products and service is a bigger priority than offering a three year warranty as default. So if your video card fails in 2.5 years…spend the $50 to get a new one that’s 2x faster

I continue to welcome your thoughts and comments on this. This is a topic that’s never really closed, as we’re always interested in hearing what you want!

I’m more concerned that the original system is a well-built, non-lemon that works properly (especially after an expensive lesson in buying a poorly-built lemon from VoodooPC ); and that if the system should arrive with any problems from shipping, or bad parts, or whatever, those get fixed or, if they’re not, I can get an appropriate refund.

For expensive laptops, I do like to get a 3 year warranty (plus some sort of accidental protection) since: (a) it’s much harder to fix them yourself; (b) they’re much more subject to damage, not that I ever spill full coffee cups over my laptop keyboards, or anything like that; well almost never.