Re: Is this even legal in the EU?
I was thinking the same thing.
I pay 600 quid for a thing.
The manufacturer says some blow up and send them back..
well I own it. It's mine. It's up to me whether I take that risk or not now I own it - not samsung.
Maybe I love it. Maybe I got it as a present.
Maybe the situation (not this one) is one avoided by doing or not doing certain things.
Whatever, it's mine to do what I want with. I bought it as a phone/android device - I am pretty sure I would not have agreed to a 'we, samsung can fry the fecker whenever we feel like and you will be 600 quid out of pocket and get didlly squat'.
ok - I know they say 'we have told folk to return for refund bla bla bla - so what ? It's MINE.
I don't really see what legal ground they can possibly have for effectively killing it and I assume, not refunding me after the fact.
In fact is this the first time in history something like this has been done ?
1. company sells A
2. company then effectively kills A remotely with no user choice in the matter.
Only with IoT has this sort of thing been possible.
The nearest I can think of is the CC getting cut up thing - you present card, shop gets alert, calls for check and is told to not give CC back to customer and cut it up - though that felt very wrong to be on receiving end of (no fault of mine at time), there argument was physical CC does not beling to customer but to bank - so we can choose to have someone destroy it.
Really not the same here - you bought the hardware and the licence to run the software on it. You did not have to agree to run the samsung sh1t for example (hell I have an S6 and it was the first thing I gutted off their when I rooted it).
It's no surprise Samsung think this is acceptable - this is the company up there with google as far as privacy and data rights is concerned - every mobile sucks your data through samsung account crap, backups, etc unless you disable it, their tvs even record your voice and upload it.. it probably seems entirely reasonable the them to destroy 600 pounds worth of hardware they don't own...