Which things exactly? Manuals translations is SO DAMN EXPENSIVE. They have to sell, what a dozen or so cards to get those losses? Or 7 european (EU) offices of which one is also a dev center vs 15 US offices (of which one is HQ/dev)? Or stock which comes to both from Taiwan?
In any case, it seems VAT is the explanation and in that case price is without premium, even great compared. Still expensive.
The EU does enforce a "2-year warranty", but it's not what you think. (Speaking as a German:) When you want to replace a broken product under the mandated warranty, then:
- In the first 6 months after purchase, the merchant must replace the product unless they can prove the defect was not present at purchase.
- After 6 months, the burden of proof reverses, and the customer must prove that the defect in question was already present at purchase.
In practice, whatever party has the burden of proof usually doesn't bother. So in effect, "6-month warranty" is a much more realistic description of this 2-year warranty.
(The fine print: Many vendors offer their own voluntary warranty on top of the mandated one. And I don't know if the rules are different in other EU countries.)
> In practice, whatever party has the burden of proof usually doesn't bother.
In practice, I've never had to prove anything within 2 years of purchase. Might be a difference between Germany and other EU countries, but somehow I doubt that.
This is probably how it is across the EU. Why antagonize your customers unnecessarily by forcing them to jump through hoops when your product fails in less than 2 years? That just leads to bad PR and reduced customer satisfaction and thus lower trust and sales.
They benefit in the perceived sense of reliability of a 2 year warranty. Why buy a product if it's going to fail in 6 months and you can't get it replaced, when the competitor is more likely to treat you fairly.
Stuff very rarely breaks in the second year. I'd bet the vast majority of warranty claims are within the first year, which is legally mandatory in every jurisdiction of note.
At NVidia's level, nearly so. They ship on the order of 50 million desktop GPUs each year. Legal hours, real estate, or translators may seem expensive, but when you count the number of graphics cards that would be required to pay for them it's not even in the ballpark of 50 million.
The warranties do cost something because they add significant risk/cost against each incremental unit, I will grant you that.
Regulations like these have a disproportionate effect relative to volume. NVidia would probably have most of those things even in the absence of the regulations, a couple guys in a garage would certainly not.
