Following up on my last post, it looks like the retail giants are going to start taking advantage of the “beta” culture by offering their technical services to keep your systems up to date. I read today at the Consumerist, this very shocking claim:

Wanted to tip everyone off: Best Buy sells a sweet Blu Ray player made by
Insignia for $169. I picked one up & spotted the “Geek Squad” can upgrade the firmware for $29.99. Meh. I’ll do it myself.

On checking out, the young lady pointed out that I’d need the firmware upgrade, and they could do it. Without it, I’d not be able to watch the latest Blu Ray titles, such as the Dark Knight. I told her I’d take care of it.

I got home, and took a peek. There is no phone jack or ethernet port on the unit, only an SD Card slot on the front. Hmm. Went to Insignia website, no firmware update notice anywhere. I call Insignia, and guess what? All of their CS is now handled by Best Buy. Awesome.

The Dark Knight plays fine.

Tell everyone you know- if you buy the Insignia KM- BRDVD player, it’s FINE. NO FIRMWARE update needed. I wonder how many people they sucker into this.

I’m not sure who the bigger jerkoff is… Best Buy or Insignia. Obviously Best Buy is worthy of the deepest layer of hell for charging customers for updates to products that they are selling. Especially if said updates are to bring a system that doesn’t currently work to a working state. This of course, beside the point that they lied outright. But I’m not sure if that’s worse than selling a product and not supporting it. It doesn’t take much to put a simple firmware update on your website. For anyone not sure that there isn’t any value in the Geek Squad providing this service, let me please put this to rest by saying that you could literrally hire the rodents that find cheese in laboratory mazes to do the jobs that the Geek Squad does. I’m not convinced that the Geek Squad members could navigate those mazes. I am fully convinced that they could not do it if you put a iPhone in the path of the cheese.

I’d love for Insignia to redeem themselves in this. I halfway can’t believe that they don’t have the update available online.

I’m a rather stable person. I don’t get excited easily. I don’t get angry quickly. There are, however, a few things that cause great fits of anger rise within my deep inners. At the top of the list of these things are Local News broadcasts, Budweiser commercials, and Consumer electronics stores.

I don’t think of myself as some kind of electronics guru. I’m no Kim Komando, and I am not a gizmodo contributor. However, I do have a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and I did work at Best Buy for a short period of time. Also, I was nearly a witness in a lawsuit, State of Ohio vs. Best Buy, after submitting a compelling story of my personal battle with my local Best Buy store to the Ohio Attorney General (Jim Petro). So, I’ve got plenty of credentials for criticizing the consumer electronics retail giants.

My Mother in law showed me the USB cable that Best Buy sold with her new printer. Of course, she already had a USB cable, so imagine the confusion that she encountered when she replaced the old printer with the new one and still had an unopened GOLD PLATED USB cable that the Best Buy employee insisted was necessary for getting the printer to work. Funny… I never needed gold plated connectors to get a good reading on an oscilloscope in my college experience. Two problems here. Why is there a (non commissioned) sales person trying to sell USB cables??? If the store is trying to do favors to the shoppers, why wouldn’t they ask the very simple questions necessary to learn whether or not the shopper already owns a USB cable? Second, why in the world would you insist on offering the ostentatiously priced gold plated cables to the unsuspecting layman without offering the normal cable without the plating? That’s essentially theft in my opinion. By the way…. Never ever ever ever buy a cable from Best Buy (or any retail store) for more than 2 or 3 dollars (a price that I guarantee you will NEVER SEE). These cables are worth no more than a few dollars. Buy one from New Egg, or find a local “surplus” retailer or reasonably priced retailer (local custom computer shops and service centers may have decent prices too).

I was browsing the flat panel televisions at Best Buy about a year ago and I was surprised when I couldn’t find a tv in the 29-37 inch range that wasn’t 1080p. I wasn’t planning on asking, but when the (non-commissioned) sales person pushed himself on me, I figured that I’d ask if he could point me to one. His response floored me. He explained that they did not have any 1080p flat panel tvs in that size, and that, “It’s really hard to pack that many pixels in that small of a screen.” Knowing that, at the time, there was a very wide variety of 32 inch lcd tv’s with 1080p resolution on the market, I tried my best to control my laughter/anger. Of course, I couldn’t let him go without a good solid does of ridicule. Note that laptop screens have been “packing” more than that many pixels per inch into into their monitors for what seems like a decade.

I really just don’t like to be lied to. Ok, you don’t have a 1080p 32″ tv. Don’t make up some story in order to sell me something I don’t want.

Then, today I read this.