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Samsung purposely knives customer's TV to weasel out of repair
(www.youtube.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yes, but shipping it back to be destroyed instead would be more wasteful, with the same end result.
It would be better to repair, but where repairs cost more than replacement, the only way to force them to repair is with regulations, as otherwise they do what costs less.
I much prefer that they require you to break it and give a new one. From a consumer perspective it's a better outcome. From an environmental perspective, it's slightly better than ship back and destroy. The ideal is repair which has less waste and solves the problem for the consumer.
I wonder if the cost of shipping a defective item were higher if it would happen so frequently. Polluting on that scale is largely free, even though it costs us all dearly.
Like you said, we don't have many tools other than regulation