Back in late March, at the end of my coverage of Google’s Pixel 9a smartphone launch:

I mentioned that one of my Pixel 7 phones had started swelling, indicative of a failing battery:

I teased that my fortunate upfront purchase of an extended warranty for it ended up being fortuitous and promised that the “rest of the story” would follow shortly. That time is now, and in this piece, I’ll also contrast my most recent experience with an earlier, less-positive outcome, as a means of more broadly assessing the consumer electronics warranty topic.

The smartphone case study

First, the Pixel 7. Devices containing swollen batteries can quickly transform into dangerously flammable sources, so I immediately removed the smartphone from its charger and powered it down. I then reactivated my Pixel 6a backup phone, the same one I’d temporarily pressed into service around a year earlier when my other Pixel 7’s rear camera array’s glass cover spontaneously cracked, and swapped the SIM into it. And then, I jumped online with Asurion, reported the issue, paid a (bogus, IMHO) $138.68 “service fee”, was directed to a local repair location (Asurion had bought uBreakiFix in late 2019), dropped the swollen Pixel 7 off, and ~24 hours later had a gift card sitting in my account for the original purchase price!

Let’s do the math:

• I bought the 128 GByte version of the phone in early June 2023 for $499, promotion-bundled (at the time) with a $100 Amazon gift card, for an effective price of $399.
• For the next 20 months (Asurion also auto-refunded my most recent month’s payment, although I had to then manually cancel the overall policy through Amazon, where it was treated as a subscription), I’d been paying $7.83 per month inclusive of tax for extended warranty coverage…a bit irritating, as the phone was redundantly covered by Google’s standard warranty for the first 12 of those months, but…for $156.60 total.
• I paid a $138.68 (once again, ridiculous, but…) “service fee” to process the warranty
• And I ended up getting a $499 gift card.

If my arithmetic is right, I ended up using the phone for nearly 2 years for a total fiscal outlay of $195.28 (plus the cost of the replacement phone, which I’ll mention next). I’m a bit surprised, honestly, that Asurion didn’t just have uBreakiFix swap in a new battery and give it back to me. That said, the display or internals might have gotten stressed by the swelling, so it was likely more straightforward for them from a long-term customer retention standpoint to just give me my money back. And to be clear, considering the burgeoning market for refurbished phones and other consumer electronics devices, they probably went ahead and swapped the battery themselves and then, after running diagnostics on the phone to make sure everything else checked out, resold it on Amazon Renewed, eBay Refurbished, or elsewhere.

Speaking of which, eBay is where I ended up picking up my replacement smartphone. I could have gone with a newer-generation Pixel device (or something else, for that matter), but I already had a bunch of extra Pixel 7-tailored cases, screen protectors and such in storage. And, thanks to Google’s recently expanded five years of software coverage for the Pixel 7 (and my Pixel 6a spare, for that matter), it was now guaranteed to get OS and security updates until October 2027 (versus the original October 2025, i.e. a few months from now as you read these words). I ended up with an eBay Certified Refurbished 128 GByte Pixel 7 in claimed excellent condition, complete with a 1-year bundled warranty, for $198.95 plus tax.

And indeed, when it arrived, it was in excellent condition (reflective of the highly and abundantly rated supplier I’d intentionally, carefully selected), cosmetically at least. It appears to have had a case and screen protector on it for its entire ownership-to-date, both of which I immediately replicated. And functionally, it also seems to be fine, albeit with one characteristic that gave me initial pause. Check out the to-date battery recharge cycle count reported for it:

At first glance, that seemed like a lot, given that Google documents that the Pixel 7 “should retain up to 80% capacity for about 800 charge cycles, after which battery replacement is “recommended,” and particularly given that my other Pixel 7 only has 40 to-date cycles on it:

But I’m an admittedly atypical case study. I work from home, where I also have VoIP, and rarely travel, so my smartphone usage is much lower than the norm. Conversely, given that the Pixel 7 first became available on October 13, 2023, 531 cycles almost exactly match a more typical one-recharge-per-day cadence. Going forward, now in my possession, this phone’s incremental-cycle cadence should dramatically decrease. And to further extend usable life, I’ve belatedly taken the extra step of limiting the peak charge point to 80% of total capacity on both Pixel 7s.

The soundbar case study

So, all good, right? Not exactly…there’s that other case study that I mentioned upfront I wanted to share. Two years back, I told you about my Hisense HS205 soundbar:

which I’d recently snagged on sale at Amazon for $34.99 to replace the BÖHM B2 precursor that wouldn’t accept beyond-Red Book Audio digital input streams:

Well…about six months after I bought it, and after very little use, it quit working. It still toggled among the various audio input sources using both the side panel buttons and the remote control:

but nothing came out of the speakers from any of them (and no, it wasn’t in “mute” mode). Given its low price and compact form factor, I assume that the power amplifier fed by all of those inputs via a preamp intermediary was based on inexpensive class D circuitry and had failed.

Good news: although it was beyond the one-month Amazon return period, it was still covered by the one-year factory warranty. Bad news: that warranty was “limited”. Translation: I was responsible for the cost and effort of return shipping to Hisense, including any loss or damage en route, which meant that I’d need to both package it in a bulky/heavily padded/more expensive fashion and pay for optional insurance on it. Further translated: it’d likely cost me as much, if not more, to ship the soundbar back to them as I’d paid for it originally. And I’d probably end up with an already-used replacement, with even more “limited” warranty terms.

Eventually, after I complained long and hard enough, Hisense’s customer support folks relented and emailed me a postpaid shipping label, followed by shipping me a seemingly brand-new replacement soundbar. Candidly, I suspect that although I always try to avoid such “media special treatment,” someone there did an Internet search on my name and figured out I was a “press guy” who should get “handled with kid gloves”. Would the average consumer have accomplished the same outcome, no matter how long and hard they complained? No. Which, again, is why I always strive to maintain anonymity. Sigh.

Similar experiences, good and/or bad? Other thoughts on what I’ve discussed? Sound off in the comments, please!

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.

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