What do you mean "no matter what the manufacturer says"? If the manufacturer says your warranty is void - it is. If they broke a law in doing so is a separate issue that you would have to battle out in court.
When your 800$ laptop's speakers start buzzing and the service center says you need to pay 80$ for the repair because the tamper seal on the RAM was broken, are you really going to spend 30k and a year of your free time to sue them over it?
If you can get the big company to say they're denying the warranty for that reason in writing, you could probably find a no-win, no-pay lawyer to file an eight digit class action lawsuit.
They know that as well as you do. I've found they usually do more passive aggressive / ambiguous stuff than overtly break the law.
Once we had a Toshiba laptop with a bad motherboard. They replaced it with some other board that didn't have drivers for Linux, or even for Windows.
Lenovo took over thirty days to repair my IBM thinkpad (broken screen connector), and when it came back, the high voltage screen transformer was shorted to the case, so it shocked the heck out of me when I turned it on.
On top of that, they didn't replace the broken screen connector, and claimed it was "no fault". This was after the local lenovo repair people found the fault, and lenovo said they couldn't ship the required part.
>>are you really going to spend 30k and a year of your free time
Are there no small claims courts where you live? Ombudmans? It really isn't a huge deal, nor is it very expensive. It's not 30k - more like $50. And not a year, usually few weeks at most.
>>? If the manufacturer says your warranty is void - it is.
