Zero Customer Care and Accountability by Asus

I purchased a very expensive Asus gaming laptop from the US in August 2017. I was told that the laptop would function anywhere in the world and understood that Asus was a reputable company that prioritized customer satisfaction.

I returned to South Africa and continued to use the laptop which worked fine until December 2018 where it suddenly and for no apparent reason, short-circuited and stopped functioning.

Asus's position is simply that the laptop is out of the 12 month warranty since purchase (less than 5 months after such expiry) and that therefore any repair must be paid for at one of its authorized repair centers.

Their authorized repair agent, Rectron then quoted an amount of ZAR20,250.00 to conduct a partial repair (indicating that further repairs may be required after replacing the motherboard). It then notified me for the first time that a diagnostic charge of ZAR160.00 was payable if I elected not to proceed with the repairs.

The cost of repair is very nearly the cost I paid for the laptop in the first place. After having expended so much on what was represented to me as a top of the line product, one would think that Asus as a company would be more willing to assist in some way with this problem or to otherwise compensate me as a gesture of good faith.

Instead it has chosen to simply hide behind its warranty at the expense of customer satisfaction, ethical business practices and reliability as a manufacturer of high performance computers.

I am appalled at the approach Asus has adopted, which shows a complete lack of accountability for selling a defective product simply because it manages to make it past a 12 month warranty period. It shows a complete lack of respect and empathy with the customers who are otherwise prepared to pay the high prices required for these products on the reasonable expectation that they will last them for a substantial amount of time.

I will not be using Asus products again, nor will I recommend them to anyone interesting in purchasing gaming laptops, pcs or related products. On the contrary I would caution anyone considering purchasing any Asus product based on this experience alone.