So what are other trustworthy places to buy electronics? Seems like if you don't buy at Apple or Amazon (without 3rd party sellers), there's no way of knowing if an item is counterfeit. Which harms the market as they can charge higher prices...
The scary thing is that even Amazon has had their procurement team fall prey to either grey market and sometimes just straight up counterfeit chips. If you're buying accessories that are going in hot (e.g. HDMI components that can blow an entire chip out, even on well designed name brand Panasonics[1], buy it from the original vendor. Otherwise it's a coin flip, because some of them don't even respect the simplest ESD shipping policies[2].) My Dell power supply was supposed to be a "Dell" that I got from Amazon (via a 3rd party vendor) and I'm 95% percent sure it was constructed by that same Apple imitating vendor. (The board layout was identical, the lack of solder mask, the brands of the caps were the same, etc.)
One day it got really hot and stopped driving power to my laptop. I borrowed my buddies charger (first party) and that wouldn't work either. I cracked the thing open and saw the output filter caps had vented, and on the board there was a space for an additional cap which was unpopulated. They wanted to save 30 cents, and I ended up spending about a dozen hours and about a hundred dollars on diagnostics, part replacement, ensuring that nothing else was compromised, etc. Now I'll happily give Dell or any laptop vendor my money - let them keep their monopoly. I won't buy their overpriced RAM upgrades or SSDs (there's lots of aftermarket competition where I can get better products for the same price in that arena) but when it comes to clean power, nope. Going first party every time.
They simply don't give a shit that it's virtually impossible to buy non-counterfeit laptop chargers, phone chargers, batteries, or most electronics on their site.
They also are alleged to, when you buy item X directly from amazon, ship you item X from the closest warehouse both in their stock and in fulfilled by amazon stock. So who knows that the hell the provenance of the item you receive is.
All of the above is fine for a book or a shirt, but not fine for power electronics or food.
Though Apple sucks as well for gouging you on their ludicrously overpriced chargers with their fragile yet non-replaceable output cables. If their chargers weren't nearly $100 w/ tax and shipping this wouldn't be as big of a problem.
