I wonder how the terms stack up in a legal sense.

I'd look at it like this:
you buy a car
you rip everything out of it and put in your own engine and engine management system made by "frank" in his back yard
shit breaks
manufacturer won't cover anything because "frank" made a faulty engine that blew up & took the car with it.

a better example:you decide to install linux on your pcmonitor shits itselfmanufacturer is required by law cover the warranty.however if you are unhappy with linux, that's your problem to solve.

Equally stupid example.

A maker of a monitor is making a monitor, it doesn't often come with a PC and has nothing to do with how a PC performs. It's an external device. If it malfunctions then that's irrespective of hardware and software unlinked to it. Unless the maker of the monitor allows you modify the bios in the monitor and put on your own custom bios. By doing that you accidently flash the wrong monitor controls and in turn ruins the refresh rates and colour contrasts and so on that it becomes unuseable. What's the law there?

Here's what a unlocked phone can have done to it: A wrong radio firmware breaks all bluetooth/GPS/wifi/3g/2g/4g.

Edit: also as i found out you can also stop your phone from even making it into recovery. Although then again on my SGS i could just use a resistor to bring it to download mode again assuming the battery has charge. It won't even charge if you break that part of it though so you kinda gotta be quick to pull the battery.

do you idiots seriously think the manufacturer should be held responsible if you load the wrong firmware and destroy your phone?

You people are what's wrong with this planet, no one wants to take responsibility for their own actions.

do you idiots seriously think the manufacturer should be held responsible if you load the wrong firmware and destroy your phone?You people are what's wrong with this planet, no one wants to take responsibility for their own actions.

Huh? considering the plural, who's the second idiot?

I don't see a single person with >105 posts who believe that.

Maybe you're just being a little jumpy for some other reason? Were you humiliated by a warranty in the past or something?

Moar examples pls.

Absolutley, it's fair risk. Frankly too, if you're doing your own mods, then you've got a good chance to ebay and repair your own things, or at least would be happy to take it to a trusted phone repairer.

A smartphone is one of the few things in the world which is starting to really stop being component based, and you can't really treat them as modular like a car or computer. It's hard to say 'oh well that's the manufacturers fault' if you can't turn it on, because is it the screen or is it a bootloader problem? Did you do something horribly wrong?

If the onus of proof is on the consumer to prove it wasn't his modifications which caused the problem, then it's suddenly very hard for that owner to prove the problem was hardware not firmware or software if only due to the integrated and tiny nature of the device. Because you can't just pull the suspected broken bit out and test it elsewhere, and prove it's the broken part, it's hard to prove that it's a manufacturing problem.

I buy a new phone (or a new car) for the warranty. This idea sucks.

This is the screen that displays ONLY WHEN YOU MODIFY THE BOOTLOADER.

If you do not modify the bootloader (the bit you have to modify to get root, which then enables you to get custom roms, and other fancies) then you have full manufacturer warranty.

I think you're trolling, but because your name is infi i can't be sure if trolling or...

edit: as an aside pinky your link is broken

well then the disclaimer is stating the bleeding obvious....

wont really matter when people start complaining "my motorola down down and they squibbed on their warranty."...