God created the sky and the earth; everything else was created in China. This is a joke that describes our modern reality. But the situation wasn't always like this. My generation and I remember the time when products were good quality. Cars, like the "Volkswagen Beetle", could work for 50 years. Our black and white TV set worked for 25 years, and it probably could have worked for another 10-15 years, but then we decided to immigrate to Israel.

Businesses found that fixing this kind of device is difficult, and engineers invented units (devices like chips that cannot be repaired). As a result, repairing devices, like computers, became easy and didn't require expertise. Nowadays, the idea is going further, and people do not completely understand it yet. Devices like phones have become cheap, and phone companies are not interested in repairing them. If your phone is broken, and it is still under warranty, they will just give you a new one. If you pay attention to new phones, you will see that all of them are glued shut. Opening a modern phone requires a hacker’s skills. Repairing a cheap Chinese phone that breaks at the end of the warranty is useless, because you don't know for how long it will work. Repairing it costs about a third of the price of a new one. I don't know how it is in other countries, but in Israel, importers don't want to repair broken cheap Chinese phones. It costs them more than the revenue they earn from selling the phone. Things are changing faster than our minds.

All this information is a preface to a story that happened to me. I bought a cheap Chinese phone for my son. I was on vacation when this phone stopped working, so my son took it to the warranty service of GetCell, one of Israel’s phone importers. They kept the phone for two months and then returned it with a note saying it couldn't be repaired because there was humidity in the phone. When I came back from vacation I decided to check it and I connected my charger to it. To my surprise, the phone worked fine. The problem was in the charger not in the phone.

From this we can conclude that GetCell didn't even check the phone. You can't ascertain that there is humidity in the phone without opening it! But we know that opening a modern, sealed phone is an expensive process. Further, I can’t see any marks showing that the phone was opened. If they had merely connected a charger, they would have discovered that the phone was fine.

I don't want to say that all Israeli importers behave like GetCell, but I suspect that in Israel, all companies in one field behave similarly.

I bought the phone from a store in order to get a warranty. But the warranty was worthless, so if you want to buy an inexpensive Chinese phone, you might buy it on the internet much cheaper, without any warranty. You won’t have an effective warranty either way. But at least you won’t have paid extra for a worthless warranty. But even at the lower price the phone can break at any time and require replacement. So it may actually be cheaper to buy a top model phone like iPhone or Samsung, because those companies honor their warranties.