ALTERNATE.nl

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I'm one of the people who bought an MSI 3080 Gaming X Trio on launch day, 14 minutes after it launched. This week I was near the front of the queue, expecting my card to be shipped soon, but MSI announced they changed the name of the product to MSI 3080 Gaming Z Trio.

In an interview with pcgameshardware.de MSI Germany stated that the X and Z models are practically identical, with exactly the same performance, only a slightly different backplate. MSI Germany itself said this minor change won't matter to end clients, but the X version is "discontinued", replaced by the practically identical Z model.

Some stores, like the Finnish Jimms.fi, simply changed their X Trio queue to the Z Trio model with NO EXTRA CHARGES to their clients.

But Alternate (and Megekko, Azerty...) took this as an opportunity to drop the unprofitable queues.
They said "the product is discontinued, nothing we can do", cancelled and refunded the orders.

Alternate.nl (and other stores) should apologize for the whole situation and offer places in a queue for the Z Trio model to everyone who were in the X Trio queue, at no extra charge just like Jimms.fi did.

Manufacturers often make minor adjustments to their products with no name changes and no big announcements. For instance, many changed the GPU power delivery system in the 3080 models since launch - a much more significant change than the backplate. Aesthetically, EVGA changed the color of a detail on their FTW3 model from red to black.

In these cases Alternate didn't feel the need to cancel orders of the discontinued versions - because the companies didn't change the names of their cards, despite also introducing trivial changes that mean nothing to the end user, like the Z Trio did.