Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

In rhetoric this is what's known as "inoculating the argument", or "inoculation theory". You take a reasonable criticism of what you've said and present a weakened version of what someone might respond with in order to suggest that means that response is invalid.

The thing is though, in this case, you've not really presented a solid argument. All you've said is "Microsoft might be doing terrible things!", which is potentially true, but it's a bad reason to ignore the obviously good things that we can see. What your argument boils down to is that once a company loses your trust they can never get it back regardless of what they do. In which case you're removing yourself from the conversation because you're only ever going to be negative.

The thing is that as it is said over and over in this thread, you cannot trust reviews, and I would add that you cannot trust most of the smaller blogs/review websites because most would say anything about a product as long as they are paid.

If I buy the new Sony noise cancelling headsets, I know I will not get disappointed: it is a reputable brand, and it is the high-end of the range. This strategy is not perfect, far from it, and some brand are taking advantage of it. In that case, vote with your wallet. You can't really do that with no-name brands.

You can not trust any review on Amazon anymore, not even from verified buyers. Resellers of Chinese goods will have people (there are facebook groups) to "buy" these goods and leave a 5-star review for a refund.

Depending on what you get, you may get a fake good, or genuine products that failed QA, or similar products with less QA from the same factory, or old tranches, or goods with short best-before dates, goods with a different composition of ingredients, goods with harmful substances as filler and so forth. If you buy refurbished goods, chances are pretty good you will run into region lock or quality issues with no recourse, as brands will refuse (e.g. Apple) to offer support! Even if this is not the norm, it will sooner or later happen to you.

Therefore:

-> Do not buy any brand product that costs above an amount you feel comfortable to just lose. Assume you will getting a no name product, then you are fine. Otherwise, try to buy at a store or better, directly at the company. Save yourself the headache.

-> Do not buy things that go into your body, except if the seller is the manufacturer.

-> Do not buy goods that run without supervision, may catch on fire or otherwise damage their surrounding. Do not assume stickers of "CE certification" (or whatever applies in your country) are genuine. There is still no effective recourse by law enforcement in these cases.

This does not mean that everything is fake or bad quality, but you do not need to take this risk in cases where real harm may occur. Most brands sell their goods directly from their own website, which also usually gives you better support. Do that!

Edit: I realize this PSA is probably useless on this platform as people here are generally pretty aware about these things. But do spread this information for more naive buyers. You really only need to get poisoned, burnt or lose significant amounts of money once.

I'm saying brand loyalty has lost its power now.

Sony is a good example. You say it's a reputable brand, yet sometimes they just lose it do something absolutely terrible. The first one that comes to mind is infecting willingly their customers with a rootkit in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), but it's just because I don't follow up on those things as much. I'm sure there are ones in the last 5 years, although with PR firms doing their job as well as they do now, a quick google search will seldom return anything.

Companies don't have a customer first mentality anymore.

Loyalty doesn't mean anything for them, and so you being loyal to them makes no sense.

And it does mean a more complicated world, because you constantly have to reassess where to buy from.

Naively, I though he was trying to make well designed clothes for rock climbers. As a geek, I though he was trying to solve a problem.

No. He just bought Chinese low quality t-shirts, and sticked logos on that and spent all his energy developing the brand itself: communication, aesthetic, mentality, target, etc.

I couldn't see the value of doing such thing, since we have enough of this crap. But it worked: friends around me started to wear the damn thing.

It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.