I hope this isn't perceived as advertising.. I'm quite apprehensive about making this purchase and will absolutely update with my progress if/when the console arrives.
In the meantime, if anyone out there has any experience buying through AliExpress I would love to hear from you. This is my first purchase and I feel like it's a total gamble.
If this is somehow perceived as advertising, mods please delete immediately. I do not want to violate any rules. This community is too awesome to lose!
I order from there quite a lot. I’m not really a fan of buying Chinese stuff but all the electronics are made there whatever you do and this way I’m cutting out the man-in-the-middle dickhead types who closed all the local factories and moved production to China just to push up the share prices.
I’ve always found it to be pretty good, remember that you don’t really deal with Ali that much, rather individual shops selling their stuff on there. I’ve had problems with stuff arriving broken before but I’ve usually found their customer service to be pretty amazing, they’ll often replace stuff without much fuss. I once ordered a Bitcoin miner before realising later that it was a scam, and Ali refunded me all the money.
The two main problems are that nothing on there is good quality, it’s all just cheap Chinese stuff. The second problem is that it takes ages for everything to arrive.
This is probably the exception, but I bought a bunch of smart bulbs from there 4 years ago (all pre-flashed with Tasmota). They're still going strong and get used daily.
Yeah, they're isolated on a separate, no-internet VLAN if you're worrying about my security posture lol. That said, I've never noticed them trying to make any suspicious outbound connections.
It's absolutely the best place to buy stuff like this. I buy spools of addressable LEDs, ESP boards, random electronic components, and smart home stuff from there provided I can wait a week or two to get it. You're buying the exact same stuff from Amazon most of the time but at much cheaper prices with longer shipping times.
That said, I probably wouldn't ever buy a branded product like OP did because if they screw you over it's going to be a huge pain to try to get a refund and there's a decent chance it's not as described or straight up counterfeit.