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'White Box' Makers Take Up The Slack
n3hat writes: "This story in the business section of the Baltimore Sun points out that the 'pooter bidness isn't as bad as the publicly-traded companies report. Seems that as much as 45% of systems are assembled by screwdriver shops and other white-box makers, not the big guys." No huge surprises here.
Well, surpisingly, both spellings are listed by the American Heritage dictionary, but it *was* a goof, so I changed it :)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I'm sorry, but that just makes me piss myself when I see you Yanks complain about such editorial content.
The words are colour, initialise, and patronise - in addition to the little one you seemed to choose to notice.
No 'zees' in there in English, my donut eating burger friends, no sir-e.
If we are going to complain about such grammar and spelling, why dont we grab ourselves a copy of an English dictionary, my little Ronald McDonalds?
I used to work for a company and we built some machines. To be honest there was absolutely no way to compete with Dells and the like on price. The only reason we built systems was to service our regular consultant business. For the most part we only built systems for business customers. Some just demanded the best most stable systems, others had special needs. For instance high end graphic design workstations, and some servers. Sometimes we would build them for sound studios and such. If someone wanted a regular system we would just sell them a retail HP or IBM, it was cheaper for them and more profitable for us.
Our component cost often exceeded the cost of a whole Dell system, but we cherry picked only the nicest most stable stuff. Even considering that we generally favored. You can buy a $10 power supply, or you can get a $50 Antec. Chances are that $10 supply will fail in a week while the Antec will last 5 years. Ditto for graphics cards, (second most failure prone component.) Frankly the cost of having a productive worker without his computer for a day or more exceeds the cost of getting a good computer to begin with.
If you find a white box system cheaper than a Dell you better be pretty suspect of what is in it.
With the price of RAM, hard drives and lower-end graphics cards being pretty reasonable nowadays, there is no real incentive to actually buy a new computer for most users.
For example, right now I'm running a computer with an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with 320 MB PC-100 SDRAM, 500 MHz Celeron A CPU, 8 GB hard drive, Matrox G400 DualHead AGP graphics card, a no-name PCI sound card with the Yamaha XS-DG sound chipset, and a Zoom Telephonics 2949L external V.90 modem. That's far more than enough to run Windows 98 easily, surf the Internet and run Works 2000 productivity software.
If I were to upgrade my system so I can run games, I can easily get a 40-60 GB ATA-100 hard drive, swap out the Matrox card for an ATI Radeon 7500 AGP card, and upgrade the CPU to a Celeron 850 MHz Coppermine CPU using a special Socket 370 adapter from Powerleap.
I think people will be surprised that a memory upgrade plus hard drive upgrade will speed up the system 50-75% pretty easily.
For a reasonably brave person, building your own system is certainly the way to go. Compaq has come a long way in business models away from the proprietary format but its home models will probably stay the same, especially since being acquired.
Now for larger scale installs, I stay away from the white boxes for one single reason: different hardware. Time and time again I've seen orders filled that all have different hardware even though it was asked of them to use *exactly* the same in each machine. This creates a nightmare when you are trying to clone a large number of machines for things like labs, or even in a large scale deployment in an office. While drive space is cheap enough to store different images, it still takes unnecessary time to prep all those different configs.
The other upside to buying business class computers for large organizations is getting replacement parts pretty quick. I deal with Compaq a lot and their turn around time is less than 24 hours on parts ordered by a certain time. Plus I don't have to go through hoops for them, we order then all online. No phone time with a tech or anything. I'm sure there are a few white box vendors out there with good support like that, but I doubt its a high percentage.
That's because the gray market lowers your chip prices. Big OEMs more than about 5,000 units a year have to purchase from AMD at the prices they sell 1,000 units for (its about 50% more than you pay. However, really big OEMs especially in Europe can get a better deal on larger volumes 10,000+. So order more then they need to get the discount and sell the extra for very large discounts. The pricewatch vendors, or their wholesalers buy these and sell them to you for very large discouts. AMD chips are not nearly as cheap as the relative street prices would seem to indicate. Intel's street prices do not seem to follow this pattern. Street prices are about 10% below wholesale. I don't know if Intel controlls their channel better or if they don't make the same level of price breaks if you order in very large quantities. That's why hobbiests can build AMD systems for so much less than Hewlett-Packard or Gateway.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
One point I think a lot of people are making on this thread is that we can fix most stuff ourselves, and we will tolerate the downtime of having a box built by some random Joe rather than HP/Dell/Compaq/etc - what you miss is that if you are in a bank or other corporate shop, and your user is earning 100k a year, it ain't worth the company's while to shave a few pennies off to get spotty support. They *need* the good support and will be *happy* to pay for it. To them it does make sense.
Just as a note, I've had some very good and very bad experiences with White Box systems, although I'd never buy a pre-fab machine despite the bad. The ability to pick what goes in is more than worth it. However, it's all about where you get it from.
Personally, the biggest mistake I ever made was to buy a custom box from CompuSmart (for all of you Canadians out there). They originally were good on price but the system was a nightmare. The power supply was wrong for my Thunderbird 800, and consequently burned out the motherboard and processor. Of course, this was only on the fifth trip into the shop that they discovered this. Unfortunately, all my parts were on warranty there. They kept telling me it was either the RAM had slipped out or that it was somehow my fault that the system wouldn't boot. Then, they took an agonizing four weeks to get a replacement motherboard (and wrote nasty messages into their in-store computer system about me when I kept coming in and checking up on it (yeah, I saw those messages, Jerks)). Finally, once the four weeks were up, I took it home and couldn't get the network card to work, combined with the machine sporadically restarting and giving me registry errors. Another trip to tech support and they diagnosed that the processor was screwed (way to check that out the first time, guys). Another SEVEN WEEKS later, I got my new processor. Luckily I got a replacement/loaner or I would have snapped. Then they tried to tell me that it was my fault that the network card didn't work, despite the fact that it had been sitting on THEIR DESK for the four weeks that the motherboard was out they were the only ones who touched it during that time. Only a fresh reformat fixed the problem.
At this point, I swore never to buy from them again. When the SAME PROBLEM came back two months later, I took it to another local small-time business who diagnosed it correctly and fixed the power supply in three days. I will definitely be buying my next system from them (PC-Place (the small-time shop in Saskatoon, Sk)).
So as a lesson, white box is the way to go, make sure you know who's building your computer, and NEVER BUY FROM COMPUSMART!
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
In my biased opinion (I'm from "rest of the world"
The importance of service is also altered here - service of big vendors may be not as great and fast as in US, sometimes you have to wait quite long for servicing stuff. Besides, I had never any problems with return policy with small vendors e.g. at "PC components flee market" (Yes, there are some in some parts of the world); and I had some with big market players.
So in my region main customers for boxes from large vendors are large international companies that want to keep standard throughout the world; and perhaps some nouveu-rich. Other customers would rather pay less and have better service....
What's more: usually in my country you have to wait ca. 3 weeks for delivery of hardware from Compaq, HP etc.; white boxes come much sooner.
I "was" the proud owner of a Dell pc. Then my graphics card went bad. Happens right? SO, upon trying to replace it, by way of freak accident, my mother board fried. No biggy, I went out and bought a brand new one. And, since I was buying a new board I figured why not upgrade to a better one? So I did. Then I went to put it back in. As it turns out, the power switch and the power supply were both proprietary. I had to buy a new case and new power supply to accompany my new motherboard. Next computer I get I'm building myself. I would suggest that the average user go to the small timer who builds their machines using all standard parts. Then upgrades are possible without paying through the eyes for the proprietary part. My new motherboard is twice what the old one was, at half the cost (and the replacement Dell was refurbished too). I used to be a Dell fan...
This is a backwards place but I don't feel like driving in reverse.