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Dell's Open PC Costs More Than Windows Box
fist_187 writes "In this article at The Register, they show thath Dell's Open PC costs more than a PC shipped with Windows XP. That's right, getting a PC with a blank hard drive costs more than the same hardware running Windows XP." From the article: "As it turns out, Dell's sales staffers have a secret web page for the product that you can't find with normal search tactics. A kind lass we'll call 'M' pointed us here. On this site, Dell presents a couple different versions of the mysterious E510n. The lowest-end system starts at $774 and is exactly like the boxes above - including the free flat panel - except it has 512MB of memory. For some reason, Dell told reporters that the box starts at $849 - yet another one of the odd sales tactics surrounding this "open source" kit. [Following the publication of our story, Dell raised the price of the PC back up to $849. See the sales pages below for the original $774 price comparisons.]"
That's pretty much a sequence of numbers, when there's no guarantee that the other person won't use it? Kinda like buying a CD-Key game with open packaging... Not something I'd recommend.
Look behind you...
Computers with Windows XP are stuffed to the roof with trialware and services that kick back the cost. Those with empty hard drives are, well, empty. What's so hard to grasp here?
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
No, the most logical and economical thing to do is build you own machine. Resources are so plentiful and hardware is so cheap anymore, is there really any point in paying a large corporation extra hundred(s) of dollars for warrantys to replace a $50 hdd or cdrom? Save the money and build your own.
No, it's been that way for a while. The FreeDOS boxes have always (as long as I remember) been more expensive than an equivalent box with XP.
I don't know what kind of deal they have with Microsoft to make that happen, but I suspect it is more than just the AOL and McAfee add-ons that they can bundle with XP.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
A lot of IT departments have neither the staff nor the patience to build each PC on their own. Considering the tiny profit to be made off PC building, it's much more sensible to focus on projects, rollouts, etc. Tack on the fact that most IT folks don't want to spend hours trying to RMA failed mobos from random vendors, and Dell/IBM/whoever else make a lot of sense in the long run.
Still, that doesn't mean we enjoy dealing with their tech support folks. What idiots!
In this article at The Register...
Eeek!
They're doing this because they're going to sell less of these PCs. I mean, honestly, how many people are going to buy a Dell who have the intelligence to use Linux or another OS? Very few. I'm willing to be that 99% of the /. community or anybody who would potentially want to buy this PC already builds there own. Am I right or wrong here?
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Building your own is great, but when you're freelancing as a consultant, and you have clients, you don't want to worry about what you build, and that's where Dell and others come in. Plus it's easy to sell people on Dell machines, at home or at offices, since alot of them already use them at work. Every time you say 'I can build one FOR you..' they get this strange look and their eyes usually glaze over. For some reason, they accept the fact that you can fix pc's but not build them.
I buy ~250k/year of Dell PCs. We do not have the time, staffing or patience to sort through myriad component problems. They are all Dell Optiplex and Latitude machines with three year warranties and Complete Care. If it breaks, it's Dell's problem. We just don't have time for anything else. If some shop has the time to screw with this stuff, they have too many IT staff and are pissing away money for nothing.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
If the Windows box is cheaper, why not buy it so that you have a Windows license laying around in case you need one. It's not like it's going to hurt you to have a copy laying around in the even that say... you need it to do work from home.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The only reason left these days to build your own is if you want specific components, or you just want the experience. Economic reasons to build your own died when Walmart and other big-box stores started offering PCs for $299.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Have you actually done a cost/benefit analysis? Have you done so for every other IT shop on the planet?
The justification ought to be based on the answer to the question "Is the amount we would pay Dell (or another company) more, or less, than the cost of the hardware plus salary for someone to build/maintain the machines?". If it's less, it would make sense to do it - if it's more, it makes sense to go the Dell (or another company) route.
Simply saying "If some shop has the time to screw with this stuff, they have too many IT staff and are pissing away money for nothing" doesn't cut it - there is no way that you can know that all IT shops would be pissing money away by doing that.
And that glazed look may *actually* be a little tin foil hattery. I can't tell you how many times I've come to the IT-GUY and said "I can build that with better reliability for $80 cheaper" and have that same gaze. Everybody is afraid of getting something "Too good to be true".
Good on XYZ (Dell) company for helping to instill some FUD.
Hmm, Google does screw around with this stuff. Perhaps they have too many IT staff (although it is their business). Whether or not they piss away money can be debated when their profits triple next, or they go bust, whichever comes soonest.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The only reason to buy Dell is their service - heck, they ended up giving me a new laptop 1.5 years after my old one because of issues I was having...
When I started up my brand new Dell laptop I immediately booted to CD-ROM and installed Linux.
I never agreed to the Windows EULA. You have to be careful when it first starts up because any key will make it accept. So if it comes up you have to shut the power off then start it back up and get to the boot menu before it comes up again.
I wouldn't ever consider building a PC for a client these days. Why build for someone as a consultant? You're just asking for trouble. Machines have fairly high failure rates no matter what brand or components you use. I'd rather point people to Dell so that when something breaks, I'm covered. =) Besides, with PC prices the way they are, how much can you save your clients anyway? Especially once you factor in the cost of your time.
and 3) having a computer that's actually coherent.
3.6GHz P4 is (not so) neat, but when coupled with integrated graphics, 256Mb of shitty RAM and the worst mobo of the market it becomes quite... uselesss.
Better get a much lower clock and have the other components match the processor's level of performance.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
No, it is specifically allowed by copyright law, it's the normal use of software.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
May I direct you to Exclusive rights in copyrighted works. I quote: "(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;"
May I direct you to Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of particular copy or phonorecord. I quote: "a) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106 (3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord."
In other words, while the owner of the copyright can license for rental, if they sell the copy instead of merely renting it, then the right of first sale says they no longer have control over the where/what/when of that copy.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
No. This just proves that Microsoft is paying Dell to jack up the price on systems without Windows on it. There are few other explanations.
Dell should want to make money, selling the box for *more* when it does *not* have the Windows tax doesn't make much sense.
Don't you realize what Dell is really selling? Support. People buy those machines because when something gets stupid on it, they'll take care of it. The spend most of their time talking dumb users through un-screwing personal settings, removing software they just put on, fixing TWAIN drivers for their scanners... that sort of stuff. To that end, they've got thousands of people trained exhaustively in XP support. There's an economy of scale in it, they're rigged up for remote admin of the machines, and have a huge infrastructure already built up to deal with it economically. Now, take a machine with Distro X on it, firewalled in some unconventional way, running some oddball... what? rootkit? Who knows. If a Dell tech (at a corporate cost of $Plenty per hour) has to stew about how to determine if the onboard video hardware they provided is faulty, or it's some distro's slightly broken compile of something... any and all margin they've made on selling that box is now gone (along with the cross marketing they can do with AOL, or MSN, or any other stuff that many of their end users end up buying).
It's not a "Windows tax" - it's simply the thing they most often (by overwhelming numbers) provide to their customers, and it's what they're rigged up - logistically and contractually - to support. Ask a typical network support tech what he's likely to end up charging to deal with a PC that for some reason isn't spooling print jobs correctly - and then mention to him (since he's already assumed you're talking about Windows, and he knows which of three or four things to look for) that it's Linux machine. Maybe Mandriva, maybe Fedora. Maybe SuSE. Which version? Not sure. Etc. Completely different set of skills, different overhead needed. All of that has to be taken into account when Dell puts a price, in advance, on the machine.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Wow.
It seems you need to hire an operations manager.
You could be saving a little bit of up front cost to just piss away tens of thousands of dollars a month because you can't justify the cost of labor. Sure if you had the time, I'd warrant that you would have peformed a true cost-benifit analysis of maintianing the machines in-house. But by you're own words "We just don't have time for anything else."
Sad truth is, you probably don't have time to properly account for the the time and money you waste by coordinating with Dell, and I'll wager that your company (by it's size in computer demand) is large enough that it's already utilizing resources just to track and coordinate the problem machines.
Sure, it might only cost you a percent or two of profit, and changing could be the wrong decision (depending on the data you collect), but even a COMPUTER SCIENTIST knows that basic business classes provide ample opportunity for justifying decisions with real resons (cost / savings) than the cop-out, "We just don't have time for anything else."