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Dell's Marketshare Decline Due to Intel?
timeOday writes "News.com reports that Dell's PC sales are growing more slowly than the overall PC market for the first time on record. Gartner's Charles Smulders blames Dell's decline on their allegiance to Intel, and cites Hewlett Packard's embrace of AMD as a key to their growing sales. Can Dell continue to shun AMD, or is a breakthrough imminent for the #2 chipmaker?"
From my personal experience as a consumer and as a tech HP/compaq computers are garbage. Dell computers are alright is slighty over priced while Sony and Apple are asthetically pleasing but over priced. If HP/compaq is gaining on Dell it must mean the consumers have gotten dumber and nothing more.
I still prefer to put my own together.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Actually Dell home support is in India. There small business support is often in the US. I have a friend that works for Dell in Idaho doing support for servers.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I just bought an Inspiron E1505 laptop, and I don't agree about the shoddy product. It's better built than my last Toshiba, and the HP/Compaqs I've had at work.
That being said, what did disturb me was the ordering process. Dell used to pride itself on having good knowledge of it's supply chain and streamlining their delivery.
I ordered on March 23rd. The expected delivery date when I first ordered was April 10. By the time I got the email confirmation it had become April 18th. Dell has a website where you can track the status of your order. It went from prepping to build to testing all in one day.
Then it sat in the 'boxing' stage for 3 days.
The laptop finally arrived on April 5th. Ahead of their initial schedule.
But I found it disturbing that they really had no idea of how long it would take. In reading the notebookforums dell boards, there are others who have ordered different models who are still waiting 2-3 months later, because of a shortage of some part, or an engineering flaw, etc.
I believe part of the reason for the change, is that all assembly(at least for the Inspiron laptops) is done in Malaysia. It took 3 days to box the laptop because they had to fly it back from over there.
Anyway, just interesting. I had not purchased a Dell for myself in 10 years, and while I like it and still feel I got a better deal than the competition. I will have to say the process left much to be desired.
Sadly, I have to agree with the idea, although the word shoddy is perhaps a bit much. They still provide product and service that is better than average - but they used to be so much more concerned about quality and support.
I think they realized how bad their competition was and figured they could cut corners and still be better than the average PC maker. I think they are still better than the average PC maker, but only barely these days; that isn't enough to keep customers.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Dell is no exception. Indeed, I think compared to many other vendors they are not that bad in terms of actual hardware. Their support on the other hand is absolutely horrible. I have had several customers who have had to order replacement parts and it is a pain. I can expect to spend on hour on the phone to order a replacement Windows CD or a heat sink retention assembly. That time gets billed to my customers. Parts replacement up until recently was handled in the US but that too has been offshored to India.
Of course hardware replacement is the exception rather than the rule, so generally, I am still comfortable recommending Dell with the caveat that they are better to pay for my support services than try to call Dell.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
As a fairly well-known technician hereabouts, I'm often asked for advice about purchasing systems, particularly laptops, etc.
Back in the day, I might have recommended Dell. Their laptops were fairly well features, reliable, and competetively priced. Note that the AMD/Intel difference might place into the last factor nowadays...
Anyhow, my more recent experience with Dell has been just as indicated: they've ridden their previously decent reputation for awhile but now their crappy call-centres, incompatible parts, and not-so-great quality is starting to bite them. Dell computers are getting more and more cheap nowadays, and that's in quality as well as price.
Now let's look at some of the others:
- IBM systems (up until Lenovo, who I don't have too much experience with recently) are generally reliable but less-featured (esp with the small HDD sizes)... still I'd say they are or were good for the office types who wanted a system that would keep on ticking.
- I haven't had many problems with Toshiba laptops, other than the gazillion little tray icons that the have loading at startup to control the touchpad/wireless/burner/etc settings. I turn most of the unnecessary ones off though, and lots of laptops have 'em... so no biggy. The newer laptops seem a bit more thin/plasticy though so I'll be keeping an eye on them, but they've been good so far other than a few here at the office that have been shitkicked (big big scuffing marks).
- HP: Well, I'm using one now. I've got one at home. The home model (ZD7000) has a built-in defect wherein it doesn't like having two sticks of RAM in with high-memory graphics/etc applications (spontaneous reboots). Not great, but that's the only model where I've seen that issue and haggling with HP eventually scored me a free 1GB stick of RAM for that laptop. It works fine for me, and despite being lugged around regularly it's been durable. My office-style work compaq (NX8220) aside from giving me nightmares configuring the ATI graphics card, has been both reliable and durable as well. AMD64 processors in the newer compaqs (and me being a linux user) scores personal points and recommendations for other linux users (such as at work), but not recommendations for the windows users. Compaq laptops also were known to be not great in quality before, but that seems to have quite improved with HP making them.
- Acer: You get what you pay for. Acer's have quite a lot of features for your buck. I've also seen generations spanning three years that had consistant power unit/modulator issues, and quite a few with screen burnout. However, I might add that I do have a (non-laptop) Acer LCD at home, and it's holding up nicely, so maybe they're improving in that area... however the plasticy feel and the rumours I've heard about HDD burnout make me tend to say "whatever you get, try to avoid Acer" to most people who ask advice.
- Sony: When you buy Sony, you're buying a brandname. And proprietary parts. And a sinking brandname. Overpriced and underperforming are usually two good words
Now, back to desktops. I haven't seen too many Dells explode lately but when I do look in them I find relatively cheap parts (motherboard) and massive compatability issues with standard parts. Floppy drives won't fit properly behind the happy little Dell bezels, power supplies can be funk or custom, and sometimes even PCI/etc cards don't seem to go in right. Sure, you can buy a cheap Dell machine, but upgrading or adding/repairing any parts is oftimes a major pain.
I wouldn't actively recommend against Dell, but I'd still advise caution to potential Dell buyers, and that's a step down from the days when I happily promoted how my little Dell laptops kept on kickin' (hell, some of the older P-II era ones are outlasting the more current gens)
You can on
I've got a GX270 at work, and I heard from the engeneer that came to replace the motherboard that 7/10 of these motherboards will give out during their lifetime due to shoddy capacitors. We've also got some expensive Lattitude laptops, but the batteries and the power supplies are always giving out. These (somewhat older) laptops are not top of the class in design either. They are heavy, short battery life, keyboard/touchpad problems, keys press into the screen etc. Fortunately, the hard drives they use seem to be fine. But to say that they aren't error prone...
Actually, having just NOT purchased from Dell, I think it goes further than anyone being able to provide easy configuration. It may not be conscious, but Dell is actively working against easy configuration.
A few years ago, it was easy to get what you wanted - start by selecting the processor, and select upgrade options from there.
No longer.
Today, you can't start with a hardware choice, but must start with a BRAND (XPS or whatver they all are), then pray that brand can provide what you actually want. Simply stated, exploring different configurations on a Dell is HARD, as it takes time and backtracking. Any mix of mid-range to high end hardware and a lower end processor can't even occur. Hunting for a reasonably priced configuration at Dell is not worth the effort.
I just purchased my first non-Dell in 5 years, and it was a result of their lack of flexibility in ordering (and tying in items I didn't want to purchase - think Windows Media Center Edition). Bring back the ease of configuration and I may purchase there again, but it won't happen with their current configuration system and choices.
Dell is so far in bed with Intel that I don't think anything will make them ever offer AMD as an option
Yet it is interesting that Dell sells AMD processors off its website, and also offer AMD systems for certain customers in the server market. Looks like Dell's been sleeping around..