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?"

Comments

Re:Perhaps

[LWATCDR]

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.

ALL consumer computers by major vendors are shoddy

[einhverfr]

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.

Well, when people ask me

[phorm]

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)

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