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HP Regains Throne as Top PC Maker
Nick writes "HP is once again the leading PC manufacturer." From the article: "HP has snatched the PC crown from Dell's barely coherent clutches. It has taken HP close to three years to once again lead the market in worldwide PC sales. Under CEO Carly Fiorina and post Compaq, the company largely gave up on the tit-for-tat struggle with Dell for the PC top spot that had been so important to it over the years. Now it has reclaimed the #1 slot during the third quarter on the back of Dell's self-destruction. Overall, worldwide PC shipments hit 59.1m units in the third quarter - a 7 per cent rise from the same period last year, according to new data from Gartner. The US PC market, however, dipped 2 per cent, marking its first fall since mid-2002. Dell is particularly exposed to the US PC market, and it showed." Update: 10/20 16:37 GMT by Z : Switched link to a more current story.
Now that everyone knows that HP-hired goons will go through your garbage, sit outside your house, and take pictures of you & your family...it seems everybody thinks HP is great!
I look forward to Sony, Microsoft, and SCO trying this next...
Published: January 16, 2003, 4:49 PM PST Zonk is one of those "special" article submitters, I take it?
It's good to see HP getting results from the vast improvement in PC quality, pricing, and service. My company used to solely buy Dell's, but lately have become frustrated by the 'here today gone tomorrow' pricing. It's annoying for a small business purchasing manager to go into Dell's Home PC section and find the same PC as the Small Business section for $100 less one day, and $100 more the next. Come on Dell, stop playing games with us.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
What gives?
I have it on good authority it won't last long. With the introduction of AMD based products and new factories being built in North Carolina, new Europe, India, and China, Dell will take the lead back in the next couple of quarters.
This is just the results of dirty back-handed wheeling-and-dealing committed by all corporations and is probably nothing to be particularly proud of.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Am using a Dell 233Mz w/ 64Mb RAM, 4 Gb SCSI disk running NT 4.0, service pack 6a. Has HP got anything that can beat that? I hate to get stuck on the upgrade treadmill, as you might notice...
Firefox, Notepad, & Popcorn are all I mostly use, anyhow.
Or is history actually repeating itself...
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
Yep. Zonk's so afraid, he's posting positive news articles about HP from nearly 4 years ago and passing them off as "news for nerds"!
My blog
I woudln't derive actual meaning from it ...
HP doesn't make significant profit selling PCs.
It hardly sets any technology standards - those are all set by the rest of the industry.
If Dell is #1 next month, so what?
The vendor making all the money in the PC business is still...
that same company from Washington state.
I think Zonk had a Kent Brockman moment, he saw HP taking market share and took it from there, posting the article was basically his way of saying "I for one welcome our new, top-selling PC-making overlords."
Learn to know, the dark side of the force, and you will achieve a power greater than any Jedi...the power to save your w
The article "Published: January 16, 2003, 4:49 PM PST" is talking about figures from 2002, and how the industry has recoverd since then. Not new news.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Wow...Zonk, which drugs are you taking, and where did you get them?
I just bought a dv8000. I was busy with other things in my life, and didn't realize until it was too late to return it to the HP store (21 days!) that it is horse poo.
1 608306
The keyboard and the touchpad occasionally go haywire, and it's not just me:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=
Wish I'd seen that before I ordered (or very soon after).
I bought it because I need a portable, fast machine with a big display.
So if HP is indeed pulling ahead, it won't be for long.
Posts have been submitted from the past directly to today's Slashdot homepage.
As part of an experiment, Zonk set a number of stories in January 2003 while the idea of giving subscribers access to stories before the unwashed masses. Indeed, this story was seen by beta subscribers in 2003 and has suddenly re-appeared after a quantum mishap involving Cowboy Neal zapped a few posts from the database.
Today, they're showing back up as a new singularity in Cowboy Neal's SQL-Optimising-Time-Compressor caused bits originally lost in 2003 to show up in their original state three and a half years later.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Four years ago, I purchased a Dell laptop for my son when he went off to college. It lasted all of a year before the hard drive died. After quite a bit of trouble with customer service reading scripts in Indiglish we finally got an RMA. The machine worked for about two weeks after it was returned and then developed some unrelated problem. Rather than waste another 4 hours on un-intelligible tech support, I bought my son another computer from a different manufacturer. It's worked flawlessly for the past 3 years.
Judging from what I read on the net while I was researching my son's second problem, I don't think my experience with poor quality product and poor quality tech support from Dell is unique.
There's a limit to cost cutting - go too far and you destroy the reason people initially bought from you. In my case, it'll be a long time before I ever buy another Dell. In the past 4 years, that's 3 computers Dell hasn't sold me.
Time to move on to something else.
...built in North Carolina, new Europe...
Is that the 'new Europe' Grand Moff Rumsfeld set up to compete with 'old Europe' in the hope the former will eventually replace the latter?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I'll put ten bucks on ROTK winning best picture
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Content is correct, just misprint in date ... here's the scoop from The Register
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Perhaps Slashdot should have a section just like the column in Scientific American where old research announcements from the 1800's are reprinted.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
With success like this, I think she can look forward to a long and exciting career!
Badass Resumes
select * from base where originalOwner = 'you' and currentOwner != 'us'.
0 rows returned.
All their recent espionage aside, I have bought 2 HP computers over the years (desktop about 5 years ago, laptop last year). I am very pleased with the quality, but 2 does not make a very good sample. Does anyone have opinions on the quality of the machines themselves?
Dark Reflection
Calling HP a top PC maker is like calling Wal-Mart the top retailer. Technically it's true, but that doesn't really tell the whole story.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
I'm about in the same place with Apple. My wife's old iBook G3-600 was in the shop four times under warranty, and she's had to replace the power adapter three times, with the current adapter being a third-party model that is *much* sturdier (and way cheaper) than the crap Apple shipped with the iBook. Against my better judgement, I bought her a new 2GHz MacBook (she much prefers OS X to Windows), and I've yet to get that machine to a usable state. Random shutdowns that resetting the PRAM/PMU won't fix, and the machine won't stay connected to the wireless network for more than 10 minutes at a time when it *is* able to stay powered up. And for those that will ask, yes, it's set to a preferred network and the software is up-to-date, which wasn't easy to do with the constant shutdowns. Which reminds me - I need to call Apple *again* tonight.
It's a shame, as I have a number of older Apples, none of which have given me the first bit of trouble. I just don't forsee another Apple laptop anytime in my future, though.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
...but when HP says it shipped X value of hardware, that would be to retailers no? Where as Dell sells direct so when they say they shipped Y value that amount has actually been sold.
...instead of business news?
So, HP is now the top PC vendor.
And this means what? Vista will run in some new, exciting way different from the way it runs on Dells? Interesting new _kinds_ of peripherals will come to market first on HP boxes, the way the Sony 3.5" diskette did?
Or does it just mean (yawn) that on the right day with the wind behind it, some HP models may offer incrementally more RAM or an incrementally faster processor than the equivalent Dell, especially for corporate purchasing agents purchasing them in quantities of a thousand?
How long has it been since HP tried anything like NewWave?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.
I have worked with both Dell and HP business class solutions. Dell servers suck. I had RAID fail on me numerous times to include both hot spares failing to merge into an array to address a failed drive. In this instance I had to rebuild the entire volume and restore from tape. With Dell workstations lets talk about the GX270 constant issues with power supplies and capacitors going bad. These are known issues with this model yet Dell insists on a one for one swap for each PC. As soon as one PC is fixed and returned to the floor another one goes bad and we have to request either a motherboard or power supply to be replaced. On the other hand my HP DL series servers are like Maytag washers. I practically forget they are running in my racks. The same goes for HP business class workstations.
"Rather than waste another 4 hours on un-intelligible tech support, I bought my son another computer from a different manufacturer. It's worked flawlessly for the past 3 years""
1)Customer looks for tech support number in product manual and literature. No luck.
2)Customer looks for tech support number on web site. No luck.
3)Customer finds the support number by looking in the company's domain registration record.
4)Customer calls number. After being re-routed and bounced and made to call other numbers, customer finally reaches tech support.
5) Customer waits 37 minutes to talk to someone.
6) Customer gets a filtering person, who creates a service record after giving the customer the third degree (When the process is repeated, the filtering person always has to re-create the service record because the previous one forgot to save it)
7) Tech support person asks what the problem is. Customer describes. Support person asks customer to be put on hold. The company disconnects customer after 10 minutes of waiting.
8) Repeat #5,#6,#7 several times. Usually in the same order.
9) Real tech support person on the phone! He asks: "Xvswwwovv wavvwat qzxwzvxx?".
Where were you when the voynix came?
FTA: Hewlett-Packard regained its position as the world's largest PC maker in the fourth quarter, while the industry overall saw shipments increase in the quarter and in 2002 as a whole.
This isn't to say that HP hasn't regained the top spot, but this article actually is out of date. There is no typo. It's the wrong article.
Badass Resumes
Just for the record, never buy a first generation apple. I will wait till they do a complete line update on the macbooks before buying one. Every new design has bugs. Even from Apple. But the story is always revision a models tend to need more TLC(with /without a hammer) than later versions.
My 12" powerbook G4 acted up once. I finially figured out that several of the fonts had gotten corrupted on the HD, ncreasing their size by an order of magnitude.(yea 3 gigs of fonts when it's supposed to be less than 200 megs) and it was doing random things to the OS. I was upgrading to 10.4 at the time so I wasn't too upset. But I also waited until the second or third revision came through of the hardware.
Personally I would deal with it for a couple more months and upgrade to the "new" macbooks when they come out in a few more months. Then sell the old one on ebay for as much as you can.
there is a sucker out there who wll pay you good money and at least underwrite part of the replacement costs.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I have some stats that would actually contradict your situation. I attended a 4 year university in their business school. Part of being in the business school, every student reveived a brand new laptop, and then two years later, you turn it in for another brand new one. When I was a freshment, the school had a deal with HP, and all of us received HP OmniBooks. Everyone complained. They were always causeing problems. The next year, Dell won the bid and now the CIO of the school will not even consider giving the contract to another manufacturer. The reason? The number of hardware related complaints/cases received by the schools help desk dropped 50% after switching to Dell Latitudes.
However, I think Dell needs to seriously reconsider its hard drive suppliers. Whenever I have seen any hardware related problems with a Dell laptop, it has always been the Harddrive. Most people with the school laptops ended up replacing the hard drive at some point during the 2 years the school suppported it. I'm a rare exception and it continues to chug along. The GF's hard drive also failed recently (bought herself, bargain laptop, but from Dell). I believe the hard drive I took out was a Seagate, but I think most of the latitudes have Toshiba, so not sure really what to say there. I have always had success with WD, so I'll be sticking with them.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
HP has IBM to thank for the lead they now have. Since IBM sold off its laptop division to Lenovo, the corporations ran for cover. I know my own company stopped buying Thinkpads, and now buys HPs... The corporate types want to buy from the biggest, most reliable vendor. For many that was IBM, but Lenovo didn't fit their bill, and I'm hearing a lot of them went with HP over Dell. It is an indictment of Dell and Lenovo more than a vote of confidence for HP.
"Four years ago, I purchased a Dell laptop for my son when he went off to college. It lasted all of a year before the hard drive died."
We've got a fleet of notebooks from Dell, Gateway, and HP. The hard drives in laptops all seem to die much more quickly vs those in desktops. I've always assumed it is due to the increased physical traumua a traveling laptop gets subjected to.
"After quite a bit of trouble with customer service reading scripts in Indiglish we finally got an RMA. "
When Dell sells you a computer, they also offer you a choice of service plans. If you go the cheap route, you get the guy in India reading a script in broken English for hours, and mail in service. If you buy the Gold support, you get a native English speaker, 1 minute hold times, and next-business-day, on-site service. Plus Accidental Damage replacement (you drop it, you break it, you get a new one).
With Dell, you get exactly what you pay for.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Personally I would deal with it for a couple more months and upgrade to the "new" macbooks when they come out in a few more months.
I refuse to reward Apple with yet another sale after dealing with their shoddy engineering twice now. If I do end up replacing the MacBook, it most assuredly will not be with another Apple.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Just a note - I have found that yaw'ing is bad for the spindle bearings in hard drives. ... the resistance the gyroscope gave you to changing the direction of the axis - now envision a 5400rpm gyroscope. Same thing.
My experience shows that by not moving the laptop while the drive is spinning (regular desktops too) your hard drive will last longer. For a feeling of why, remember those toy gyroscopes you had as a kid
Put the laptop on a hard flat surface.
Turn on.
Use.
Turn off.
Move laptop.
Hard drive lasts almost forever.
I've seen it a hundred times, and the guys that come crying to me about crashed drives are the same ones that wouldn't listen when I barked at them about picking up their laptops while running, swinging them under their arm and walking them all over the office.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Oh come on! Everyone who has ever bought a Dell product knows the difference lies in their customer service...
"Hello these ees 'Dan'...may I be of knowing and becoming on the eashew?"
As a consultant I used to purchase only Dell's.
They seemed to provide the best end-user support depending on warranty level(which isn't saying much) so I wouldn't have to trouble with all of that.
But lately (and since I'm no longer a consultant), the leap from, say Latitude 610's to 620's showed an increase in price and a decrease in overall quality/performance (when 620 first came out it only offered intel graphics? comeon!)
And for lower level business class specs, you can spend $1600 on a d520, or get the same specs for $800 from a Toshiba A8-EZ8312, with (at this point) better and faster support!
It's really just up to whoever is more aggressive in the market to chew away at Dell's carcass, to determin who is the top dog.
I told you, Dell is a one-trick pony.
Dell's penchant for hollowing out suppliers is just one of the 'thin-line' tactics that finally knocked the company off. No one wants their business these days and they certainly can't compete in the current growth markets.
Don't expect Dell to ever regain from this...going down, down, down.
Good riddance to bad rubbish!
But servers and devices too. I finally got fed up enough with Dell with the apparent inferior machines, high prices, and poor technical support.
But we recently had need of a server to use for RSnapshot, and Dell wanted too much money so we hit up HP. Got a hell of a deal on a server with 2TB of disk space. Now if they'd just ship the damned thing.
I think Michael Dell should close the doors and return the money to the investors.
If they don't do something about customer service at Dell then my money would be on HP to stay in the lead.
I have five newer Dell systems at home and at this time I wouldn't buy a keyboard from them due to my recent
experience with Dell customer service. I spent five grand to get insulted by a condescending customer service staff.
No thank you I will pay more for better service.
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
Ya sure, that sounds like "self-destruction" to me. The tone of this sounds like HP bought itself some press to try and rebound from this corporate governance scandal. I wonder what HP had to do to get to this 15% growth rate in a saturated market? If I were an HP shareholder I'd be very concerned that this is was a diversionary ploy at the expense of long term growth. Similar to the way GM kept losing money on rental fleet sales in order to prop up its overall numbers.
I would suggest getting a next business day on-site warranty in that sort of situation. I've had a Dell laptop which came with a 3 year warranty of that sort, and it has been quite worthwhile. I've had three replacement motherboards, two replacement keyboards, the replacement of the case around the LCD, a heatsink replacement, and a replacement hard drive. Dell's quality is rather horrible. But since, in my situation, problematic hardware is replaced within two to three days of breaking (I generally don't have time for someone to come the next day), it doesn't cause that much of an inconvenience.
I generally make warranty requests over email, and tell technical support exactly what is wrong, and exactly what needs to be replaced. They seem to appreciate this, and have, with one exception, been very efficient and have always replaced whatever I told them needed replacement.
Of course, Dell technical support also seems to steadfastly believe that I am the University of California, and not Constantine Evans. And they now require that I give them the billing and shipping addresses which were on the original PO that the UCSD Bookstore used to purchase the machine. That caused quite a hassle when they started requiring it - whenever I told them that I didn't know the addresses because I had bought the laptop from the bookstore, they just refused to talk to me.
I work for an organisation where some hot-shot has decided to buy several hundred Dell pc's. When tested, about 25% (!!) was DOA. That was about three months ago. The organisation is still arguing (sp?) with Dell about the repairs and nothing has happened yet. Looks like the next time we need pc's it'll not be Dell.
We (the repair-crew of afore-mentioned organisation) have the saying: "If you wish someone to hell, give him a Dell". Every time we have to do Dell's they have the greatest amount of defects in comparison with IBM and HP (of which we have huge quantities too).
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
I refuse to reward Apple with yet another sale after dealing with their shoddy engineering twice now. If I do end up replacing the MacBook, it most assuredly will not be with another Apple.
Apple's no worse than the rest, and at least their customer service is usually pretty good. I have a coworker who has been thru 4 laptops over the past six months, from Dell, Toshiba and Sony. All junk.
Dell was the worst of the bunch, though - not only were two machines defective, they were impossible to deal with. They tried to screw him on the purchase price (he only bought the machine because he had a coupon, which they then tried not to honor), then they screwed him on the return when he sent the defective lump back to them. I'm not surprised HP is eating their lunch.
I recently purchased a couple Compaq Presario Computers Model SR1710NX and SR1910NX (I needed basic computers and wasn't looking to spend a lot.) For the price, I was impressed. They used many of the same component suppliers I would if I was building my own box:
Motherboard: Manufactured by Asus with open PCIe slot.
Hard Drive: Seagate SATA drive (SR1910NX, I forget what was in the SR1710NX)
Sure, they're not exactly a full featured systems but I can add to them when I find good deals on stuff I want to upgrade. Quality components, no generic motherboard and no cheaper Maxtor drive, that I would have likley seen from the Compaq of the past in their Presario line. The SR1710NX has been use since Feb, and so far no problems. (Of course I had to get rid of a lot of crap that they pre-install... but all the consumer retail systems come with that)
I now recommend the Compaq systems with Asus boards (you can research that on their website) for friends and family. Figure it's a better bet than a cheap Dell these days. (As for support - my friends and family end up calling me anyway.. so I have no idea how good that is)
--Aaron Greenberg
It must've been that HP laptop I just bought that sent them over the top =D
One of the reasons why HP is cleaning up in the home computer and small business market vs. Dell is because of their physical presence in the local retail channel. Dell is a pure Internet mail order play, with no local retail presence. That was great 5 years ago, when Dell's rivals were bloated, smaller operations who had to maintain a retail marketing and distribution structure that handled dozens of major retailers, in addition to their corporate sales and Internet sales structures. Dell could shave a substantial percentage off the price of each PC as a result, which at the time added up to a couple hundred dollars per-PC, back when the average PC cost around $2000. Dell had no real R&D to speak of either, unlike its competitors - they were free to focus solely on lowering component and assembly costs, using stock standard designs provided by Intel.
Fast forward to 2006 though and the picture isn't so rosy for Dell. The average inflation-adjusted price of a new PC is probably closer to $1000 today. The shipping costs alone can add 5% or more to the cost of a PC, not to mention the added hassle if there's a problem and you need to return it. So Dell's mail order model has become something of a disadvantage. Everybody has implemented the kind of component and assembly optimization Dell pioneered, and they're all just putting together kits of standardized equipment supplied by the same handful of vendors - Intel, nVidia, ATI, etc., so Dell gains no traction there. The standard $1000 PC comes with so many built-in features there's little demand for the kind of customization that once set Dell apart.
On the cost side, Carly butchered HP's workforce, so a lot of the old R&D overhead is gone, and HP has the combined retail channel of both the old HP and Compaq, plus all of their old corporate accounts. There are fewer retail players to deal with as well, lowering HP's costs even more, and HP's size gives them more leverage to push retailers around with. In this new environment, HP is poised to beat Dell at their own game.
The only problem is, this has turned into an extremely low-margin game for all of the players. HP makes a lot of revenue off the PC market, but their margins are all in corporate hardware and services and of course in printer ink that costs more per-ounce than gold. Beyond that, they're now a hollowed-out shell, living off of support for legacy products designed and frequently sold a decade ago. Corporate hardware is slowly marching down the commoditization path as well, though it's probably 5-10 years behind the kind of margin erosion we've seen in the PC space.
IBM saw what was coming and bailed on the PC market a couple of years ago, retreating entirely to the corporate space. HP bet the company on beating Dell, and while it looks like they may in fact pull that feat off, my guess it's going to be a pyrrhic victory. I think the PC market isn't going to be worth diddlysquat in a couple of years. Apple is rapidly carving out a big niche for itself in the only remaining retail segment that's profitable - the high end. That leaves everybody else - Lenovo, HP, Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Gateway - to squabble over the low margin to no margin mid and low end of the market. I think it's only a matter of time before most of them are squeezed out, leaving probably just Lenovo and either Dell or HP standing.
Which of those two ultimately wins out probably depends upon when the Chinese enter the printer market and begin to consume market share from HP. If it happens within the next 3 years, Dell will probably be victorious, as HP will have its legs shot out from beneath it due to the drop in sales of their highest-margin retail product, printer ink. If cheap printer rivals don't enter the market in the next 3 years, HP will probably survive as the other big player in the PC market, leaving Dell to implode as their revenues continue to decline.
In the end, IBM will probably buy out the loser in that battle, take the corporate hardware and service for its
Regional sales vs global sales. The other three locals don't get as much int'l biz, apparently.
Reality is prettier inside my head...
"I don't think my experience with poor quality product and poor quality tech support from Dell is unique."
Nor is it from any other manufacturer.
My company purchased an HP Compaq nw8240 for me nine months ago. It's been the best portable I've ever used - it's rock solid & trully a desktop replacement. Given some of the things I've heard about HP in the past I was concerned but it's proven to be a solid system. I usualy kill my portables within the first six months but not this one.
Well, the whole "Apple Quality" idea is shot to hell, then.
Nobody wants to buy from a company that makes good products only if bought on the 2nd Tuesday of months that have the letter "U" in them.
Just try and tell me that first-generation notebooks from IBM or HP have such horrible problems...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
actually they do. First generation of any line usually has a bug that desn't show up in limited testing but only becomes a problem after it is exposed to thousands of testers. You shouldn't be a brand new model of a brand new car line either. Doesn't matter whether it's a ford, chevy, BMW, or mercedes. They all have little technical errors. Things that the engineers didn't think of or thought would work better than they do.
real world hardware always has those kinds of bugs.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.