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Turns Out Ubuntu Dell Costs $225 More
An anonymous reader writes "One week ago this community discussed the apparent price advantage of Ubuntu Dell over Vista. The article linked to a Dell IdeaStorm page with the status: 'Implemented.' Today the status has changed on that page to 'Reneged: Ubuntu Dell is $225 More Than Windows Dell.' The full price of a Ubuntu Inspiron 1420N is indeed $50 cheaper than the identical hardware configuration with Vista — except that a $275 free upgrade to 2GB memory and a 160-GB hard drive is available for Windows only."
and download and install Linux on it.. Maybe Dell should include a free linux cd with it..
Or Dell really DOES make a lot of money off of the crap-o bloatware (6 month's free AOL etc) and this is their way of compensating.
There is no conspiracy. They are simply reacting to competitive pressures. They probably determined that Linux laptop sales would not be dramatically higher with the extra RAM promotion since they don't really have any competition for Linux laptops; they are the only game in town among the big vendors. Conversely, in the Windows world I think HP is eating their lunch (HP is heavily discounting their new Santa Rosa dvx5 series), and so they need these discounts to shore up sales.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Dell are hardly known for offering sane or consistent pricing across models or market segments - try browsing their website some time as a home user, then as various classes of business customer. Why should it come as any surprise that they've omitted a special offer from a machine with a non-standard OS?
Personally, I have no plans to upgrade to Vista any time soon - at least not at home. If faced with the prospect of getting a machine with Ubuntu at $X, or a machine with double the RAM and a bigger hard drive with Vista at $X, I'd take the machine with Vista, thank you very much. Shrink the partition as far as practical, install Ubuntu, and you're ahead - you've got the higher-spec machine, AND the ability to boot into something that the Dull PhoneMonkeys won't hang up over. Okay... that's a path a geek would take, not a regular consumer, but I doubt at this time that there would be very many non-geeks opting for Ubuntu over windows anyway on a new Dell.
Besides... if you're going to criticise Vista, you should at least have first-hand experience of what it is that you're criticising.
Last time I checked you could disagree with the EULA, send the Vista disk back to M$ and get your money back and then install ubuntu. Why not do that?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Isn't this a no-brainer?
1. Buy the PC that gives you the best hardware for the lowest price. If that means taking a Windows PC that has "free" extra memory and a bigger hard disk drive then do it.
2. Shrink the Windows partition (that extra disk space is a boon), install Ubuntu and/or other operating systems of your choice.
3. Go about your business as normal.
4. If you ever have to speak to Dell tech support, you have the additional benefit of being able to tell them that you're using a Windows system (true), and them not giving you the cold shoulder when you tell them that you're using Ubuntu, etc.
5. If you sell your PC at sometime in the future you give yourself a more attractive package to sell and thus recoup more of your initial sale price. More RAM, more disk space, Windows Vista Home all have a value, and the Vista Home alone may make a huge difference to the resale price on eBay. Remember, 90 percent of PC users won't even have heard of Linux, so why cut them out of your resale equation?
Dell is simply trying to protect its standard business model, which includes making money from pre-installing offers from third parties (such as ISPs and AV vendors) on their Windows installations. There's no reason why you can't let them do that and still benefit from their reluctance to abandon that model.
Saving $50 (or is it now $25?) if it means half as much memory and half as much disk space (1GB/80GB vs 2GB/160GB) seems to be a false economy.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
No conspiracy here. Dell has very odd pricing plans, bonuses, sales, and specials that change all of the time. You can configure the same computer from three different locations on the Dell website and come up with 5 different prices. They typically offer "upgrades like memory, 19in LCD, HD etc on bundled deals that are even cheaper then without the upgrades. This is regardless of the OS the machine comes with.
Given the choices on their various buying portals, it should be no surprise for advertising sake, they have very specific configurations for a specific price that are cheaper then what you could together using configuring their own. These same specific machines with upgrades are what ends up in the mailed out advertisements and the back of magazines and may even be a loss leader for them but it gets people to the site in hopes they can get an up sell as well.
Some don't like the choices of configurations, some do. For those that do a little leg work on Dells site, you can get a really good combo deal. If you want to buy one with minimal effort and do not feel like browsing around, you can do that as well. Dell is trying to maximize profit AND cater to the person with some extra time that does some research. I view that the same way as a grocery store putting smaller higher priced items near the register lines or selling a cold 20oz bottle of Pepsi for $1.29 and a warm 2 liter bottle for $0.89 back in the pop isle. You have a choice, convenience or lowest price.
1. Does not come with all that crap ware installed add $200 in savings for a great deal of time cleaning the trash off of the system.
2. Add office professional (ships with open office) I am sure that is at least a $200 savings.
3. Scratch having to take the machine into a shop every three months to clean all the spyware, crap etc out of the machine to make it actually work again. There is another few hundred bucks $200
I did not even list the other software it ships with and the equivalents would likely run you into the thousands.
Got Code?
Just FYI, according to Pricewatch, a 160GB notebook disk goes for about $90 and 1GB DDR2 to fit an Inspiron 1420 will set you back about $53. According to Microsoft, you'll have to shell out $99.99 for Vista Home Basic.
At the very least, if you price two machines with identical hardware specs, and you don't come out at least a little cheaper without Vista, you are getting RIPPED OFF, plain and simple. This holds true whether the two machines are base models or fully-upgraded-to-the-gills gaming rigs. If they're identical hardware-wise, they should be significantly cheaper without Vista.
What you do with the disk space beyond what your OS needs is generally entirely up to you - not your OS. It's not like you're just storing a bunch of backup copies of Vista or something - you'll fill it with music, movies, photos, p0rn, third-party software, whatever. Same stuff everyone else fills their boxes with - you just have 6-7GB less space to work with if you choose Vista, at least if the vendor did the right thing and offered the same hardware upgrades to the non-Vista customer, at the same prices/differences.
I realize there are people here who need that extra disk space for high-end stuff (Oracle springs to mind), but the majority of people who get one of these boxes will do so with something else in mind besides maintaining a multi-million-record database for a large corporation. Hell, I'd only use one for watching movies, listening to music, or coding.
Sorry to ramble on, it's 9:13am and I haven't slept yet.
Dell's prices fluctuate more rapidly and more widely than the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Identical systems may vary by significant amounts depending on whether you talk to a "home office" or "small business" rep... or whether you talk to them on Tuesday or Wednesday... or whether you get the price on the Web or over the phone or in a mailing.
I'm not sure anyone knows what a Dell costs unless they are a business negotating a deal for a few thousand of them.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
At the very least, if you price two machines with identical hardware specs, and you don't come out at least a little cheaper without Vista, you are getting RIPPED OFF, plain and simple.
Speaking purely from a business stand-point and ignoring all philosophical issues, this is not definitively true. That is, it may be true that you're being overcharged but it isn't necessarily so. You're looking at one particular cost - the cost of purchasing the operating system - and assuming that every other cost is the same. It may very well not be, even on identical hardware. It's been well documented that Dell gets paid to load crapware on the system. That's revenue that they do not or may not get on the Linux machine, which means they must increase the price to reach the same margin. Its also quite possible that other cost, such as support cost, are increased for Linux machines. This could be due to a number of reasons, such as people using Linux calling in more because they're less familiar with the OS, or help desk people requiring additional training or being harder to find. The bottom line is that computer sellers operate on razor thin margins, and there's a lot more that goes into price calculations than what Microsoft charges for their OS. That doesn't mean that we should set back and pay unwarranted mark-ups without questioning them, but it does mean that simplistic statements such as the one you made above don't tell the whole story.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
"I did not have that problem, and you didn't give me enough diagnostic information to adequately help you solve it. You can attempt to find someone else with a similar problem, or we can work on it a little bit longer and try and get more information."
Plus, we don't know if the GP was messing around with things that he shouldn't have. People that are new to Linux (especially if you're having problems) shouldn't be messing with their Gnome install, advanced user settings, or extremely experimental beta eyecandy software, despite how tempting it can be.
Without knowing that information, I think that mhall did a great job addressing AC's problems. He recommended that, even though he wasn't sure exactly what the problem was (since he had never experienced them), he should:
- Check his screen resolution (and possibly video card drivers),
- Not mess with Beryl or Compiz,
- Create a new, default, user account and see if that helps, or
- If he doesn't have much to lose, try re-installing.
You're ridiculing him for some advice that he offered (for free) that was more helpful than most customer service departments (where they get paid), especially given the limited amount of information he had.Indeed. mhall doesn't deserve to be insulted in that manner.