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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."
Haven't people been saying the footprint of Linux is a shitload less than Windows bloat.
You simply don't need the extra on linux.
liqbase
There's two things I need every morning - a cup of coffee, and a blatant "flame Microsoft" Slashdot article. Bravo.
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.
Dell's promotions and stuff is err..."dynamic", to say the least. You can find the same system at like 5 different price depending where you look. So its no surprise that stuff like that would happen.
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.
True... it would be interesting, if somewhat complicated, to see the price fluctuations over a couple month period to see how the prices really stack up.
Other than stating the upgrades to windows are FREE! You still save $45. What I am missing?
Inspiron Notebook 1420 N
Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo T5250 (1.5GHz/667Mhz FSB/2MB cache)
Ubuntu version 7.04
2GB Shared Dual Channel3 DDR2 at 667MHz
Size: 160GB2 SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
Price: $774
Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo T5250 (1.5GHz/667Mhz FSB/2MB cache)
Genuine Windows® Vista Home Basic Edition
Anti-glare, widescreen 14.1 inch display (1280x800)
FREE! 2GB2 Shared Dual Channel3 DDR2 at 667MHz
FREE! 160GB4 SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
24X CD writer/DVD Combo Drive
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Mini-Card
Price:$819
No, Vern. They just let him in.
I love how these "revelations" happen far later when the rest of us that looked at it saw right away that the "specials" or "instant rebates" only apply to the windows machines.
There has been people here on Slashdot posting for a few months that the Open source and now linux laptops are in fact more expensive by around $200.00.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything." ~Gregg Easterbrook
I'm quite impressed how the (quite obvious) spin was placed on this claim. It's only $275 more if you WANT to upgrade.
Still, i'm definitely disappointed in Dell; i'd have liked that upgrade for free too...(Although Vista would need it to Pagefile usage, whereas Ubuntu would use it for the hoards of FOSS that's available...)
ilovegeorgebush
Considering it's already down (see my other post in this thread), I guess it's safe to say that Dell's dynamic pricing moves faster than Slashdot's submission acceptance system.
Or rather Dell is getting a kickback from microsoft that is paying for the upgrade.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
It's the Slashdot corollary to the Cartoon Law of Falling Anvils (Law IX):
Everything moves faster than Slashdot submissions.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
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.
So Dell's base 1420 with Ubuntu costs $747 with these specs:
Meanwhile, Dell's Windows equivalent has exact same specs, except for these differences:
And the Windows version costs $869. So the Ubuntu version is $122 cheaper and has a better WiFi card.
Remind me again... what did you step in?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
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
Sorry, I transposed numbers on the Ubuntu price -- the machine is $774, not $747, so the difference is $95, not $122.
My apologies. But Dell's Ubuntu system is still cheaper.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
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?
And, checking the Windows price again, it's dropped $50 from when I checked it before (for a price difference of $45).
I give up. Maybe if I check again in 20 minutes, Dell's Windows systems really will cost less than Ubuntu.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
The current Lenovo T60's are totally Linux compatible. I love mine.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
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!
It makes sense, you gotta have 2gb of ram for vista to even perform marginally well...and it requires more disk space too.
Being relatively a noob to Linux I decided to purchase a desktop with Ubuntu from Dell and have nothing but great things to say about it. I usually build my own computers, which is an easy process for me using Windows because it's easy to guarantee combatibility with the OS. But now with Vista out, my fears of losing all my purchased apps, plus a desire not to get locked into another cost ineffective software solution lead me to trying Ubuntu.
In the past, I've tried different distrobutions (SUSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, among others) and have always taken it off my system because some annoying little hardware incompatibility caused me problems. So, while Dell may be charging a little extra for Ubuntu, I think there's something to be said about getting a Linux computer that will "just work" right out of the box.
I also have to mention that I don't feel cheated. I have a great system, 20" Widescreen Flat Panel, 2 GB of RAM, Core 2 Duo (1.X can't remember), the NVIDIA GFX (7300 Lite or something) card, 250 GB SATA HDD, DVD+-RW Dual Layer and another DVD-ROM as well. As some of the other posters had mentioned, this may have not been the "perfect deal" but I only paid about $1000 for the whole system. To me this is a sight better than paying $900 for the same machine using Vista and then having to repurchase Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks; does VS 2005 work on Vista?
Funny enough though, while Vista's having all these compatibility issues with the previous generation's software, I'm using the old Studio 8 suite on Linux under WINE and it's running faster than it did in Windows.
Some anti-MS or pro-Linux person, whichever, was obviously sitting on Dell's website waiting for this to be the case.
Anyone who goes to Dell's site or follows any of the bargain sites (fatwallet, slickdeals, techbargains, etc) knows that Dell deals change on a daily basis. One day you'll be able to buy a PC cheap without a monitor, the next day the purchase will require purchase of a monitor, the next day they'll throw in a RAM upgrade out of nowhere. I know last week there was a deal for a Linux box for around $250 off of Dell's site. They do this to keep people checking back. When someone sees a deal that looks good, they'll eventually make an impulse buy.
This isn't news worthy at all.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Since the Ubuntu price is now back at the $50 less mark, it makes me wonder whether this was just a glitch where one machine was updated first and then the other came later in the day, or whether they're actually listening. On some levels, it does actually look like they're listening (Installing Ubuntu, and the ideastorm site indicates junkware-less machines are coming, among other things), and frankly it's a welcome change. How many other gigantic computer manufacturers display this sort of behavior. When was the last time you say HP jump and fix something because of a Slashdot article just getting posted?
I was actually shopping for an Ubuntu laptop for my girlfrind last night and noticed this, but as of this morning they are offering the upgrades on the Ubuntu version as well.
She's gonna be getting a vista one anyways and just reformatting it though. The only available 15" screen with Ubuntu doesn't give you any decent hardware to choose from.
There is something wrong with the tag line. If they want to offer the free upgrade on a windows machine only, then it doesn't say that the Ubuntu configuration costs more. You just don't get the free upgrade. Did you really need the upgrade in the first place??? Remember the Linux boxes are very much more conservative in demands than Windows is so that kind of "moots" that out.
Misleading tag.
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1. Price for upgrade to 160 GB due to how much space WinVista burns up on your hard drive with virus-prone stuff you won't realize is installed - $0
2. Price for upgrade to memory due to how lousy an OS WinVista is - $0
3. Realizing you got more by choosing Ubuntu Linux instead - Priceless
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