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Lawsuit Shows Dell Hid Extent of Computer Flaws
Geoffrey.landis writes "According to an article in the New York Times, documents revealed in a lawsuit against Dell show that the computer maker hid the extent of possible damages due to a faulty capacitor in the computers it shipped from 2003 to 2005. Dell employees were told, 'Don't bring this to customer's attention proactively,' and 'emphasize uncertainty.' (PDF) 'As it tried to deal with the mounting issues, Dell began ranking customers by importance, putting first those who might move their accounts to another PC maker, followed by those who might curtail sales and giving the lowest priority to those who were bothered but still willing to stick with Dell.' In other words, the most loyal customers got the worst treatment."
This will surprise precisely no one who's ever done business with Dell.
No kidding.
I call in for a Warranty covered Repair. Why are they trying to upsell me speakers?
The US Federal Government buys more Dell machines than any other major customer. And Dell sucks, really really hard.
Sure, their server hardware is OK, but it's just off the shelf stuff which is more expensive than a lot of competition, including the superb Supermicro. So, the only conclusion is that Dell has employees that suck a really good dick.
Now this comes out. I wonder what the total damage done to the taxpayer was? Probably in the hundreds of millions when you figure in the lack of services caused by downtime, contractor handoffs of parts before they actually get the problem fixed, and subsequent testing which is mandated at many facilities.
Dell may have been more customer-antagonistic than other manufacturers, but even alleged luminaries in the business were tainted by this issue.
My first Apple base station was based on a Lucent design that Apple put a graphite-colored plastic enclosure around. Naturally, the Job/Ivs-ian approach to mechanical design did not allow these base stations to have ventilation holes in them, even though they had a comparatively big internal linear power supply and were using a 486 chip. Combine that with all the remaining hardware and you had a nice hot little box, especially if you used the dial-up modem. A year later, and the marginal Lelon capacitors powering the the base station started bulging like Champagne corks or popping off altogether.
Naturally, Apple told its customers that the they were SOL if the unit was out of warranty after a year of ownership. Those who had AppleCare warranty could get refurbished units - usually in marginal cosmetic condition - and only if they mentioned that AppleCare covered attached peripherals. Apple never proactively contacted owners of graphite base stations to acknowledge the issue and to point owners towards repair options.
I got mad enough to investigate the issue, discovered the bad capacitors and created a web-page to teach others how to replace them or have service providers replace the capacitors for them. Not that hard to do. I also gave folk instructions on how to add ventilation holes to help these poor base stations cool better. The Lucent design covered much of the board with an EMI shield, which exacerbated the thermal problems - it's like encasing the electronics inside two heat shields.
As the issue affected more and more customers, Apple started a non-publicized warranty program that allowed customers outside the warranty period to get their unit replaced - but only if they knew what knowledge-base article to point the Apple drones to. Naturally, just as the program appeared one day, it also disappeared after a while - without a press release, notice to customers, etc.
All along, the typical answer from an Apple phone-drone was that they had never heard of the issue before. So, if you did a little digging at Apple, I would not be surprised if the SOP manuals for phone-drones include the 'suggestion' that every issue reported by an irate customer is 'unusual', 'never heard of before', etc. It's one way to mollify customers, especially those who don't know of the myriad of other customers affected by the same issue.
The only times I had Apple admit something outright was with the Santa Rosa graphics chipset problem, and probably only because by MacBookPro was covered under AppleCare. However, by then, a lot of of other folk had already been affected by this issue and NVIDIA was presumably paying for the PCB repairs. So I'm not sure if I can give Apple a pass on that one either. The first sets of customers were probably told that unless the unit was under warranty or AppleCare that they'd be buying a new motherboard and paying Apple for the privilege of getting it installed too.
Would the base stations have lasted longer if Apple had elected to use name-brand capacitors instead of Lelons? Perhaps, but any electronic appliance last longer with lower operating temperatures. Sadly, this is an issue that seems to continue to haunt Apple - a desire to design pretty enclosures whose thermal performance is at the borderlines of what the electronic hardware can tolerate.
I used to work as a systems administrator for the company suing dell, AIT, and to be honest from the setup we were required to use you could not tell whether the problem was because of dell or the high heat on the machines. The problem stems from the owner of the company's desire to cut costs anywhere he could. He stopped buying actual servers and went to buy desktops and sold dedicated hosting services on them as though they were servers. We would have groups of 3 pizza racks stacked with 12 of the VCR dells per shelve. The heat from all the machines was terrible, we even had plastic melting on some of the machines. To cool the system we had 2 used industrial ACs, that were always breaking, in addition we had 3 of the large stand up fans that really did no cooling at all. What is really ironic about this suit is that the company at the time advertised nightly backups on all accounts, however only about 1% of the customers, the ones on our netapp, was actually backed up. For the rest the company would not buy the hardware to actually backup customers.
When you cant win, ad hominem.