Alienware M17x Recall

There seems to be a lot of people who are saying the same thing I am and I believe if enough of us get together we can do a class action lawsuit.

New Alienware 17 inch computer...motherboard and video card went out. 3 WEEKS AND DELL STILL IS TELLING ME THE PARTS ARE BACKORDERED, due to a lot of people having the same problem. Interesting...since I was able to locate the parts in 15 minutes on the phone. CUSTOMER SERVICE REALLY IS POOR!!!! They have given me 7 different dates as to when the parts will arrive...ALL DATES HAVE COME AND GONE!!! NOW DELL IS IGNORING MY EMAILS

 

next time record the phone calls, make sure they tell you its in stock

 

Oh for god sakes...no you cant do a class action lawsuit for bad phone tech support or slow phone tech support. And btw...my replacement m17x took 4 weeks to build because everyone and there mothers brother wanted one with dual 5870's. Seriously, ppl!! You dont get the demand for these things.

Lesson 1:
Your AW and you want to make a shiny new m17x with the latest tech gadgets in it. Despite what everyone thinks, these laptops are not cash cows, so you decide to do a conservative estimate of how many you will need. You guess 10,000. Low and behold, internets blow up with rumors of ur awesome config and now you actually need 100k. Everyone is pissed off.

So when you go to make your all new m17x r2, you guess that everyone will want it. Rather than be conservative you over estimate. You decide to to build 150k of the units. But, because of the problems getting an r2...now only 50k units are sold. Suck, now you have 100k units you need to discount and sell for a loss cause you werent conservative.

Summary:
Yes, this is an exageration. But the principle works. AW makes brand new tech that they release in short development cycles. Since they dont know what everything else on the internet will be like when they release a product, they have to be conservative because the profit margins on these notebooks is actually narrow. They cant afford to have 1 million units sitting around waiting to get baught, because if it takes to long the lose money like a hole in the bucket.

Now this is not to say that they cant and shouldnt strive to do better. They can and should do so. My point is, you have to realize the economics of what you are dealing with here and be realistic/flexible with delays and demands. Also understand that 90% of the people doing order support have no idea about this concept either...and can only do what the computers tell/show them.

Lesson 2 to follow later.

 

They get huge discounts for that 150k versus 10k. Knowing Dell they still charge the same so very doubtful on the selling at a loss. I mean they charge $360 to go from 4GB to 16GB 1333 memory!