Myth Busters: Alienware Overpriced

rotf!
opinions are one thing, but trying to force them on others is quite another thing.

 

No, it absolutely is not, and you're extremely naive to think that you're being singled out for having an original thought. Ever thought you were just plain wrong?

 

I think it is deffinately not overpriced.In fact, a sager with backlit keyboard, 7970m and killer wireless is like 50 less from alienware... And for a 50$ u get much cooler design and better cooling system...

 

From the appearances, the desktop case looks really cool, but not the laptop... One thing that brothers me is when discussing gaming laptop, Alienware is the only one they can think of...

 

please share your sources and calculations. I'm interested in buying an alienware with the same specifications as a sager for less money. thanks.

 

Sorry to hear that you got reported, not something that I like seeing out of any debate regardless of the sides that people took, whether I agree with them or not.

Though in continuing with the discussion, like, if you just look at the components you get to check off while building either laptop, gpu, cpu, ram, etc. Sager does come out to be cheaper. Based on my, albeit unscientific trials, I have found this to be true. However, my main point is that when buying a laptop, even as a desktop replacement, you should be looking more at everything you're getting with the laptop in terms of things that there is no box to check off. This includes things like build quality, keyboard, speakers, touchpad (though not as relevant for most people buying these systems). So my main point is that you can't simply neglect these features or treat them as throwaways. Even if you're using the laptop as a DTR and have external speakers, external keyboard, external mouse, then you still will always need to rely on the build quality, and a good warranty just in case.

So my point is really that things like I mentioned above mattered to me when choosing my laptop. If they are not important to you, then that is fine, but I think you stepped on some toes when you discounted some of these things for everyone. Everyone wants a good warranty. Will people always want to pony up money for it? No. Will people sometimes feel that it is not needed for them? Yes. But if you offered everyone a 10 year advanced warranty for free, would they take it? Of course. That being said, knowing that, means that warranty does matter, and then in turn some people will see the value in extending their warranty.

Plus when doing price comparisons with Dell, it is often wise not to include things like buying ram from them, or depending on "techiness", hard drives. Even the biggest AW junkie on this forums will tell you that they overcharge for those two things, and speaking from an m14x point of view, they are quite easy to swap out and save yourself some cash.

And yes, I love walls of my own text.

 

I dig the list OP provided as well as all the various pricing stuff but none of that takes into account the manufacturing costs of the important stuff like the keyboard, all the various lights, and the enclosure.

It would be interesting to see a full price breakdown of everything that goes into various brands of systems just to see where everyone falls. I can't speak for the new stuff but my M15x post Dell has a metal case. I can't think of any other manufacturers aside Apple who use as much metal to house as many models. I want to say Dell uses a metal upper on the XPS as does HP and I dare to say Samsung and maybe LG on some of their models. Point being once upon a time I'm pretty sure AW used metal enclosures on all models.

 

Well...you see, the problem is that you're building a laptop.
While these laptops provide a certain level of upgrades to avoid the inevitable End of Life, they are not "build it from scratch" computers. Unless you want to buy a bare bone chassis, play with your components trying to get different companies parts to work together and play nicely.

Laptops components are different from desktop parts in that they are built for specific models and brands where they remain in the laptop until it is not used anymore. Laptop customization and upgrading is a small niche in the overall market of mobile consumer computing.
Desktop customization on the other hand represent a much larger market, where individual parts are more readily available at a cheaper price.

Not to mention that Dell doesn't pay your prices for their components. They pay the prices of a priority company that has contracts with part manufacturers to ensure higher profit margins for them. Even your prebuilt dell price is high because it is marked up for additional profit, they are a company and that's how they make money.

 

the only reason why notebooks don't have the same level of customization as a desktop is because that would hurt profits. it's way more profitable selling new notebooks then just selling upgrades.
it would be very very easy and actually cheaper to implement standards (no need to invent what already is a specification) that would allow notebooks to be as upgradable as a desktop.

you could very easily have several models of different sizes with several upgrades. mxm cards would be available in every store just like desktop ones and everyone could upgrade to whatever they like. sure with some limitations inerehts to the types that the specification even has already.

alienware does sell upgrades but they are very limited and extremely expensive. there's no reason for such an high price. actually a mxm graphic card should cost LESS then the desktop equivalent because they don't even need a cooler, box, cables, adapters, printed instructions and so on.

they are indeed a company that the primary focus is to make profit, please the client is much less important then that.

sure it's not just alienware that does this. but it does charge a lot more when compared brands.


but it's not just graphic cards. very easily it could be implemented for displays, I/O ports etc.

 

I don't think laptops will achieve the same "at home" customability that desktops have. At least not for a while.

All in ones might at some point though.


The problem with laptops is that they get carried, thrown around, bashed, battered, and put through the ringer. That means small parts have to be soldered and/or screwed on carefully and in small spaces. Which is something most people can't do.

 

sorry but that is not true. otherwise you would be unable to change cpu ram hdd and odd. and in some you can even change the gpu very very easily.
actually sometimes is more easily done on a notebook then on a desktop.
who is unable to change parts on a notebook is also unable to change it on a desktop. anyone who can change parts on a desktop is also capable of changhing them on a notebook. even a trained monkey would be capable of unscrewing and adding pieces and screw it again.
there's no reason for example to solder gpu's to the motherboard.

 

one example of what you don't have to deal with on a desktop compared to a laptop.

Those stupid ribbons that connects everything. Most of them are so short it is very hard to put them back in the right place. Most Keyboards I have seen the cable is so short you have maybe 1/2" of a gap to get the cable attached...

I would like to know what part on a laptop is easier than a desktop.

 

I said SOME components could actually be more easy to change in a notebook. for example, ram or wifi.

I can give you the example of alienware if you want. there are many keyboard layouts in several languages. most work on several models of same sized notebooks without a problem. so a standard is easy.
yeah it's easy to change. unscrew remove cable, connect cable, screw, done. is that hard? I do it all the time. I buy notebooks in USA and take them to europe and change the keyboard layout and sell them way cheaper then the european selling price and still make huge profits.
if someone can't connect a ribbon cable to the connector it must have serious issues... I never took more then 5 seconds to do that. the hardest part is to unscrew.

 

It is not over priced at all. Look at China DELL's price, u will know what is "over price"

 

All I gotta say is each to their own brand. Their is pro's and cons to both clevo and Alienware. The features of each one fit to different people. I personally own an Alienware because its the best deal that was available at the time and the community here is such fun to be apart of. I also Like the awesome warranty I got a great deal on aftermarket. Just my 10 cents if anyone cares, Probably old news by now

as to all this I just have to say that while this is cool in theory, all the keyboards would be in effect the same, and one would have no choice over the other in terms of design/customization etc.

 

I too would like to see this. I've spent weeks shopping around and have whittled down my choices to an Alienware M17 and SAGER 9170 with the following specs:

17.6 in 1080 monitor
i7-3610
8GB RAM
500GB HD 7200RPM
7970M

The Alienware ($1785) ends up being 215 dollars more than the SAGER ($1570) after coupons and military discount but before the 90 dollar gift card the Alienware sales rep threw in. The only functional difference between the two systems as far as I can tell is that the M17 has a switch to disable Enduro and the 9170 does not. A problem that might eventually be fixed on the 9170 through drivers.

I don't like including gift cards into price comparisons unless they're extremely sizeable (10%+ of purchase price) or would go towards something I absolutely need.

There is something to be said for the Alienware's 7970M working at its full potential out of the box, but I'm still not convinced it's just over 200 dollars worth of something.

 

- customizable lights
- nameplate
- in-home repair
- cool factor

That right there looks like over $200 of value to me. You mite not think so, but wait till your Sager breaks and you're looking at a 2-4 week turnaround compared to a next day in-home repair complete with replacement parts. Complete accidental damage cover for an extra $50? Yes please!

Also, save a few bucks by getting bare minimum HDD & RAM and upgrading aftermarket for less.

 

I agree with every word in this post. Every OEM I've ever taken the time to look into overcharges for disk and storage. It is much cheaper to get base options, then get them aftermarket. You could even sell the stock RAM/storage on eBay or keep for backup.

 

guess I got serious issues then... I can't do it... I have a laptop with a bad keyboard... got it all apart... spent over 5 hrs trying to fix it... that half inch gap in the middle of the laptop 7 inches in... Can't pull it off... The alienware ones are very easy they have slack in them... Pull apart a toshiba they don't...

 

I do not believe they are overpriced, if you want the specs, service levels of a cheaper laptop then buy that one. I prefer the quality of my m18x, imagined or not, it is my preference and to me, that is all that matters.

 

I hope that this news was not posted before. Here is a recent interview between Neowin and Frank Azor, the general manager of Dell's Alienware division. The quoted text is his reply mostly about the price of Alienware computers.

The full text is here.

 

+rep for the nice read thanks!!
Hope that mention of the higher res screen comes into play in the next revision of Alienware Laptops!

 

I bought from dell website for and hell i didn't pay any tax and the only thing i'm unhappy with is delivery time. Took 3weeks to reach me :c

 

You're paying for a brand
You're paying for hassle-free PC Gaming (No individual warranties, troubleshooting, hoops to jump through
You're paying for the service

That's why they cost more. If you build a rig cheap and nothing goes wrong, then yeh - Alienware are expensive. But if you build a rig and something goes wrong, they're relatively cheap when it comes to your sanity.

 

Thats debatable, sometimes Dell support can take your sanity away as well.

 

and some parts when you buy them individually come with a guaranteed 7+ year warranty.

 

One thing I thought about is aren't ALL computers just more expensive outside the US as well and not just Alienware? Had a friend in Japan and like CDs/DVDs and pretty much everything is more expensive there to begin with. It can be a Toshiba and same situation and I think this is true for a lot of other countries too.

 

Just thought I'd say that I got my Alienware M17X for cheaper than a Clevo system by haggling about the price (I mean about $150 less ). The Alienware did start at a higher price though. I feel very comfortable knowing that I have an advanced warranty that protects against the everyday things that laptops go through plus nice build quality and quick support. Not to mention that Dell gives everyone free shipping by default.

I think that Alienwares and Sagers/Clevos are the only two comparable laptop brands of their class and thus they get compared in flame wars quite often (ASUS and MSI don't have GPUs with comparable benchmarks, I love both these brands as well by the way). I was looking at a MALIBAL system until I was forced to look at Alienware systems and saw that i could get one for a better price.

Alienware owners who didn't haggle will, without a doubt, pay much more than Clevo owners though which reinforces the awesome power of haggling. I prefer the subdued look of Clevo systems but enjoy the support and superior warranties that Dell offers.

Choose whatever brand you want, but please, do not go around spreading your ignorance and fanboyism to other people.

 

This ^

I would never pay the AUD prices for an Alienware. The Sager/Clevo derivatives are actually reasonably priced in Aus.

Just as a side note, I also really dislike the Alienware cases (it's like a kid's transformer toy or something!), I wonder if you can customise to remove branding and remove all the colours?

 

Wait, what?

Are you talking about something comparable to the retina display in *shudders* Macintosh machines?

 

Its inevitable. I am actually surprised 1080p has been the "standard" for so long.

Nothing wrong with it though. Better colors, and definition. And any laptop with half decent parts will be able to handle a high def display.

 

Screens over 1080p don't really make sense for laptop gaming until mobile GPUs get much more powerful.

Most people like to play games @ native resolution, and there are already games out (witcher 2, metro 2033) that are not smoothly playable at 1080p max settings even on the latest mobile GPUs.

 

This is very true. My 7850m struggled to play Metro 2033 @ 1080p.

On the other hand though, the Retina display can run at 1440 x 900 and appear as a native resolution due to it being half the horizontal and vertical pixel count. My brother in law had one (returned due to overheating.......) and this resolution did look good in the games that I saw. But at this point you are settling for a lower pixel count in the more brute games which would look best at the high resolutions.

For a laptop with a 650m and a beautiful screen, it can game well at the lower resolution if you don't mind it. The other attributes of the monitor are awesome which may make up for it. Except the price tag.

 

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

What about for dual GPU laptops like the M18x though?
With dual 680's, even if they are only the mobile versions, it should still be able to eat any game for breakfast on max settings with an over 1080p screen. 2 mobile 680's is more powerful than 1 desktop 680, and I know people with desktops that only have one 680 that are able to play on very high res monitors without issue.

 

To those that are confused, this post was a response to a post that is now deleted that had a link to an article where the author purposely made an AW desktop as expensive as possible to make it seem like they are dramatically overpriced. I will concede that dell Ram and SSD upgrades are obnoxiously expensive, but you can do those upgrades yourself very easily and cheaply at home in only a couple minutes, and the rest of the dell options are remarkably close to market value.
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That got ridiculous because he bought 32 gigs of ram and a 512 SSD, both of which dell horribly overprice. An upgrade to 32 GB from the base 8GB is 450$ . I would get the basics in everything but the Video card, micro atx chassis (a lot of great features such as built in cordless lighting, compact design with good cooling, etc...) media card reader, and blue ray drive.

I would upgrade the ram and and hard drive when it arrived myself.

a few days ago i was bored so I actually customized an epic AW desktop. I left the ram, processor, and hard drives alone, but upgraded the thing to the ATX chassis (200 dollars, ouch), a GTX 690, the optical drive to a blue ray player, added a media card reader, etc... all came out to 2369$ after the 100$ discount and if you add in the 100$ dell gift card they include.

I then went on newegg and built the exact same computer (minus the chassis) and added 100$ for build time and 50 for the shipping cost difference and low and behold, it came out to less than 250$ less than the AW, and the AW comes with one full year of warranty across the whole system. I could also probably get AW to lower the price a bit with haggling.

ram (8 gigs 1600MHz): 50$
water cooling: 50$
Hard drive (1 terabyte HDD): 75$
case: 125$
power supply (850 watts): 130$
GTX 690: 1000$
i7-3820: 280$
Keyboard and mouse: 50$
Media card reader: 15$
Motherboard: 125$
Blue ray player: 60$
OS: 100$
Case lighting: around 30$
shipping cost difference 25$
Build time: around ~100$, either in my time, or some guy at the local PC shop.

Total: 2135$

Difference 234$ If I went with the standard chassis, which really is perfectly fine, the difference would be only 34$.
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Another thing that is a bonus with dell is that you can pay in monthly installments. Can't do that with newegg, and dell has already OC'd the CPU which saves you time.

That article writer just got MATHED SON! :thumbsup:

 

The article also got deleted from the forum

I read it before it went away though. And yes, the person who wrote it is a crackpot.

 

Not true. Everyone wants a Ferrari or an equivalent! It is just that most of us can't afford one

 

I am going to go against the trend here and keep in mind I haven't read the original article. Everyone knows that Alienware puts a premium on the high end shiny bits that everyone wants. I was looking at getting an M17x with a 512GB SSD as the primary drive and I calculated that Dell Australia wanted $1,000 just for the drive and the price premium that they ask for the high end graphics cards has a lot of people saying "just get the minimum graphics card / RAM / SSD you can and then upgrade it yourself by buying from newegg or some other after component seller. So looking at it that way they are overpriced and they don't need to be.

 

Well, without reading that article (cause I have an allergy to crackpots ) I would say certain things in the Alienware lineup are overpriced. But those are things like the SSDs, RAM, accessories, etc. Stuff that Dell marks up from retail value cause, hey, they have to try and make profit, right? I'd be surprised if Dell didn't overcharge for standard peripherals and the like.

But getting down into the base costs and bowels of the Alienware laptops, the estimated costs of those unique parts are more than justified. Just like in cars, the cost of computer is NOT the sum total of it's parts. It takes engineers to design that motherboard and get it to fit inside it's respectable notebook chassis. Keyboards have to be made to fit exact while providing the largest keys and best keystroke function possible. They have to factor in cooling whilst not running the copper heatsink pipes all thru the internal as that would take up too much space. Alienware has to develop BIOS for each motherboard, and then Alienware's manufacturing contractor(s), be it Foxconn or whomever, has to modify their assembly lines to make all these intricate parts specific to only one model. Intel has to do the same thing with their CPUs and Chipsets, Nvidia and AMD for their GPUs.

Even if all these OEMs shave as many corners as they can and Alienware reuses as many part models (Optical drives, wifi cards, etc.) as they can to lower the production costs, fact of the matter is all these little things extras add up (including the engineering and design of new models). And all that trickles down to the base cost of the machine. Anyone who doubts this I DARE to take a tour at Volvo or Caterpillar or John Deere and see how much from drawing board to production a new model of machine costs. I have, and when these manufacturers spend millions of $$$ to develop a new model, I can certainly understand when they have to mark up the unit as a whole to recoup those costs.

The difference in being a smart consumer and stingy one is knowing what you should be paying markup for (i.e. faster CPU, more powerful GPU, newer motherboard) and what you shouldn't be paying retail for (i.e. SSD, RAM, hard drive, all of which you can get at cost from Newegg and such).

 

I enjoy this type of argument, but on further analysis, it is difficult to say any 'gaming laptop' isnt overpriced. After all, most of the games we all play at max/near max resolutions would be just as enjoyable at medium settings with cpu/gpu combinations that cost hundreds less.

As for AW being overpriced, it really does depend on how you value aesthetics. I was looking at the MX18 for a while as I wanted a desktop replacement with a lot of power and the ability to upgrade. I ended up going with the sager in my sig as I actually found the AW designs to be too flamboyant, but I also set my keyboard on my NP9170 for a randomized LED show, so it really is up to each person.

 

Wondering how over priced we are in the uk as a comparison

 

Comparison to the US? - in the UK, we are quite a lot more expensive than buying the same machine from the States. However, if you bought from the US, you have to factor in import costs etc.....sometimes the savings that can be made by buying from the US are wiped out by the UK tax man. My kind of general rule of thumb (loosely) is to compare costs, if you build the same machine on the UK website and US website, they are generally pretty close apart from the £/$. If you then change the £ to a $ (from the UK build) and convert that $ figure back to UK pounds, that gives you an idea of how much more expensive we are here. Of course, that's just a general formula to apply.....

 

Thanks for that
As a general rule it sickens me how much more us Brits pay (my wife's American)

 

I think they are pretty well reasonably prices personally, when I bought my machine it was expensive if I had paid RRP, but buying at the right time, I was discounted automatically £205 on my machine, then an extra 10% off, then 5% off ontop of that and free delivery, when I configured the same machine on the american website, was about the same, but it was RRP in $. Depends on whether you can get a discount or not and if there is an offer on or not.

 

Big government is always über-expensive. Move on over and enjoy it with us while it lasts... we could use more Brits in the States. Before long it will probably be no different here, so you'll feel right at home in Sherwood Forest. In the meanwhile you can enjoy the benefits of Alienware's Costa Rica support team that does a great job.

 

Certainly is expensive, Bro! - now where did I put my passport?....

 

It is only overpriced for people that dunno how to call different reps to haggle. Only suckers buy from alienware.com and pay full retail price.

 

Says the man who actually has a sales rep to call. Not everyone lives in a coutry that has sales reps on the phone. For a lot of people around the world, online from alienware.com is the only way to buy, if you want the warranty. So I guess then according to your parameters I and a lot of other people are just suckers eh?

 

Actually, the whole haggle-for-a-better-price thing really frustrates me. Don't get me wrong - I want to get an Alienware in the next few months, and you can bet I'll be sending a PM to the reps on the site in the appropriate thread trying to get a deal - but it bothers me that we have to do that. If they're willing to sell it for less that the asking price, then I'd think moving down their asking price (to attract more business) would be the better move than selling some at full price and some at substantial discounts.

(then again, I hate shopping for cars for much the same reason. I guess I just keep seeing a seedy smiling guy somewhere saying "What would it take to put you in this M18X today?" )