Who makes Alienware laptops today?

From what I've read online it seems that Alienware laptops were made by Clevo before Alienware was bought by Dell. Are Alienware laptops still made by a 3rd party today? If so, who makes them?

How does the build quality of current Alienware laptops compare to brands like Sager / Clevo / Asus / MSI?

 

Compal does the actual assembly, if that is what you meant.

 

Hmm.. I thought it'd be a simple answer like "Clevo still makes them" or "Alienwares are re-branded MSI laptops". So if Compal does the assembly then who manufactures the parts? Does Alienware use the same parts (such as motherboard, heat sink / pipe / fan design etc...) as any of the brands I mentioned?

 

Pretty sure Alienware isn't a rebranded anything.

They're just Alienware, just like MSI is MSI and Clevo is Clevo.

 

Well, I think way back in the day they took cases and had them rebranded, but now I think they are uniquely their own. Like what spybenj said.

Sent from my SGH-T999

 

They used to be rebranded clevo shells.

 

The short answer is Compal.

Back in the day when Alienware was a small mom and pop operation, they had no option except to brand products made by an ODM. While they were customized to make them special, in-house R&D, Engineering, design and patents are too expensive for most small businesses.

Dell/Alienware owns the design and provides Compal with manufacturing specs as the OEM. Compal manufactures parts of the system and assembles the end product. Regardless of ODM (Compal, Clevo, etc.) you cannot buy a "white box" Dell or Alienware (or HP, Acer, IBM, etc.) because of laws that protect OEMs and their unique branded products. Also, bear in mind that Compal, Clevo, Asus, etc. do not manufacture everything in a system. There are many sub-vendors for components, and some sub-vendor ODMs make things to spec for other ODMs.

There are very few OEMs that manufacture what they sell. The only reason you can get a "white box" Clevo from companies like Sager, IBuyPower, CyberPower or PowerNotebooks is because they are resellers of generic products where the ODM (Clevo) owns the basic design and specs, and they (Sager, in this example) does not design anything of their own like Dell/Alienware, HP, etc. They merely adopt what is offered, slap their own badges on it and provide added-value services and support. In some cases, their brand may offer a unique GPU, WiFi card or something like that... but nothing in terms of hardware that an end user could not do on their own.

Where OEMs like Dell/Alienware, HP, IBM have a lot of influence is on build quality and firmware that makes their products unique, and in some cases, some of the internal components proprietary. The BIOS or vBIOS firmware and hardware device ID makes the end product "branded" and proprietary. As long as the system BIOS does not blacklist hardware that does not match a specific device ID, the internal components are interchangeable between different brands.

 

Yes in order for "whitebook" products to go to market it has to be done with the express permission of the OEM who ordered it.

Larger companies like Asus and MSI who already have a base of hardware design and the like can get away with doing their own designs. You can see that with asus having their own graphics cards that don't work in other notebooks (and vice versa) because they design their own and modify it to reduce costs.

 

People in china/Taiwan.

 

Alright thanks for the update!