Dell is "no longer a PC company, now focussing on enterprise IT"

If you are a "consumer" thinking of purchasing Dell, understanding the following may save you a World of pain.

According to one of their officials:

Dell says it's 'no longer a PC company,' focusing on enterprise | The Verge

Dell is "no longer a PC company, but is now focussing on enterprise".

Read that carefully. In February of this year, they publically announced they would be shifting their focus towards Enterprise IT as they see it as a source of revenue.

This seem to be because of low profits and falling market share on the consumer side. They are now regarded as the lowest performer in Standard and Poor's index because their shares are DOWN 15% (as of May 2012):

Dell Taking Low Profits “In Stride” | SiliconANGLE

If you read around this forum there is a general sentiment that their consumer offerings and customer service SUCKS and may people describe DELL NIGHTMARES they have experienced.

On the other hand, the same people who say stay away from anything Dell Consumer, speak highly of their enterprise section. This oft-expressed sentiment correlates with their public statements about the aspects of their business they are prioritising (ENTERPRISE) and de-prioritising (CONSUMER).

I *wish* I'd known this before purchasing an XPS L702x which has been a bane of my life of the last year, and I'm literally aghast at the poor quality control at every touch point and time wasting customer service. As a former Dell fan, I literally feel betrayed by them; Dell has abused my time and polluted my life with abject shoddiness.

So the moral of the story is, avoid Dell unless you are an enterprise purchaser of enterprise systems with enterprise support. For the sake of your sanity and well being, I encourage you to *stay away* from Dell Consumer PCs.

If you feel mistreated by Dell and you're a consumer, perhaps this explains the backstory to your experience.

Dell Social Media Team, keep your CVs in order. Usually when a company pivots it's offerings when it's losing a lot of ground, staff structures change too.

 

Unfortunately, that's just the way things work. Since consumers want everything for the lowest price and are difficult to maintain, any reasonable business would pull out of the consumer market if the numbers don't work out.

If you have to put the blame on someone, it's your fellow consumers. Dell is only responding to what the consumer wants.

 

well consider this, it probably cost the same to send a tech out to a home or to a company. Also, business probably wont have a complain like "OMG my 580m is throttling".

But I doubt they will withdraw totally.

 

It's not a problem of business vs consumer, but it's a problem of selling performance or not to do it.

I need much more performance at work than I need at home. If the PC I use at work throttled badly as the XPS15 with bios A04, my time for an FPGA synthesis would go from 40min to 1 hour and 40min. I'm almost inoperative during that time.

Also, any GPGPU software would be unusable, accelerated 3D cad software would experience extreme shuttering, HD video acquisition interfaces could not work properly. What if the CPU of a server would throttle to 42% while the server is under heavy load?

It would be another big let down to know that Precision have the same of quality issues of the new XPS15.

Still, when I'm at home, if I pay for a notebook with certain nominal performances why shouldn't I get it?

 

IMO, CPU/GPU Throttling is quite simply, mass explotation of ignorant consumers.

Dell are trying to gain price advantage by shipping systems with components that do not allow the most important individual components (like processor / GPU) to run properly.

Dell shouldn't be allowed to advertise I7-720qm processors that in practice, due to bad engineering / bad cooling / shabby system architecture, are throttled to perform like I3-xxxm processors under sustained load.

I wouldn't be surprised and I hope that there are multiple class action lawsuits against Dell on this front. The individual in Dell responsible for these decisions should be held personally accountable for their actions. I hope their competitors take them to court on these fronts too, because they have been misleading millions of consumers with their marketing messages by not disclosing the nature of throttling and the effects on system performance.

Keep in mind that most people; "the average consumer" have no idea what throttling is and sometimes end up going a bit mad buying extra memory or utilities to optimise their PCs to run faster.

Because these computers don't neccessarily crash and just run slow, it doesn't appear to average consumers that there is a technical fault.

Throttling doesn't even appear in many short benchmarks which typically test computer speed in bursts as opposed to over a longer period. You can only diagnose this if you are an expert like many of the users on this forum.

Dell's approach on this front is literally mean spirited, clanedestine, approach and has nothing to do with "care", integrity or "the power to do more".

Should one of the non-expert (ignorant) consumers contact Dell, Dell will probably suggest reinstalling the OS before support can proceed. Only if you contact them, talking about throttling might they solve it.

IMO, by repeatedly shipping computers that they know throttling, Dell are knowingly involved in misselling.

This practice should be illegal, because it is immoral. They should have to state explicitly if they sell a processor that under sustained load cannot run at it's full capacity, the actual performance that can be expected.

If you sold a car with a 200bhp engine, that due to cheapy components, that had been limited to 80bhp of power or it would break (aka many Dell consumer laptops) I don't think they'd be allowed to advertise 200bhp.

Keep in mind that Dell is doing this on purpose. Dell have repeatedly sold computers with these issues. They do not issue bulletins to consumers to be upfront and state that their computers are throttling.

All support is knowingly reactive (i.e. you have to reach out to them) even though misselling and the mis-representation of computer power is proactive. This is an uncaring unethical immoral attitude on behalf of Dell.

I understand this because I've been using computers since I was six and now I'm in my mid 30's. Please, other people on this forum, do you think I'm correct in my thinking?

If we as the users of this forum can diagnose throttling, why isn't this picked up and solved by Dell engineers before machines are shipped?

I can't beleive that they don't have the internal resources to identify these issues.

 

It's more expensive to design a system with greater heat dissipation capacity, but this is not something the average consumer would be willing to pay extra. For the majority of consumers, anything is acceptable if they get the lower upfront cost.

If you are an expert user, why would you purchase consumer-quality products? You aren't going to get the same performance from these products, simply because that's not what they're designed for.

 

the majority of consumers pay for "i7", "gpu", and so on: they pay for performances. If they don't know that a cooling system affects performance more than "i7", we -expert users- are here to inform them.

What's the utility of internet, if not this?

Also I don't think people here ignore the issue, Bill sold us the cooling of the XPS15 and the "balance between form and function". And when a seller tries to sell, is because he knows there is someone that want to buy.

I'm a consumer when I'm at home, and maybe you haven't followed closely the XPS15 story, so you don't understand the weight of the specific problem.

 

You don't have to buy consumer for at home stuff, all my laptops minus my Alienware/Sager which are specifically are for gaming, are all custom built or business grade as they are more reliable, and built for travel/on the go. If you know a certain model has a known issue, why would you buy it? That's like eating raw burger and complaining you got illness from eating a raw burger. And given the XPS track record, are you are all surprised?

 

I always buy their business machines and to date it has been 4 of them. The Vostro line is a good performing one and they hold up extremely well to abuse. I also have one of their Studio laptops and after 3 years of use, the plastics are in rough shape.

 

If you are in any doubt whether Dell intends to provide proper support for PCs and Laptops they sell, it can't get any clearer than this:

Michael Dell himself has described to Wired his intentions:

“It’s not really a PC company. It’s an end-to-end IT solutions company.”

Source: Michael Dell: My PC Company Is 'Not Really a PC Company' | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

In my experience over the last year, Dell has been more like an end-to-end IT problems company, exhbiting and causing problems at every stage of interaction:
- XPS L702x was shipped riddled with bugs
- Staff couldn't solve these and lacked basic competency
- Social media team refuse to answer questions
- Many other people are echoing these issues

So - save yourself from hassle and pain and recognise that if you're buying Dell as a consumer or small business, they have redefined their business and aren't thinking about serving you.

DELL SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM: If I'm wrong, then please answer all my questions, like I've asked repeatedly. I don't know what you leave the onus on people like me to ask questions that you should take responsibility for solving internally within Dell, instead of costing customers huge time, morale, productivity, opportunity and customer relationships. But perhaps it's because you are just offering lip service to make yourself seem customer friendly, when internally you're downgraded and restructured your service according to what you can get away with. Without even looking, I find examples very regularly of issues people are having with you.

 

I'm surprised I did not see this thread earlier, but this is the direction most of the big PC OEMs have been going. HP is going this way too, HP has been looking for a way to sell or spin off their PC division and IBM already got out.
There are no profits in low end consumer PCs and Apple controls the high end. Even worse, PCs are a shrinking market. So what you have are a bunch of me too companies selling products with no profit margin into a shrinking pool.


Enterprise is more profitable with less retail headache/challenges/overhead/ankle-biter customers.
Dell's business products are better if you are looking for quality. My work provided latitude has been solid for two years and it is extremely easy to service. My personal vostro being the budget line doesn't have the same build quality but still problem free and also easy to service.

 

I would have to agree that Dell seems to be moving toward Enterprise. The two main providers that IT uses for hardware are HP and Dell. Most of the servers we have gotten are HP, and the desktop/notebooks have been Dell.

 

XPS 14/15 throttling: Dell rep posted they would honor a full refund with restocking fees waived for WiFi related issues. I guess throttling could be lumped in if you really want your money back. You would have to ask them, or if you happen to have WiFi issues as well...

Throttling in general: How many laptops besides full on gaming or work station rigs don't throttle? Not that I agree with the practice, but my point is lots of laptops have throttled for a long time. I am not aware of any class actions to date against any manufacturer over throttling (admitted lack of knowledge).

Disclosure: I am a contractor for Dell.

 

It's about time. I have been a Dell fan for half a decade and have been saying that its consumer-grade garbage has given the brand a bad reputation. Doing away with the Home division and focusing on enterprise is the only way Dell can survive.