XPS 1210 price increase?

Now XPS starts at 1299... it used to be 1200 right?
Also they used to have T7200 for 1199 if I remember right... now its back to T5600 for the base model.... Wonder why they would do this during holiday season (may be they know people will gift, irrespective of the cost )
OR, they are planning some coupons !!

 

They are not raising the prices because of future coupons for the holidays because its already the 12th. If they were introducing coupons they would have issued them at the latest on dec. 1st.

Secondly, XPS systems rarely have coupons; I can only think of one time in which they did and that was when I bought my system

 

I agree with jtom. It is rare for Dell to have XPS coupons, but I think they raised the price so they can offer coupons. It makes people feel like they are getting a good deal. And also the time restraints on the coupons, pressure people into buying a notebook within a cretin period of time. Usually around Christmas time, there are all kinds of coupons and deals. Not always the best deals though.

 

I also heard from a inside source that the 12 days of christmas is comming soon.

 

I hate this strategy of dell...they do it quite a lot...and think no one realizes it... the other day, I saw a deal where they increased the price and said free upgrade...how can you call that free?

 

The sad part is most people do not realize this. Sad but true.

 

This is what Dell does:

They will raise the price of the notebook and manipulate the prices of the various components (hard drives, RAM, video card, etc). sometimes lower sometimes higher. I've found when they increase the initial price of the notebook, some components are slightly lower. When the final cost is calculated, it usually (but not always) is within +/- $50 of the notebook before the general price increase. I've used their configurator nearly a hundered times and with the last notebook at least 30 times. Sometimes the price can be hundreds more. My suggestion is if you are in the market, have the money, see a good deal, go for it. If I would have waited 10 days I'd have saved about a hundred bucks. But yoiu risk that with any big ticket purchase.

 

Dell is such a volume buyer that they can affect the market simply by placing orders--you will notice 'free' upgrades to 7200 rpm hard drives sometimes or maybe 'free' DVD-rw upgrades--this is because they are are running low on 5400 rpm drives or combo drives. Dell does a really impressive job of supply chain management. Prices really fluctuate more than they trend up/down.