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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

The Dell Precision mobile workstations have a good price when compared with other mobile workstations.

All mobile workstations, regardless of vendor, are overpriced in comparison with gaming laptops, because those who buy mobile workstations are forced to buy them for a few features that are missing in gaming laptops.

As another poster has already written, a common strategy when buying a Dell Precision mobile workstation is to buy them with the minimum RAM of 4 GB and with the minimum SSD of 128 GB, with the intention to dump the original RAM and SSD and buy something like 64 GB of ECC RAM and a fast 2 TB SSD, at much lower prices than from Dell.

The only reason for the 4 GB RAM configuration is because Dell will not sell a laptop without RAM or without a SSD or HDD.

The economy from buying yourself the RAM can easily be up to one thousand USD or even more, even after paying for the mandatory 4 GB.

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Never understood why they don’t just offer RAM at closer-to-market prices instead of giving you a 4GB stick that will get tossed or sit in a drawer unused. Surely they’d rather make $20 on RAM instead of $0? It’s not like they refuse warranty service for unrelated parts because you’ve installed aftermarket RAM. I’d bet they could even get preferential pricing on qty purchases, so in theory it should be cheaper to get RAM / SSD upgrades through the mfg vs aftermarket…

Not everyone's tech savvy enough to order and install their own RAM. For every person buying 4GB of RAM to upgrade later there's probably 10 buying 16GB RAM at 100+% markup.

I'd guess most people buying mobile workstations would be savvy enough. But if your company requires the laptop is bought from and gets service from Dell why wouldn't they just pay the premium price? Having worked in a start-up where everyone 'got their way' with respect to hardware (company culture thing) it was impossible to centrally organise things like repairs - nobody but the dev knew where stuff was ordered so technical defects took up lots of dev time which costs more than just paying a few $100 extra for peace of mind.

They'd like to make some margin selling computers. The cheaper base model machines are very competitively priced between manufacturers. Much easier to make your profit on options.

Oh, sorry, did not know this was their mobile workstation line. Makes sense, then.

To be honest, considering we're talking about Dell, I must say I'm nearly surprised they did not put a DRM in the BIOS/UEFI to forbid using more than the quantity the laptop shipped from without paying a license. I assume it's that then, all the customers that do buy the cheap lines and update the RAM themselves would go to other shops ?

Dell is actually one of the best large PC OEMS in my opinion because they dont play those games (at least not on their business focused and higher end products). Their UEFI firmware is pretty good, and updated regularly even on old machines (they also support fwupd on Linux, which is a must for Windowsless systems IMO).

Like many “irrational” pricing schemes, it can be explained with price discrimination.

If you’re cost sensitive, you upgrade yourself.

If you’re paying an overworked IT department to buy laptops, you pay the premium to Dell instead of hiring an employee to deal with upgrades like this, and then hire another person to scream at multiple people (instead of one) when all the laptops start BSODing because of some Microsoft update combined with Murphy’s Law.

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