Dude, You’re Gettin a Dell
abortretry.fail
abortretry.fail
TL; DW: LTT bought computers on the phone secret-shopper style and Dell was forcing them the extended/on-site warranty, despite the shopper saying no many times the Dell rep still put these things in the order and charged them for it.
To extend this, why would you do anything over the phone if you can just do it through a website? Talking to humans is always going to cause errors and inefficiency; just getting the person to get your name spelled right is a challenge.
If you have done your research beforehand, it’s a good way to get a discount.
For example I wanted to buy a sewing machine but didn't know anything about them though I knew what I wanted to do with it. So I went to a nearby shop and asked the seller what they recommended and actually ended up with an appropriate product. Maybe for computer related stuff this is not the good way to do it anymore idk.
I can understand seeing a salesperson in person about a big purchase for some equipment: they can actually show the items to you, let you try them out, etc. You can't do any of that over the phone.
Plus, when you decide to buy the thing, you can verify, visually, that all your information is correct. Again, can't do that on the phone.
For the video the other person posted, the DELL experience seems particularly shady since they are the only manufacturer which pushed heavily for insurance and financing. They did this experience twice (in 2018 and 2020) and this issue happened both times. So the website part of the product seems fine, however if you talk to a DELL salesperson then you may have to expect shady behaviour since it looks like they are encouraged to sell things you don't need.
But yeah, don't spend thousands of dollars over the phone, I agree.
Buying in-person is the best usually, as long as the price is the same, and the item isn't something difficult to take home with you.
My own limited experience (one XPS 15, a Dell laser printer that Just Works™ 10 years on, and plenty of Dell monitors) have been pretty positive, but I hate how all their desktops and servers use proprietary parts and have hence never personally bought any of them.
Is it "="? To me this seems more like porsche (VW) and skoda (VW). Sure, they are owned by the same company but I wouldn't think that experience with one brand relates to the other. In fact, HPE (their enterprise segment) nowadays is a different company.
HP's consumer stuff can be quite bad, their customer stuff however is actually quite good, as you noted. So while the discussion of how to best handle branding is interesting, it would be better for the discussion to distinguish the two.
It’s was a beautiful machine, but within months of purchasing it, it started overheating and shutting down under heavy load. I’m fairly certain it was a thermal management design flaw for that particular year and model, and that Dell knew it and was determined to not replace any of them.
Instead, they spent probably several multiples of what the device cost sending techs to my house to replace the mobo (which had the CPU and GPU soldered on) no less than half a dozen times. They also made me mail it back to them for a few weeks. This went on for literally three years until the warranty was up and they washed their hands of me.
Ultimately, nothing fixed the issue. I had to permanently underclock it to prevent overheating. So, I had three years of issues, a company that wouldn’t replace their defective product and instead put me through the wringer, and I was left with a computer was incapable of operating at the specs advertised when I bought it.
I don’t know if I’ll ever buy another Dell, but they ate up most of the good will I had for them with that debacle.
I had to disable turbo boost to keep it from going nuclear under even trivial load. Mine doesn't overheat exactly, but the squirrel fans go full blast and it's super loud. I think the XPS line is just too thin for the hardware they shove in there. Mine has a quad core i7 which was pretty rare for 2014 but if you can't realistically make use of it...
Meanwhile, I was trying to render video on mine and it was hitting 100C and blue screening constantly.
The only real hiccup I've ever had with it was:
- when I bought it, the (intel) wlan card was too new and only arch had the driver in the kernel.
- there was some flickering/jittering display problem that started showing up when we bumped kernel major versions somewhere in 2021ish. Was it 5 to 6? Anyway it ended up being reduced by a subsequent kernel update and then fixed when I disabled panel self-refresh (PSR) in the kernel args. But I stayed on the last 5.x kernel for a while until I figured that out.
It's also generally impressed me at how well all its USB3/C stuff works. I use it with a dock while at work to drive an external display for personal stuff, and it has also driven a 49" 1440p super ultrawide which impressed me. And it's worked well even when I have literally every port on the dock populated with something or other: display, nic, mouse, kb, webcam, etc etc. with some docks or some laptops I've found that you usually find limitations as you try to use every single port simultaneously.
I tend to hold on to laptops that I know work well with all my stuff for well past their technical relevance - I used my t440s until it stopped reliably booting (which for a laptop going on 8ish? years old after working fine after it's last mobo replacement 7 years ago is my sign for "ok time to upgrade"). So I'll probably have this 9310 for a while.
...I should replace the SSD. They're very cheap and stupid fast now, something that has changed in the past few years.
They could have been lost to history like Compaq (Houston-based), Gateway, and many others were but knew that selling consumer PCs were a race to the bottom very early on.
Dell does much, much, much more than PCs and servers these days, though pretty much everything they do is done to sell more PCs and servers.
Anecdotally, I run an all-Apple household but really liked my experiences with Dell. Their four-hour rapid response service is no joke either!
If you're a sysadmin in the Pittsburgh area and got woken up by your boss at 5 AM on a Saturday in July 2020 just so you would go plug in a USB in the back of a server, I'm sorry, it's half my fault and half Dell's.
My contract involved upgrading ESXi on these servers, which is what made me aware of the issue (since ESXi basically lives in ram, if you never reboot you never have a problem). Across maybe 50 servers, at least half of them had a problem with either an SD card or the module for them. Only one had an unrelated problem.
I never liked their consumer stuff, but then again, i don't use consumer stuff that often.
At this moment my personal opinion on enterprise stuff is that HP has a bit better hardware, but Dell has a bit better support.