Dell to anounce new computers | The Coffeehouse

eagle

Hey, I'm about to meet Michael Dell at a Press conference in NYC, you can catch it live on the web at dell.com

Look for me on the BBC tonight....

Realy cool high-end PC's, laptops and Media Centers with 50 inch screans!

Manip

And?

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Ah yes, but have Dell hired any decent industrial designers or are they sticking with the cheap plastic look?

Manip

W3bbo wrote:
Ah yes, but have Dell hired any decent industrial designers or are they sticking with the cheap plastic look?

HEY! I like Dell's look!

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Manip wrote:
W3bbo wrote:Ah yes, but have Dell hired any decent industrial designers or are they sticking with the cheap plastic look?

HEY! I like Dell's look!

*cough*

Wil
Wil

I assume they look like this, right?

Manip

The Ditty is a POS.. But I like their machine cases, monitors and laptops... By pure looks alone they can even compete with people like Sony and Apple.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

I'm really happy with my Dell. And I'm buying a new one this week (for my mother).

Manip

Summary:

02 to 04: Crappy video with meaningless marketing dribble ... "Discover" ... "Teach" ... "Invent" ... etc ... Completely stupid and useless.

04 to 10: Video cuts out, giving a hissing sound like you get from an un-tuned in TV ....

10 to 12: Video is back, but in blue only (No Red or Green) but the sound still is the same as an untuned in TV, hissing.. There is no sound from the Mic.

12: Video and sound are both back!

Product line divided... XPS for gaming. "Basic" for just that, e-mail/web browsing etc ... "Services" and Dell TVs (which they have been selling for over a year).

XPS: Ultimate performance / design

More marketing video showing their XPS systems... Nothing new/special ^Shrug^

XPS for tech users as well as gamers ... ^Shrug^ ...

This guy has spent the last five minutes talking about the market for the XPS, someone PLEASE shoot me... Sad

XPS is part of an "experience" apparently.

Dell Launched a new XPS web-site this morning...

They have a phone conference with some head of marketing for it... This was a bad idea even on paper... I mean a phone convo at a press conference? wtf...

Dell's Sales Reps actually know about the products (they make this sound like the ultimate advancement in the history of the universe). Dell has a "5 star system" for supporting customers using their computers... ?

Slides are running five minutes behind the slides at the location.. When he is describing things in the slides people over the 'net can't view that at all until later. Someone needs to be fired for planning this press conference!

Wow does this guy go ON and ON and ON about nothing at all... He is just mumbling into the mic right now

Dell is going to produce and supply cheap flat panel TVs.

39" Plasma TV

Vista Ready.

Dell supports Sony's Blue Ray technology, NOT HD-DVD.

Linux: Dell's "N" series comes with 'FreeDos', they will not pre-install Linux - Users need to do so themselves.

Black Ratchet
Just another Phone Phreak from Boston

I set up a Dimension 9100 this weekend. I must say, I was rather impressed. All metal case, aesthetically pleasing, and a nice color scheme.

I miss the old school Optiplex cases, although, I picked this up last night for my new desktop, and it looks very perty. I am undecided about the whole "OMG! It has blue LEDs!"-thing.

eagle

I told Michael that I was a Windows Vista beta tester, he said "I am too" and his eyes lite-up!

These machines are Vista ready!

There is a website XPS Experence........they didn't give the url.

Michael is a very mellow guy, he is still here hanging-out.

z33driver

I hate Dell! My laptop (Inspiron) fell apart in a year, and they couldn't even get their own BIOS right so this guy in Germany had to write a fan driver. I finally ripped the thing apart a few weeks ago and sold off the parts. I will never buy any of their junk again, well ok except maybe a giant flat panel. I guess its like McDonald's, you hate them and know its bad for you but you eat there anyway.

Wil
Wil

I have on backorder a Dimension 9100 with 3.2 GHz Pentium D, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia 7800 graphics, 20" flat monitor, with a price of $3340 that I got for $2672 because they were having a special offer when I ordered. I see that one of these "luxury" XPS machines identically configured costs about $3700. Now ignoring the discount I got through the special offer, that's still a price difference of about $350 between the Domension 9100 and the XPS with the same hardware. I suppose $350 is thus the value of the "premium service", i.e., getting a Help Desk that answers from the USA instead of from India.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Wil wrote:
I have on backorder a Dimension 9100 with 3.2 GHz Pentium D, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia 7800 graphics, 20" flat monitor, with a price of $3340 that I got for $2672 because they were having a special offer when I ordered. I see that one of these "luxury" XPS machines identically configured costs about $3700. Now ignoring the discount I got through the special offer, that's still a price difference of about $350 between the Domension 9100 and the XPS with the same hardware. I suppose $350 is thus the value of the "premium service", i.e., getting a Help Desk that answers from the USA instead of from India.

How about building a machine with specifications superior to a "Luxury XPS" box for about 2/3rds the price?

Sans the tech support, of course, but you usually get those from the MFGs of the original hardware.

My current PC cost me £800 to build, and if you want similar performance from Alienware, it'll cost you about £1,200.

I've had it for about a year now, and I've never had to call up tech support on any of the component MFGs.

Manip

I have faked building a PC to see how much it would cost at his spec (I guessed a few things) ... And this is what I ended up with:

£339.95 Intel Pentium 4 840 Dual Core "LGA775 Smithfield" 3.2GHz (800FSB)

2x £74.95 = £149.9 Crucial 1GB DDR PC3200 CAS3

£239.95 Leadtek GeForce 7800GT 256MB GDDR3 VIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI

£349.95 DELL Ultrasharp 2005FPW 20" Widescreen LCD Monitor

£119.95 MSI P4N Diamond nForce4 SLi (LGA775) PCI-Express Motherboard

£13 Altec Lansing VS2120 2.0 Versatile Speaker System Altec Lansing VS2120 2.0 Versatile Speaker System

£54.95 Enermax CS-10068 Black Case With 285W PSU

£24.50 NEC ND3540 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Black)

£31.75    Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 NCQ 80GB SATA-II 8MB Cache

£4.95    Logitech Value Keyboard Beige

£9.95    Microsoft Optical Mouse "S+arck" Orange

Total: £1338.8

He is paying $3,340, in UK pounds that is £1888... That means it costs £550 more, without including support, warranty (1 year?) and delivery (which I have not included in the above quote).

Plus the Dell XPS range of computers is tweaked and not "normal", I think they are even designed to run quietly so that is value add too.

Edit: Also my system has no Windows XP operating system or Microsoft Works, both value add to the Dell system.

I am not trying to say that buying from Dell is cheaper, all I am trying to say is that it isn't as uncompetitive as you might first believe it would be. All the little value add bits mean that the total worth is to some less than the saving by building your own.

Also, if you use Dell's Outlet shop (which I myself often do) the low end computers *often* work out *cheaper* than those you could build yourself at the same spec. I mean not just a few bucks cheaper but like up to a hundred bound. So much so that it is often worth buying machines from the Outlet just to rip apart for components!

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

IRT Manip, Mine was more like this:

Processor: AMD Athlon64 3200+ (£130)
RAM: 1GB OCZ DDR400 (£70)
HDD: 80GB Western Digital Caviar SATA (£40)
CD1: OEM Sony CD-RW (£27)
CD2: OEM Sony DVD (£27)
Case: Chieftec Dragon Server Blue + Full-size window (£120)
GPU: nVidia GeForce 6800GT 256 (£170)
Motherboard: ASUS K8NE-Deluxe (£80)
Keyboard + Mouse: Logitech MX700/Internet Navigator Deluxe SE (£50)

Which comes to a total of £714, sans monitors and speakers which I salvaged from my older computer. (Well, I got a new replacement 17" secondary which was £110)

But at the time I got it, my primary monitor was £350 (and I still have no regrets after 2 years, shame you can't get them any more).

The speakers are 2.1 "Harman/Kardon" speakers, they sound "alright" but the satellite speakers are on the small size (1.5 times the size of my fists), I reckon they cost about £50

So the total value of my PC overall is £1,224

Not including software costs, Windows XP Professional OEM is £80 (but Dell would get their XP Home OEMs for virtually nothing, what with their under-the-table agreements with Microsoft, besides the OEM version of Home only costing £50 anyway).

z33driver

Incidentally, those 20" dell monitors look like a great deal. I believe they are using the same LCD panels as the Apple Cinema display. I have a 20" Cinema on my Media Center PC and the display quality is fantastic, I love it, I paid $1000 for it and you can buy the Dell on ebay for a little more than $500. Kinda kicking myself now. Oooh, I just checked their site. 20" LCD for $559, $24" for $1199!!! I am tempted but I just don't trust their quality. Will wait to hear from others first. I'm not sure if they are buying the LG panels cheap and packaging them up in cheap plastic casing and other cheap components or what...

At $3800 for the Dell 50" plasma HDTV though, you've got to look at other higher quality brands. Looking on Best Buy's website there's a bunch of 50" Plasma's from other brands like Panasonic, LG, etc. I'm going to guess that Dell is just relabeling the LG hdtv's. There is a pub I like to go to that just put in 3 Pioneer plasma's side by side hanging above the bar and they do have an awesome display. After my experience with the laptop I'm not sure how safe I'd feel buying a Dell Plasma screen for almost $4G's.

eagle

Check-out the XPS M170, a 915 Express Chipset Centrino laptop with a 17" TrueLife widescreen display and a NVIDIA 256 GeForce Go 7800 GTX Ultra!

That's the machine I posted with earlier today.

IRenderable
Pi

z33driver wrote:
Incidentally, those 20" dell monitors look like a great deal. I believe they are using the same LCD panels as the Apple Cinema display. I have a 20" Cinema on my Media Center PC and the display quality is fantastic, I love it, I paid $1000 for it and you can buy the Dell on ebay for a little more than $500. Kinda kicking myself now. Oooh, I just checked their site. 20" LCD for $559, $24" for $1199!!! I am tempted but I just don't trust their quality. Will wait to hear from others first. I'm not sure if they are buying the LG panels cheap and packaging them up in cheap plastic casing and other cheap components or what...

The dell monitors are great, I know 2 people with them and they have had them for awhile and they are great. They cost less then an apple monitor for the same reason apple computers cost more then the equivalent PC. Design or some BS like that. The apple ones can't even swivel....

Erisan

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

How did Dell build these saying they are Vista Ready when the system requirements for Vista aren't concrete yet?

Wil
Wil

Manip wrote:
I have faked building a PC to see how much it would cost at his spec (I guessed a few things) ... And this is what I ended up with:
...
Total: £1338.8

He is paying $3,340, in UK pounds that is £1888... That means it costs £550 more, without including support, warranty (1 year?) and delivery (which I have not included in the above quote).

Plus the Dell XPS range of computers is tweaked and not "normal", I think they are even designed to run quietly so that is value add too.

Edit: Also my system has no Windows XP operating system or Microsoft Works, both value add to the Dell system.

I am not trying to say that buying from Dell is cheaper, all I am trying to say is that it isn't as uncompetitive as you might first believe it would be.

Correct. Even so, though, I probably wouldn't have brought myself to pay $3340 for the system, which is why I waited for that special offer I mentioned and got it for $2670 = 1509 GBP. So we are really talking about a price difference of 1509 GBP - 1339 GBP = 170 GBP. Since some of that difference is, as you point out, the MS XP Professional OS and the warranty (I paid for 3 years), it's really not a huge savings to build your own as opposed to buying from Dell. You just have to wait for them to be running a special deal, as they were in this case. Fortunately, Dell quite frequently runs some sort of special offer, usually for a limited period of 2 or 3 days. So it's not such a bad way of getting a computer in this performance range. Of course, the farther up the performance range you go (say, a twin-Xeon workstation with a massive SCSI RAID), the bigger the savings you would get by building your own as opposed to buying from Dell.

Spitfire15

How about the Axim series of PDAs? Dell has launched the Axim X51, which uses Windows Mobile 5.0.

But, has Dell got to that stage where most "power" users avoid Dell, and go with HP or something like that? Oh yes, I am talking about PDAs here.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Spitfire15 wrote:
How about the Axim series of PDAs? Dell has launched the Axim X51, which uses Windows Mobile 5.0.

But, has Dell got to that stage where most "power" users avoid Dell, and go with HP or something like that? Oh yes, I am talking about PDAs here.

HP's PDAs are generally speaking, the best overall.

Well, they used to be, at least.

Back when Compaq made the iPaqs, they were the best PocketPC 2000 and 2002 devices around. But the build-quality of them kinda went down a bit when they started marketing them to the public.

Fortunatly, some of the good to come out of the Compaq/HP merger was the destruction of the Jornada brand of HP PDAs.

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

Cybermagellan wrote:
How did Dell build these saying they are Vista Ready when the system requirements for Vista aren't concrete yet?

Hardware Mfgrs usually get advanced notice... plus it's not like Vista requirements are that different that current stuff.