The Changing Face of Alienware Notebooks

The lenovo/IBM thinkpads I'm looking at seem to have good waranties too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pudad

The lenovo/IBM thinkpads I'm looking at seem to have good waranties too.

The only problem with that is actually trying to get them to break to begin with :D

I don't know how well Lenovo 'books are and will be, but I know so many people here with Thinkpads that still work for years with 100% original parts

Quote:

Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

I just have to wonder, because you actually mentioned BMW, why is it that PCs have such shitty warranties? I mean, I'd expect 3-year warranties on parts and labor to be an industry STANDARD today. It's gone the complete other way...90 days. What good is 90 days? Even when you get the extended warranties these companies put you out such a long time for the repairs, it's not even worth it. Is that to discourage you from sending it in? If BMW told me I'd have to wait a week for them to fix my car, I'd go apeshit on them.

It seems like the only way to get a REAL warranty is to get an hp or Dell business line product....or do something like throw down $1,000 extra for the kind of warranty you get with Falcon NW. Le sigh.

Why do you think it is that service has more or less dissappeared from the PC industry? Am I the only one who expects something I buy to last more than 90-days? I pretty much base everything electronic I buy on warranty. It's extremely hard to do in the notebook arena. The only one I know of who has a warranty worth a damn is hp for the business notebooks.

When you're a seller of goods, service is (or would be if cost-cutting measures didn't exist) the single most expensive aspect of a sale.

Goods are simple. You have something, a widget. Widget costs x amount of dollars to make. You sell widget for x amount of dollars and make profit.

Service, on the other hand, is very difficult to measure. If you sell the same widget to 100 people, 90 people will probably have no problem and the 20% markup you factored in to support them will be pure profit. The other 10 people will have varying degrees of issues and this is where it gets tougher.

How much do you suppose the average tech phone support person makes an hour? $10? I have no idea. Let's say $10 for ease of use. Now, it doesn't matter if the customer bought your cheapest widget or your most expensive widget, you need to pay this TS person $10/hr to provide support.

So let's say Dell can make a PC for $250 and sell it for $350. So they have $100 after production costs to use. Now a certain percentage has to go to pay their employees. Another percentage has to go to marketing. So on and so on until you get to support. By the time support rolls around, you might have $20 to play with. This means that the average customer can get 2 hours of phone support without costing Dell a nickle.

Now, 2 hours of phone support isn't very much. I'd say the average PC user will screw their PC up within 2 weeks let alone 90 days. People clicking here and there and everywhere, it happens.

At the same time people are extremely frugal about spending money on service. They want the part and think it's going to function perfectly no matter what they do to it. So they don't buy any service. I bet most people would drive without insurance too, if it wasn't illegal.

Anyhow, let's compare this to BMW. BMW offers 4 years of total service. How can they do this? Because they don't expect people to screw up their cars the way people screw up their PCs. Think about the average person on a PC. They get on the internet, maybe steal some music, chat with their friends, look for porno, download cursors and wallpaper, etc. And what happens? Along the way they click yes to spyware, yes to trojans, yes to adware, and so on. They purposely or accidentally destroy the functionality of their computer.

Dell knows people will do this and doesn't want to support them for doing so. If BMW knew that people were going to put sugar in their gas tank, overinflate their tires, change the electrical wiring, etc, they sure as hell wouldn't provide total service either.

I think service has decreased for computers because the average computer user is almost 100% ignorant of how a PC works and does stupid things that are a b*tch to fix. Computers also sell for 1/10th of what they did 15 years ago. Companies are run by marketers and stockholders and not engineers.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ashpool

The only problem with that is actually trying to get them to break to begin with :D

I don't know how well Lenovo 'books are and will be, but I know so many people here with Thinkpads that still work for years with 100% original parts

Agreed.

By the way, they are still made by IBM. And will be made by IBM for 3-4 years iirc. Lenovo just started slapping their names on them.

And I doubt that ThinkPad quality will go down once Lenovo makes them. They work together very closely with IBM. I know that in Vienna, Lenovo actually has their offices in the IBM building. No idea how this is in other places where IBM is, but I'd guess similarly.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PCJ

Agreed.

By the way, they are still made by IBM. And will be made by IBM for 3-4 years iirc. Lenovo just started slapping their names on them.

And I doubt that ThinkPad quality will go down once Lenovo makes them. They work together very closely with IBM. I know that in Vienna, Lenovo actually has their offices in the IBM building. No idea how this is in other places where IBM is, but I'd guess similarly.

It's the other way around: IBM is putting their names on the laptops and Lenovo is the one that's building them, but only keeping the Think and IBM names for five years. Lenovo also moved their Headquarters to New York State

But you're right, Lenovo and IBM are very close together: IBM owns 19% of Lenovo anyway :D