4 ms·
huge markups on cheap hardware leads to profits, Slate reports.
by Oxxide 13y ago
huge markups on cheap hardware leads to profits, Slate reports.
- stcredzero 13y agoIsn't being able to accomplish a high profit margin the whole point? Being able to do that while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction is simply excellent.
- dclusin 13y agoHuge markups on RAM, mainly.
- astrodust 13y agoEvery vendor does this, especially on the enterprise side. Apple's memory prices are somewhere between Dell's consumer prices and Dell's server prices.
- Adirael 13y agoYou're not really paying for the RAM, you're paying for the RAM plus installation. It's cheaper to produce 2, 4 models on an assembly line and if you wan't to have 4x RAM just charge you a lot. I just buy the model with the less RAM and upgrade myself, in some models it's covered in the instructions and are not too hard to upgrade.
- madoublet 13y agoI assume you are talking about the internal components. I have found the components you actually interact with (screen, keyboard, trackpad, etc) to be really well done. Maybe if other Manufacturers spent more time getting these things right and less time on specs, they would have higher profits.
- astrodust 13y agoIf Dell made an effort to promote non-Windows offerings, their margins would be a lot higher, but they seem hesitant to pursue this angle aggressively. Example: http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/dell http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/dell The biggest drag on PC profits is paying the heavy Microsoft tax on every unit sold.
- wmf 13y agoThe Microsoft tax is more than offset by crapware. I don't know if there's crapware available for Ubuntu; perhaps Canonical can afford to pay Dell for every copy of Ubuntu due to the new Amazon integration.
- astrodust 13y agoIf you can find some kind of citation for that, I'd be interested. It is offset to a degree, but probably less than $50 per unit. Windows 8 costs more than that to the OEM. Also crapware makes your product seem crappier, so you have to drop the price to remain competitive. I'm not sure there's much to gain from it despite how prevalent it is.