[digital_ins]

Dell's focus on selling cheaper laptops has resulted in treating the consumer as fungible; and that's the reason for their absolutely appalling customer service.

You're starting to see this across industries where their products and services are commoditized. Quite surprisingly, when the service / product turns into a commodity (due to competition), so does the customer (due to budgetary constraints)

[ocdtrekkie]

I understand why this school bought the laptops they did, but I have to point out: The support costs of the requested help for these laptops outweigh the actual laptops themselves value, and certainly Dell's profit in it. Cheap laptops include cheap support.

If the school had purchased business-line PCs which are more suited to large organization use, they'd likely A. have gotten much better laptops, and B. gotten drastically better, on-site next day repairs.

But that costs about five times what they paid. So while I acknowledge, this situation sucks for the school, I kinda feel like we need to point out that they got what they paid for.

[cestith]

They paid for the warranty assigned to whatever cheap laptop Dell sold them. It's now up to Dell to honor that warranty in a reasonable manner. It's not the customer's fault if Dell miscalculated the cost of providing the unit. That's Dell's calculation to make.

[chris_wot]

That would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that they got blamed for being the cause of the faulty equipment when in fact it had nothing to do with them!

[keithpeter]

Just wondering: would refurbished core-duo Thinkpads with something like neverware's ChromeOS on them be a better way forward for a cash strapped school?

Cheap to buy, the machines have survived N years so by a Darwinian process any clunkers have been removed from the pool and they are built to a decent standard to start with. ChromeOS would imply cloud storage so students don't lose work &c. Depends on the use cases I imagine.

[ocdtrekkie]

Plausibly. An aged Dell Latitude or Thinkpad today still works great, and has as much power as the sort of cheap hardware they bought.

[raverbashing]

> when the service / product turns into a commodity (due to competition), so does the customer (due to budgetary constraints)

This. And then the Dell brand means the same as some OEM Chinese brand

And this is why Apple can charge what they charge per MB (even with all the shenanigans)