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Apple should pay Dell

FuuFuu

FuuFuu

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 8, 2008
226
0
Roselle
Don't know if you guys enjoy laughing at Dell but i do.

Almost all my friends from high school bought Dell for college instead of a mac. Its way cheaper they say. Look at all the options they give us. If you never tried to customize a Dell, they give you options to buy a crap load of unnecessary items.

After a month of two, since i'm the IT guy in the group, people ask for help on laptops/desktops. Almost all the laptops/desktops that breaks are Dell, and its always hardware malfunction, can't be fixed.

Sure you get insurance, but it also took them 6 months to fix the problem as they always say its a "special" case/project. i don't call a broken hard drive "special" at all

After the year past, my friends sold their Dell, got an apple. As they saw no problems on my awesome macbook.

I was glad to 'Apple' them but i couldn't have done it faster without Dell.

Thanks Dell!!
 
I don't mind a Dell.

Of course the quality of Apple products is much higher - that's partially what you pay for.

But if someone asks me what PC they should buy I always refer them to the Dell site if they don't have the cash/or don't want a mac.
 
I don't know, apple has their share of hardware problems themselves these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm a mac user, always will be, but I've had way more problems with apple hardware than all of my PC's combined. To me it's worth it because apple support always takes care of the issues , and OSX is just that much better than windows, but apple has a lot of room for improvement in the quality control of their hardware
 
jemeinc said:
I don't know, apple has their share of hardware problems themselves these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm a mac user, always will be, but I've had way more problems with apple hardware than all of my PC's combined. To me it's worth it because apple support always takes care of the issues , and OSX is just that much better than windows, but apple has a lot of room for improvement in the quality control of their hardware
Click to expand...

Yes, Apple does have problems with hardware. But the most important thing i believe for a computer company to have is a high quality customer service. apple imo has the highest one. Through my experiences, i think apple has the fastest and most satisfying customer service. There are occasionaly a rare situation where they report a personal fault on your computer and doesn't fix the dilemma. but at least it doesn't take 6 months to repair a harddrive, and takes numerous chains of phone calls in order for the process to proceed.
 
bertpalmer said:
I don't mind a Dell.

Of course the quality of Apple products is much higher - that's partially what you pay for.

But if someone asks me what PC they should buy I always refer them to the Dell site if they don't have the cash/or don't want a mac.
Click to expand...

Its cheap but at what cost? ironically, a lot of dells break after the insurance cover. which is going to costs hundreds to repair if you wanted to. if someone asks what kind of PC he/she should get, i would recommend Sony Vaio.

Personally i avoid any contact to dell :eek:
 
In my experience Dell support is a lot better than Apple's. For starters they'll come to your house.

I also got a personal e-mail contact to fix my Dell Laptop's motherboard - the whole thing took two days from the first e-mail.
 
While everyone's experience is different and I did find humor in your post, I don't mind Dell.

I have like a 6 year old Dell that is still chugging along. I liked that you actually got CD's with a Dell (not sure if you still do now), versus HP's Recovery Partition.

To each his/her own though.
 
Daveoc64 said:
In my experience Dell support is a lot better than Apple's. For starters they'll come to your house.

I also got a personal e-mail contact to fix my Dell Laptop's motherboard - the whole thing took two days from the first e-mail.
Click to expand...

That's the reason I still refer non-tech savvy family members to Dell. At least they can call up Dell and shout "It's broken, fix it!" instead of having me trying to give them long distance tech support.
 
bertpalmer said:
I don't mind a Dell.

Of course the quality of Apple products is much higher - that's partially what you pay for.

But if someone asks me what PC they should buy I always refer them to the Dell site if they don't have the cash/or don't want a mac.
Click to expand...
I have a Dell laptop at home as well as my mbp. The first thing I noticed about the Dell was how flimsy it was opening and closing it. Like comparing a Ford to a Lexus. Then how much slower boot up time was, even though the Dell and mbp are comparable machines.
But, if someone doesn't have the money for an Apple, I would not hesitate steering them Dell's way.
 
While I much prefer my Macbook Pro - we couldn't use Apple for some of our clients who require 4 hour to next am business replacement -

Dell does this and have used it many times for either server parts or latitude replacement parts - 4 hours to next AM they have parts and techs all around the country who will deliver and/or replace the part -

Apple just can't match that - ie they dont have the infrastructure to guarantee a server part on site in 4 hours or a macbook pro part installed/replaced within 4 hours (and this can be at night also)

We deal mainly with Dell Enterprise support which is far different from the support most people have contact with -
 
Gotta say, my experience with Dell has really be 100% the opposite of yours. I recommend either Dell or Apple to most people who are buying a new computer, I always lay out on the line to them the differences in hardware, and cost (and size and weight) and tell them if the difference in price between the Dell and the Apple is worth the ability to run OS X and the applications that will only run on OS X.

Most people end up going with the Dell, out of those... say 10 -> 15 users i've helped out with that, two have had issues with their Dell. Both of those dell came out to their house to fix the issue within two days... That certainly seems like some very good Tech support to me, certainly not 6+ months like you've claimed.

The "build quality" argument, while I agree when comparing a Macbook or MBP to very very cheap laptops the build quality difference can be huge. But for the most part, if you compare a Macbook with say a Vostro... their isn't much of a difference. (Lets not forget all the issues the first few revisions of the macbook had too).

As for the Virus issue, and the iChat share desktop features... well yes users can get viruses if they have poor habits like opening attachments, or not keeping their system up to date. But if they use common sense it really won't happen to much, also you can use Remote Assistance to share screens and fix a computer long distance on Windows also.. (or they could install VNC if they so desired).
 
Dell support has been top notch for the past 5 years I've dealt with it on over 4 machines, two were mine, two were someone elses. My laptop has numerous parts replaced, motherboard, VGA, HD, memory. Every time a repair was issued, I had the choice to get the part sent to me or they could send someone to fix it. Every time, the part or person called within 48 hours max. Most of the time, within 24. The times I chose to get the part, I received next business day before 10 AM. Parts replaced by their third party technician, QualxServ, came to my house within 72 hours of the initial call.
 
^^^^

Long story short - mine personally and at work has been bottom-notch.

I'm actually dealing with yet another weird problem, with a Dell D630 with wireless - the drivers just won't load and it won't connect to our network. Dell probably slightly changed the hardware and didn't update the drivers.

They take 72 hours to come and fix our machines. I guess "Next-Business-Day" is 72 instead of 24... :eek:

Not to mention 9 out of ten repairs are with bad spares, and they have to come out again - in another 72 hours.

(okay, rant over...)
 
Sometimes, you just don't have good luck. I can understand that. That is one part of Dell I dislike the most. Their drivers are not consistently up to date. Sometimes, you can't find the drivers for specific components like video that you have to get from Dell and can't download from AMD/ATI for example.
 
Ha I always laugh at dells because thats all we have at my high school and we almost have as many "IT's" as we do dells. All they do is fix those crappy computers when I have told them just to buy macs. They get so mad when I say it......I love it!
 
BigD58 said:
Ha I always laugh at dells because thats all we have at my high school and we almost have as many "IT's" as we do dells. All they do is fix those crappy computers when I have told them just to buy macs. They get so mad when I say it......I love it!
Click to expand...

I work as an IT guy in a school district myself, with 2000+ Macs and around 150 Dell PCs. . I can tell you the kids who say things like "Durr it just works huh?" when working on the Macs (which is pretty common.. believe it or not) gets annoying really quick.

Simply put, Mac or Dell, issues will ensue. If it's a computer something is going to happen when placed into the hands of students and teachers.
 
I remember back in the early 2000s, Dell was actually regarded as a quality PC. In 2003, my CIS professor in college recommended Dell highly, and I bought a Dell Dimension the next year. That was right around the time Dell's reptutation started going downhill, and they began offshoring customer service call centers to India. Although my Dell PC is still in use, it's retired for the most part since I got my Mac Pro last year. But my Dell machine most definitely was built with some awfully cheap parts - that much is obvious.
 
All this talk of cheap parts makes me laugh. Almost all the big OEMs get their parts from the exact same OEM manufacturers Apple does. Really what you pay differences in are the software, support, and brand (and case looks of course). The rest of the hardware is damn near identical.

As far as saving money goes though, the best thing I say is that unless you're getting a notebook, build your own PC. You can get amazing desktops now for $600-800 built by yourself that'll destroy any notebook out there.
 
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