back to article Dell tempts hordes with MASSIVE DISCOUNTS on PCs

Dell is charming PC punters with a promo and the reaction is much the same as that of the ambassadors' guests when they were handed spherical balls of hazelnut goodness in the Ferrero Rocher ads. A Reg reader who is helping to prop up the PC industry by buying one, chanced upon the latest hot promo for an Inspiron 15 5000 …

  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Whooppeee Do a whole £0.99

    discount.

    Dell must be joking.

    not even enough for a Pint.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Whooppeee Do a whole £0.99

      $0.99 (so - let's face it - we won't get as much as £0.99).

      Either way, not enough for a Gregg's pasty. You could probably get two cheap cigarettes, though! So, next time you want 20 Pall Mall, just buy 10 Inspirons.

      1. TRT Silver badge

        Re: Whooppeee Do a whole £0.99

        Ah, but if you go into the configurator you can save around $30-$100 dollars by deselecting a second shipping carton, the Intel Inside stickers, various UEFI/BIOS configuration options, downgrading your support package etc

      2. Naselus

        Re: Whooppeee Do a whole £0.99

        "$0.99 (so - let's face it - we won't get as much as £0.99)."

        Knowing most tech company exchange rates, a $0.99 discount actually translates into +£50.

      3. Crazy Operations Guy

        "$0.99 (so - let's face it - we won't get as much as £0.99)."

        Given the beating that the pound is taking in the currency markets, it won't be long before that $0.99 discount is the better deal. Hardly been 24 hours and its already dropped from $1.50 to $1.32.

  2. John 104

    Awesome. Dell is horrible with their discounts. I've been at a few employers who proclaim their new partnership with Dell and discounts to employees! And they never end up being more than what you can already get online as a regular consumer.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      One of the many reasons that I've never had a Dell on site that was purchased by me.

      Nearest they got was a PowerEdge that I inherited briefly before retiring it in favour of a much more powerful, cheaper and smaller server.

      Honestly, they phone me up - via various resellers - and I tell them where to go on the basis of the name alone.

      And people say to me "Oh, so we're getting some new Dells or something, then" and I give them a look that explains why their answer is quite that bloody stupid.

      1. Naselus

        "One of the many reasons that I've never had a Dell on site that was purchased by me."

        This, utterly this, completely this forever.

        Dell - invariably shitty parts put together by underpaid, incompetent engineers and then sold at premium prices.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I was looking to replace our critically rubbish Synology SAN with something a bit more reliable so as part of the research process tried to contact Dell about their EqualLogic arrays.

      On the website it explained that for more details I should chat online.

      Chat online can't be used if you have more than 100 employees and you have to phone.

      The phone number given for companies with more than 100 employees is 0844 338 1021

      When you phone that:

      *Select that you are a new customer (selected option 1)

      *If you are a home user press 1 or are interested for business press 2 (selected option 2)

      *If you require a new laptop, desktop or server press 1 or any other request press 2(selected option 2 - as I wanted a SAN)

      *Then you get a message which just says "to find out more information on our products please visit us online, goodbye."

      WTF? You have someone calling you up - a hot lead and you are saying nah, go away.

      After trying this a few times, as I thought I had missed an option somewhere I tried the laptop, desktop, server option they couldn't help but they said they would get someone to call me back.

      Never got a call back, Never even going to try Dell for anything again. There is a reason why we currently have only HP desktops and servers.

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Coat

    Discounts ? On PCs ?

    They still make enough money on those to discount them ?

    Well all is well then.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Discounts ? On PCs ?

      Yea.. they took their model from the auto industry.

  4. Immenseness
    Pint

    Confused

    "Dell tempts hoards with MASSIVE DISCOUNTS on PCs"

    Tempts or hoards? Is there a comma missing, or did you mean hordes?

    Maybe beer will help. It will certainly help me anyway, beers all round!

    1. Lunatik
      Trollface

      Re: Confused

      Dude, journalism is HARD.

  5. Gis Bun

    Dell Canada, twice in 3 weeks, have goofed on pricing. First it was an Inspiron laptop for roughly $1,000,600 [CDN] and then a week or so later a desktop for a similar price!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Wow. I could see that price on an Apple product, but a Dell?

      1. TRT Silver badge

        A top spec Dell machine comes out about the same price as the equivalent Apple. Dell have a price advantage in the mid range only.

    2. Sam Adams the Dog

      Canadian money

      Yes, but that's just $1000.60 [US].

  6. Gis Bun

    Oh. Also seen Amazon give a discount of a few cents on an item that goes for $100+ quite a few times.

  7. Terry 6 Silver badge

    Tech sellers seem to offer illusory discounts and promise more than they intend to supply on a regular basis. Overpricing items even though they aren't selling, offering the premium or wholesale customers prices that turn out to be higher than they can buy the stuff in the local computer store and selling items that sound good but have been subtly (or not) downgraded are all common.

    That being said my Dell a year ago came with a spec I've not seen at anything like the price I paid, from any supplier since, including Dell. I don't know if I caught them on a good day, but they've been almost a couple of hundred quid more, since then.

    And to show that it's not just tech suppliers, when my local pet shop closed down last week they had lots of signs saying "Everything must go/SALE/Clearance" and so on.

    Was anything actually cheaper?

    Not even in the last hour of trading.

    All I'd wanted was some gravel for the tank.Maybe I'd have been tempted by a few bargains, if they'd been evident. But that guy would rather have had his teeth pulled out that let anything go cheaper.

    And in fact I got all the things I needed cheaper than him by going to Pets At Home.

    So maybe it's not just tech sellers.

    Maybe there's a certain kind of seller that would rather bury stock than sell it at a smaller margin.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Coat

      "Maybe there's a certain kind of seller that would rather bury stock than sell it at a smaller margin."

      Is that the Atari model?

      1. Terry 6 Silver badge

        I suddenly remembered a couple stories from years ago.

        Before computers were the commodity item they've become they were particularly expensive and uncommon in the UK for a while. (Might have been early '80s). According to the computer magazines of the time the story goes that US manufacturers tried to kick start a market in the UK by dropping their export prices to us.

        But the importers simply hiked the prices of the boxes they were selling back up and held on to the bigger margins for the same low level of sales.

        At the time I'd told my father about this and he'd said he'd worked for clothing firms that took the same attitude. They absolutely wouldn't drop their margins for greater sales, even when they weren't selling enough to make money. In his words, "They'd rather sell 200 with £10 profit on each than 2000 with £5 profit on each".

  8. TRT Silver badge

    DELL

    Always not processing your VAT exemptions. Providers of weird hardware since before 1995. Seriously, prototype ISA boards that don't fit their supposedly compliant cases, optical drives with custom interface chips so you HAVE to buy one of theirs, machines where you daren't take windows 8 off when they f*** up the order to put Windows 7 on because you need to install a F6 driver, but the USB driver isn't in the Windows 7 ISO build, so you basically have to either take the machine apart to get at some weird esoteric thing to build a way of getting the driver on, OR take a crash course in building a custom Windows 7 installation DVD, only to discover that you need drivers for both the SATA controller AND the frigging SSD they put in there which doesn't work with the lowest common denominator drivers like they are supposed to. I hate Dell. With a passion.

  9. 45RPM Silver badge

    Presumably you have to pay full price for your shiny new Dell and then fill in a load of paperwork, in triplicate, and send off for your rebate (although not to a free post address). After several months, Dell will then send you a cheque.

    Nice. Must get my order in now.

  10. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Terry 6 Silver badge

      Re: Used to be great quality, now "meh"

      And yet mine ( mentioned above). has been great.

      I've had no problem slapping in a second HDD and DVD writer.

      It has worked fine for a year (desperately finding wood to touch).

      Hard to judge performance in the real world, because I don't really need an I7 with 16gb ram. But no complaints from me.

      1. an it guy

        Re: Used to be great quality, now "meh"

        Not everything is bad. laptop here now on year 8, coming up to year 9. okay, so the battery is dead (any battery would be), but it was coaxed into running windows 10 up from XP -> 7 -> 10 which for hardware that old is pretty good

  11. a_yank_lurker

    Why?

    For that whopping discount I think I will wander into the local Apple store after that insult.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ah, DELL (time to lament the 90's)..... Now, anyone for MSI....???

    The last time I bought DELL was 2007 (Vista)... I won't be doing that kind of self-harm ever again. (Long live Linux....)

    With crappy Dell quality... Lenovo's unforgivable Superfish scandal.... Overpriced HP & crappy quality.... Asus dodgy motherboards / Nvidia glitches (had to return 3 ROG's).... Acer, bit of a mixed bag... That leaves MSI, which I've never tried before...

    Anybody got good things say about MSI? (or others with global shipping / warranty?)

    1. a_yank_lurker

      Re: Ah, DELL (time to lament the 90's)..... Now, anyone for MSI....???

      I build my own or buy from a white box builder.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ah, DELL (time to lament the 90's)..... Now, anyone for MSI....???

      I used to swear by Asus, now I swear at them; my last Asus mobo had a SATA port FALL OFF!!

      I replaced it with a MSI board - which has its own issues;

      BIOS updates have been known to kill the boards - even if you HAVE downloaded the correct one.

      The Southbridge can run insanely hot (80C!!) according to various monitoring programs.

      And worst of all, sometimes it will refuse to recognise any USB device when trying to do something pre Windows environment - including the USB keyboard and mouse! (ie a boot error asking you to push an "F" key)

      This is all shades of Gigabyte; I've had THREE of their AMD boards all fail with the same fault; the original failed after a few months, and two replacements turned up already broken (ethernet port u/s).

  13. ben_myers

    I'm sure Dell can afford $0.99

    This is so comical, that I had to save a screen shot of it for posterity.

  14. herman

    "This is so comical, that I had to save a screen shot of it for the posterior." - TFIFY

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