BlitzenZeusBurnt Out Cynic Premium Member join:2000-01-13 |
System builders ripping off customersThe price of ram for current systems is cheap, but the way the system builders price it you would think it wasn't. I'm not looking for help, just wanting to vent at the stupidity of them charging excessively over retail. I'm just trying to help somebody get a system where I don't want to be their support/rma, but they are also looking for a partially custom build. I sure many of you can guess the system builder from the image, anyone who can search newegg knows those prices are way over retail for standard non-ecc ram, and don't even account for what they would consider the cost of the 4GB ram already included in the system. I know I can easily upgrade it myself, but when I see scams this bad it really makes me want to avoid the company. |
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The system builder company needs to pay for salaries, building maintenance, warranty claims, health insurance, advertising, federal taxes, state taxes, county taxes, city taxes, dividends, pension benefits, research, development, customer support, transportation, and other costs. How do you expect them to do that if they do not charge more than what some company like NewEgg charges for just a box of RAM? NewEgg is a distribution company, Dell is a system building company. Dell has a lot more costs to recover. If customers were willing to pay the true cost of assembling base line machines, then maybe the upgrades would not be so expensive. But you know Americans. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They will not pay up front for good service, so you have to sneak the cost of service in some other way. There is no such thing as free shipping, you pay for it somehow. Do not tell that to the average American, they might faint. |
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fatnesssubtle
join:2000-11-17 fishing |
Overpricing something doesn't insure increased profits, though. People walk away from prices that seem too high. |
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·Metronet
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But then - if they price to low - people lose jobs and the economy suffers. Dell does not have a EPS like MS or Google and they have had issues making a profit in the past (profit has been very up and down the last 5 or so years).
Very little money is made from building PCs. If they lower the price of the ram then they will have to increase the price elsewhere - like getting rid of free shipping which more people may value more.
You would have to know their pricing on all other parts of the PC to know if the PC itself is overpriced. They may have found that people will pay more for ram than for the OS, CPU, monitor, printer etc... |
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jjoshua Premium Member join:2001-06-01 Scotch Plains, NJ |
to BlitzenZeus
When there's something wrong with your system, the vendor can't use the extra memory that you installed as an excuse why they can't fix your problem. |
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Msradell Premium Member join:2008-12-25 Louisville, KY |
to BlitzenZeus
While the argument about needing to cover overhead is valid, in this case it's quite questionable. They're already making a profit on the base machine and it doesn't take any more labor to install different memory so as the OP stated, they are trying to rip off the consumer. Also you have to remember that they buy the memory as cheap (work cheaper) as Newegg so they should be able to select at the same price as them. |
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·Metronet
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Actually, many times the base machines don't make money or they make so little it is not funny or often times - lost money. They make the most of their money from the higher priced business market - PCs and servers while many times the consumer products make little to no money and in fact - can lose money.
In a large business - not every product makes money - it is all about the mix of products. Some are sold at a loss while others are sold at a very nice profit. The larger profits on the high end machines should - if mixed correctly - easily negate the losses on the lower end products. Problems arise when the business forecasts are wrong and there was not enough flexibility in the mix to correct the errors. |
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to BlitzenZeus
said by BlitzenZeus:System builders ripping off customers Better to refer to them as a 'first tier OEM' as system builders, in general, are not ripping off customers. |
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Hall MVM join:2000-04-28 Germantown, OH |
to fatness
said by fatness:Overpricing something doesn't insure increased profits, though. People walk away from prices that seem too high. In this scenario though, the vast majority of Dell system buyers haven't a clue what a stick or two or four costs from Newegg. In fact, the vast majority upgrade NOTHING and take 'em as they're pre-built or spec'd. |
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fatnesssubtle
join:2000-11-17 fishing
1 recommendation |
I'd say the number of Dell customers blindy paying the asked price for upgraded components is dropping noticeably. People are far more price conscious than 5 years ago, and they tend to shop in a more detailed way. And since neither you nor I have any statistics to back us up, I'm as right as you are. |
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·Metronet
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Their sales have been flat for the last 4 quarters - not going up or down but staying the same in general. Revenues are down - they are making less per product due in part to the low margin PCs that are over 50% of their business. There are many of their general PCs that can be gotten for $550 or less - you are not going to get much cheaper without the parts being absolute garbage.
Outside of their regular PCs - people are not going to get much cheaper without the company losing a good amount of money. One of the reasons Dell is trying to get their server and business side business to be a much bigger part while hoping that their general PC business drops.
I usually build my own but with general Dell PCs being so cheap - from a pure price perspective - it makes no monetary sense for me to build. One of the reasons I just got my mom a Dell - rather than building her a PC as in the past.
Not to mention - those that would benefit from 6 gigs of ram usually are not the ones buying their basic machines. The average person (even games) can use 4 gigs with no performance hit.
If Dell is 'ripping' off their customers so badly - they are doing a bad job of it. |
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Hall MVM join:2000-04-28 Germantown, OH |
Hall
MVM
2012-Feb-18 12:34 pm
said by CylonRed: One of the reasons I just got my mom a Dell - rather than building her a PC as in the past. Did you buy it at Wal-Mart too ? Pre-built and pre-configured for the masses, i.e. good enough for most. Would you or I buy a Dell from Wal-Mart like that ? Probably not... unless the price was soooo low that we could throw out the RAM and upgrade it to what we really wanted and/or swap out the HDD for something "modern" - and still be cheaper than building. |
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·Metronet
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Nope - I avoid WalMart like the plague. I get discounts for work and AAA membership that I believe can only be ordered via phone or online. I would have far preferred to buy from their small business arm for US based support. |
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I have used the quick ship model ordering when I needed a fairly powerful system very quickly. Both HP and Dell. With my employee discount, I felt I got a decent value balancing cost vs. getting the computer available to use. Do it yourself vs. installed and running within 4 days of ordering. |
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to BlitzenZeus
I never trust the large brand name PC manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc). They all overcharge and their systems are not always worth the money. I have a smaller system builder that I've used that charges a fraction of the cost for ram that Dell does. They also have salaries, building leases etc to pay yet the prices are far lower. They are also growing and expanding their business also yet not increasing price. Some less efficient builders have large overhead costs they have to pay for and some just want to see how much they can squeeze out of customers to try keep their shareholders happy. This is a screenshot of the ram options from the place I had custom build my last PC. Ram is far cheaper than Dell and prices are in Canadian dollars.
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to BlitzenZeus
Last I looked many companies are in it for the money and no one is forcing anyone to pay the high prices and customers need only shop elsewhere. |
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·Metronet
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to nss_tech
When I looked locally - I found no local builder who could touch the prices Dell had - even with the AAA\work discount I got. All systems were a minimum of $100-$150 more just for the base system.
If a company is making money on a $500 PC - I would love to see the parts - there is no chance they are decent parts. Or - they are doing exactly what Dell\HP does - they are making the money elsewhere (service, upgrades, business systems\servers and business services).
BTW - Dell shareholders have not been real happy - and their current upward swing in stock price has no basis for increase. |
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BlitzenZeusBurnt Out Cynic Premium Member join:2000-01-13 |
If they want to lower the value on their base system to pull people in, and pull the soda and fries, otherwise the soda and movie snacks scam that's their choice, however when they jack the upgrades to around double retail for custom builds it's no longer a value, possibly even more expensive than retail. I've done some test builds with these places, and they did end up being far more expensive than retail, and I could build a better system myself at retail prices with their upgrades, when they paid wholesale for the parts.
When I build a computer it costs less than double to go from 4 to 8GB of ram, and they wanted to do some video editing so it couldn't hurt. On the last system I built the price difference between 4 and 8 was only around $20 so might as well go one step higher when something will use it, if nothing more than a system cache to make the computer run faster. |
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signmeuptoo94Bless you Howie Premium Member join:2001-11-22 NanoParticle |
to BlitzenZeus
RAM makers are probably not profiting too much right now, it is feast or famine for the fabs. I would imagine that system manufacturers "normalize" prices so when the supplier price goes up, they don't have to hike THEIR asking price on final product as much.
IMHO, the bean counters that run Dell and the others have it all wrong:
They need to hike the prices on their base models and start offering better prices on gaming systems, because as it stands now, there is no incentive to buy a factory high end gamer system from them. The manufacturers have managed to commoditise something that shouldn't be a commodity. It is their own fault, and since quality is affected, and lack of US based customer service, the consumer ends up screwed. |
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fatnesssubtle
join:2000-11-17 fishing
1 recommendation |
to BlitzenZeus
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BlitzenZeusBurnt Out Cynic Premium Member join:2000-01-13 |
That's one hell of a typo, 312 times more expensive than it's supposed to be, but I'm quite sure nobody would add that to their order on purpose after seeing the price. » h30094.www3.hp.com/produ ··· /BM866AAI've never heard of a "washable" or spill resistant mice, keyboards yes, just not mice. |
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18172841 (banned) join:2001-10-06 Lagrangeville, NY |
to BlitzenZeus
Sorry they are not ripping off anyone... » www.google.com/#hl=en&ou ··· &bih=843"cheat: deprive somebody of something by deceit;" Ya not really going on hear I see no deceit... I love for someone to post hard profit numbers for lowend pcs... You have people like acer or emachines I forgot who saying they are going to stop making the cheap PCs because they are junk and make no money that's *right from the manufacture* and people will always go for the cheapest system... I can't tell you how many people I told to not buy the cheapest system and they come back with an emachines or compaq, etc. All these oems need to keep the base prices as low as they can. I had one client have an emachines blow up. Blah blah, I said sounds like a bad PSU they are known for that, drop it off I'll look at it... bad psu. I recommend they buy a dell or anything but another emachines... they call me "can you help me set up my new pc, I got an emachines at best buy for XXX (low low price)" ........ ya. Those same people will pay the huge markups... blame them for high upgrade costs... hell I had another I forgot what PC they bought... I told em not to... first one... sound DOA out of the box.... return second one... the molex plugs were laying inside the case (can't even make this up I was installing the old dead pcs hdd into the system)... return again.... 3ed one it had one molex plug that was lose... I said f it, made it work... now I get told all the time "hey that pc is still working" Ya like, the 3ed damn one you got is working, had ya got something worth a damn it woulda worked out of the box. Also love to know how no labor is needed to make a custom system... lol. |
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BlitzenZeusBurnt Out Cynic Premium Member join:2000-01-13 |
If they charged relative retail prices for the upgrades, compensating for the price of the already included hardware it would be fair, and they would make more money off the system. It's when the start exceeding retail prices for the hardware, which they again pay wholesale for so they don't need to charge extra for labor. Lure them in with the discount base system, get more profit from the retail cost upgrades now instead of paying more later. On their methods the upgrades will put their machine over retail costs. If they had asked for say $30 more to upgrade the ram to 8GB I wouldn't have questioned it as it would be in line with retail prices.
There's not much labor involved at all with a basic air cooled system. A few screws, cabling, a few plugs, setup the bios options, making sure it works, and while you're doing something else you can let a diagnostic run, like I always run a memory test on new systems I build before I attempt installing any operating system. Hell these places just throw images on a hdd for the most part, and run some basic diagnostics before boxing them up, which can be done in batches. |
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BlitzenZeus |
Check out this upgrade from Apple, anyone else wonder why their prices are so inflated? I could buy 16GB retail for less than that minor upgrade. |
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Mele20 Premium Member join:2001-06-05 Hilo, HI |
to BlitzenZeus
The RAM price is not a problem with Dells. I didn't blink twice at the price for 8GB for the machine I was configuring. I was pissed that in Home division that meant 4 sticks though (screwing you if need to upgrade to 12GB later) while only 2 sticks in SB division. The problem with the Dells is the crap video cards offered in SB division for the 460 Vostro. You cannot upgrade it later either because Dell is putting 350 watt power supply in those machines! They are back in the dark ages and that is why the crap video cards offered as any decent ones need a bigger power supply. Yet Dell brags in SB division about the great gaming one can do with the Vostros...real bullshit there. I wanted the Pro Support but I also want a better video card. So, I tried to buy an XPS through SB and you cannot! Used to be able to do that until about a week ago. Now you can only if you buy an XPS laptop but no XPS desktop with a bigger power supply and slightly better video card is offered. You are forced to their Home Division, the poor warranty support, McAfee installed for 15 months and the no reinstallation disks policy. (But no reinstallation disks in SB division either unless you buy Optiplex, Latitude or Precision). However, SB division gives you TrendMicro and that is much easier to get rid of than McAfee which is impossible. |
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BlitzenZeusBurnt Out Cynic Premium Member join:2000-01-13 |
Based on my image, if you paid that to Dell you overpaid for memory you could have easily upgraded yourself for far cheaper. As I said in my last reply related to Apple, I could have bought 16GB retail for less than the amount they wanted to add 4GB more of memory, which is clearly ripping off the customer. The amount Dell wanted to charge for 8GB is close to the price of 16GB retail.
They always tend to kill any savings when you start upgrading a base package model, but for what they want to charge you for the upgrade for things like memory it's insanely over retail price. Turn off, pull power plug/battery, open case, pop-out old memory, pop-in new memory, and once it has power again run memtest to make sure the memory is functioning correctly(important unless you like software/operating system crashes), along with your bios sees all the memory. This is one of the easiest upgrades anyone can do themselves. Changing out a couple of sticks to give you 4GB more of memory is not worth $150-200 more. |
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Hall MVM join:2000-04-28 Germantown, OH |
Hall
MVM
2012-Feb-27 8:30 pm
I'll bet you Best Buy/Geek Squad charges $50-100 for a memory upgrade on top of the cost of the RAM. |
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Mele20 Premium Member join:2001-06-05 Hilo, HI |
to BlitzenZeus
Are the Sandy Bridge processors like the older Intel hyperthreading processors? It WAS/is quite tricky with all three of my current Dell and two previous ones. The first one had the first hyperthreading CPU from Intel, amd the second, and also the current one, were/are hyperthreading. For all three, booting was either not possible or severe problems ensued unless ALL STICKS were from the SAME manufactor and BATCH LOT. So, if you wanted to ADD memory later, or had a stick go bad, ALL STICKS HAD TO BE REPLACED AT THE SAME TIME. Thus, it wasn't possible to save all this money you are referring to (unless you want to go sell the RAM you removed on Ebay which does not interest me at all). The computer shop tech here who worked on this current Dell last week confirmed that even today hyperthreading machines need all RAM from the same manufacturer and batch number. Most likely though the problem is not as severe as it was with earlier hyperthreading machines.
I am not eager to EVER AGAIN have the nightmare problems I've had with RAM on hyperthreading machines. At one point, with the second machine, I had over $1000 in RAM from Dell in my house waiting to be sent back to them. None of it worked. I actually got a new machine out of Dell because of their utter stupidity as to what was wrong. I kept telling them to send four sticks from the same manufacturer and lot and they never did that...just threw more and more RAM at me (some of which was not even designed for my machine and would not fit) and all of which was mismatched as far as timings, etc goes.
To me, the hassle of having to get a machine with 4GB RAM, immediately remove it, order 8GB RAM, wait for it come, install it, test it and then try to sell the 4GB I removed is too much hassle. And by the time I get all that done, I have spent just as much money in my time and effort that I will spend just ordering the amount of RAM I want on the machine in the first place and paying Dell's price. At least I can get the RAM I want when configuring the machine. I cannot do that with a video card and cannot order a better one later if I buy a Vostro 460. The video card problem is not solvable thus it is a real problem. |
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BlitzenZeusBurnt Out Cynic Premium Member join:2000-01-13 |
No memory doesn't need to be installed in pairs anymore, and the last revival with the p4 processors died out when motherboard manufacturers supported normal ddr memory with p4 processors also, basically removing the special memory from the marketplace other than systems that were already stuck with it.
Mixed memory systems will run fine, but there is a small performance increase if they are all the same brand/type which puts them into a multi-channel mode.
Time, and effort? It's really not that hard unless you have arthritic hands, then you would want somebody else to do it, but still it's not worth paying $150 for 4GB more ram. If you think it's worth your convenience that's you, but you paid 500% markup from retail. |
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AVDRespice, Adspice, Prospice Premium Member join:2003-02-06 Onion, NJ |
AVD
Premium Member
2012-Mar-1 3:50 pm
said by BlitzenZeus:Time, and effort? It's really not that hard unless you have arthritic hands, then you would want somebody else to do it, but still it's not worth paying $150 for 4GB more ram. everything is easy until something unexpectedly goes wrong. |
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