Re: Dell Inspiron $800 vs Alienware X14 $1800

On Mon, 24 Feb 2025 23:00:06 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com> wrote at 17:05 this Saturday (GMT):

On 2/20/2025 1:21 PM, Tahitian pearl wrote:

Not much improvement here because the X14 appears to be an entry level
offering.  I didn't realize this when I bought it because I was fooled
by the Alienware brand.  The Inspiron has 12 GB of RAM.  My bet is that
if they put real fans in it, then it would blow the X14 away.
 
Plan on overspending if you want Alienware.  The clerk tried to get me
to buy a $3400 version of the Alienware, and if I knew they were going
to give me a line of $3000 credit like they did I would have taken him
up on the offer.  I felt pretty let down by the X14, but fortunately it
took a bullet for me.

>
I never buy brand name computers.  They're either absolute junk in
proprietary cases you can't put upgrades in or cost almost 2x as much as
they should, or both.  Either build your own or part and buy from a
custom maker.

>
>
Yeah, if a computer brand spends so much on marketing, there's probably
something up with the product
>
this goes for all computer companies APPLE

Apple long ago gave up on being a computer company. Their a luxury
brand.

And not totally undeserved. A lot of the engineering in Apple products
is impressive. But it's too often focused on form, not function, and
even for what you get, the price is rarely worth it.

    [But I'm a grump about Apple in general. It's not that I don't
     like their hardware, but I spent years in the trenches supporting
     the platform and I consistently heard about Apple's superiority
     over its competitors even as I banged my head against their bad
     decisions. At least PCs were honest in their awfulness ;-)]

As for Alienware... well, it's not the same company it once was. It
grew to popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an expensive
provider of high-end boutique gaming PCs. Its computers had a unique
look that made them stand out from the crowd, and they offered a
product that was top-of-the-line in performance. (It wasn't that you
couldn't build your own PC that was faster or less expensive, but
Alienware PCs were a pretty good turnkey purchases, if you could
afford them). But that started changing in the late 2000s, after Dell
bought the company, and now... well, they're just Dells with slightly
better spec'd hardware and a price that is more about the name than
the quality.