Anyone have experience buying from Dell Factory Outlet?? I'm after a new laptop and having bought from here before I went again and was shocked at the price increases...
I bought an Inspiron for my daughter on here in November for £298 - a bargain. Early February I bought an identical spec machine for my mum for £340. I looked on there last week - same spec machine was £398, and today they're priced at £438 - thats a 50% jump in price in 3 months!! I'm somewhat puzzled at the steady increase in prices... kinda wish I'd bought a few back in November now.
Can anyone shed any light on why these prices are creaping up so much.. or if the trend will continue?
The pound vs the dollar has fallen sharply in the last year (2.05 to 1.40), and since Dell are an american company (and most PC parts retailers have american bases) the price of PCs has shot up in the UK. New technology will push the prices back down again, but there has been very little new stuff out since late summer 2008 so far, minor graphics cards upgrades haven't really taken hold, bigger HDDs are still in very tiny preliminary batches, no RAM advances have been made, no new CPUs have come out except the i7s and Phenom 2s (which don't really push the boundaries as they're either prohibitively expensive or limited to midrange), the only real advance has been that of the cheap SSD, but since without RAID they're near-useless, they haven't had much of an effect on HDD prices as they're no real threat to the market as of yet.
Dell's prices are shocking once you start adding the options to the build list.
The last few Dell's i bought (Dual Core Optiplexes) were from eBay, but they still had most of their warranty intact, and were actually brand new unopened, were from an overspend by one of the UK's huge greedy banks :)
