Dell’s recent announcement of the spiffy new XT Tablet PC touched off a firestorm of reaction to the firm’s announced starting price of $2499. This pricing is quite a bit higher than Dell’s competition, even if they have the capacitive digitizer that the others do not have yet. Dell today responded to those pricing concerns by doing a comparison of the XT against the HP 2710p and the Lenovo x61. Here’s what Dell’s Glenn Keels had to say about the pricing brouhaha:
We believe that when you take a look at like-to-like configurations AND the incremental technology (that customers have overwhelming told us they want to have), the value equation for the Latitude XT far exceeds that of competitive systems.
We performed a price and feature compare with the Latitude XT, the HP 2710p and the Lenovo X61t.Overall, what I found was that when you adjust for non-standardfeatures such as Dell’s standard 3 year standard warranty, the overallprice delta was between 8-13%. And while this amount is not trivial,the Latitude XT more that makes up for the difference with additionalfeatures customers have told us matter most to them.
So there you have the official word- we’re more expensive because we’re better. M’kayyyy.
UPDATE: I decided not to take Glenn’s 8-13% price increase for granted and visited the HP and Lenovo web sites linked to by Mr. Keels. The HP 2710p pricing starts at $1,599 and the Lenovo x61 at $1,518. That’s almost a $1,000 difference on both models from the Dell’s starting price. My math is always pretty fuzzy but let’s see, either of those prices are almost 40% lower than Dell’s. M’kayyy again.
James, perhaps what the Dell guys was saying was that after you add on to the HP and Lenovo models what is already standard on the XT, you’ll get that Delta?
Woadan
The configuration page is actually working today, and my personal minimum requirements for a decent system to replace my venerable 600m (core duo, 120gb hd, dvd writer-which is not standard?!, accidental damage coverage), comes near $3300. That is just absurdly priced. That’s not even including the extra gig of memory required for Vista users. Even if it were that much better, it doesn’t matter, because no individual or budget conscious business is going to be able to spend that much on a tablet.
This product doesn’t seem to be designed or priced to actually sell, it’s designed to prove a point and provide a showpiece, nothing more.
When the XT plans were revealed to my institution last October, it was made clear that another tablet would be forthcoming after the D series Latitude ends its lifespan in late 2008 and a new series is released. My guess is that the XT is for the PR, and the next tablet will be the actual practical model – which may have interchangeable parts with the new latitude series, making it cheaper to produce and support.
Which, in my mind is going to be way too late, because by then, the N-Trig screens will already be in a number of alternative, more competitively priced devices, and the XT will have no edge. Even though we use Dell for desktops, we already have discussions with HP and Lenovo to provide tablets. By the time Dell has a reasonably priced tablet, contracts will be signed and their money will be long gone.
Funny, that’s the same fuzzy logic AT&T uses on me whenever I ask them about their insanely expensive data plans as compared to T-Mobile and Sprint.
“We charge more because our network is better” was the exact quote from and AT&T rep.
“..customers have told us matter most to them” – Excluding price of course, which no customer cares about anyway.
When we did a technology upgrade here at work, Dell gave us a $300-$400 discount per unit (we ordered around 20 machines)over the sticker price. However, this discount was for government buyers and it was on laptops and desktops. Even if this held true for the XT, that’s still a hefty price tag if you add any upgrades. I mean, a 40 GB HD standard…
It’s no doubt that Dell needs to recoup some R&D costs and that N-Trig does not have the same economy of scale as Wacom (and thus a higher per unit price for the digitizers), but unless Dell offers some hefty discounts, they’ve doomed this product to failure.
I think that the cuting edge technology here is N-trig, and I think that what we are paying is the N-trig cost mostly. maybe they can’t supply enought digitizers now and dell is charging that price to make the demand of the tablet low. That’s why I think Motion left the boat before releasing a slate with N-Trig tech.
Dell needed the tablet to go into the market and show the be the first with technology of multitouch. Maybe when N-trig optimize the supply chain, Dell go down hevily in the price.
Just my toughts.
It’s Dell’s first Tablet, we should not be surprised at over cost, they are trying to recover their investment (E&D/blog bribes, etc)
I haven’t done the math, but I’d agree it’s not fair to compare “starting” prices, only as built prices.
To say one thing is too expensive because it’s only available with more expensive options is not fair. You have to compare apple to apples.
This is a similar argument that Apple has made for years and was never more true then in the Mac Pro, which is only available with Xeon processors.
I think that you are always going to have to pay up the ying yang for new technology. Whether you like it or not you are going to pay to be an early adopter (I think good somewhat recent examples of that are the Xbox 360 and PS3). The n-trig display is the first of it’s kind on a tablet, Bringing pontentially the first true multitouch tablet to the market(even though there needs to be software and firmware upgrades the potential is there) and will come down in price eventually. . I’m a glutten for punishment so I know, I tend to buy it knowing that if I wait a couple a months its going to come down in price, be obsolete, etc.. and I’m going to kick myself in the pants, which I do every time. So seeing I’ve put in my order for the XT I’ll try to put together a review/video (kicking myself in the pants)/unboxing/ when it finally gets delivered mid January (Good thing work is footing the bill :)
Is it just me, or is Intel scheduled to release new mobile CPUs in a few weeks?
I also stepped through the custom build tool and it gave me a projected ship date of 1/15. Anyone think they may update the CPUs?
Or alternatively, seems like it would be a good idea to wait to order a new machine until after the release – even if Dell doesn’t use the Penryn architecture chips right away, someone else very well might.