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.
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2007\/12\/18\/dell-on-high-xt\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_25d88ce9b57136f43f17c5129b8c2075","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}