Alex is in the market for a laptop for college, so he and I have been looking at the various options available. He’s narrowed down his search to a Dell XPS or an Asus Zenbook.
On the Dell web site, you can get a pretty “loaded” XPS for $1,000. I have an account rep at Dell for my hosting business, since I’ve purchased over a hundred servers from them, so I figured I’d contact her to see if she could offer a bit of a discount. For, you know, being a long-time client who’s spent well over a hundred thousand dollars there and stuff.
She came back with a quote for $1,600.
Umm. So I reminded her that the web site price– for the average plebeian consumer– was $600 less. For the same hardware. She apparently hadn’t noticed that, so she put together another quote for me.
$1,300.
I was a little flabbergasted again. She explained that buying it through a corporate channel means I can get two years of Dell support, instead of just one. Wow! What a bargain! If this laptop croaks in a year I’m going to be very, very disappointed in Dell’s products. (I have servers that have been running 24/7 for almost fifteen years.)
Anyway, I told her no thanks and if Alex decides to go with the Dell, he can just buy it through the web site. What a surreal experience.