I won’t buy Dell gear again, at home or at work. I bought my kid a monitor for his gaming PC from Amazon. It was advertised as brand new. Dell shipped it in a brand new, undamaged, unopened box. Its HDMI port failed a couple of months later but with many months of warranty left. Then Dell denied a warranty claim because their inventory system had it listed as having been previously registered to someone else. I tried to escalate the claim but they refused it all the way to the top. Amazon was helpful: they let me swap for another brand and just pay the difference.<p>In before “how do we believe you?” I wrote this all up in a blog post, under my real name, with backing details. If I’m lying, Dell can sue me for defamation.<p>A Dell corporate sales person contacted me at work to talk about setting up a work account. It felt sooo good to send them a link to my blog post and explain that Dell was dead to me. I didn’t hear back.
In Australian, a local government competition body regularly pursues this sort of fake-ass pricing. They are a great laugh once they a fined, but it is not so funny before. Here is one that is as ridiculous as the Black-Friday fake deals.<p>edit, here is the gist:<p>In July 2020, the Court found that Kogan had misled consumers by advertising over a period of four days that they could use the code ‘TAXTIME’ to reduce prices by 10 per cent at checkout, when Kogan had increased the prices of 621 products immediately before the promotion.<p>In most cases, the prices of these products had been increased by at least 10 per cent. Kogan then decreased those prices soon after the promotion ended, many back to their pre-promotion prices.<p><a href="https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/kogan-to-pay-350000-for-misleading-tax-time-promotion#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Court%20has%20ordered,breach%20of%20Australian%20Consumer%20Law" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/kogan-to-pay-350000-fo...</a>.
> A Dell spokesperson told Ars Technica today that Dell is also paying customers interest and "taking steps to improve our pricing processes to ensure this sort of error does not happen again."<p>Sounds like my 9 year old "It was an accident!!"
Just to point out: this amounts to a little over $1200 (US) per sold monitor. And Dell was ordered to provide affected customers full or partial reimbursement on top of this.<p>So definitely a costly affair.
I'm surprised this became a fine, since I thought that most people who've seen enough shady tricks like this have already been trained never to look at the "original" or "pre discount" prices, only the actual current price.
I have a DELL laptop.<p>Probably the worst purchase I made. The one saving grace is that SupportAssist actually works, and does make post-crash/post-windows-death recovery very simple and easy.<p>But that's the thing. I can tell that they put effort into this OS recovery tool, explicitly because this Laptop is a disaster of a product. Temperatures? Burning. Fans? Locked down. Freezing? Constantly. Crashing? Commonly. Blue screens? Less common now, but used to be frequent.<p>Just had to do another OS recovery yesterday. But hey, it breaks constantly like a Russian Lada, and can be "fixed" relatively quickly and easily.
Another Dell tomfoolery: their laptops advertised with 100w usb-c charging actually does only 60w charging, unless you buy Dell's superduper usb-c charger. Regardless if you have usb p.d 3.0 or higher.
Fines should be at least 100% of _revenue_ from these activities to actually punish the business. At the very least 100% of _profit_ from the activity. Anything less is cost of doing business since it's by definition a net profit.
The amount of research that needs to be done to purchase even the most basic stuff online is beyond paralyzing. I hate shopping irl but I think I hate online shopping even more.
Dell pushed a bios update that silently turned my expensive laptop into a machine that could not be used as a laptop because when I did, ie, closed the lid without shutting it down and put it in my bag it fried the mobo and subsequently would not boot.<p>Out of warranty (just) no way to ask Dell anything about it.<p>Dell are horrible. I hate them. The price has to be insanely cheap for Dell not to be just a plain old ripoff at the best of times. Actual lies, like detailed here should not surprise anyone.