HP Regains Throne as Top PC Maker 134
Nick writes "HP is once again the leading PC manufacturer." From the article: "HP has snatched the PC crown from Dell's barely coherent clutches. It has taken HP close to three years to once again lead the market in worldwide PC sales. Under CEO Carly Fiorina and post Compaq, the company largely gave up on the tit-for-tat struggle with Dell for the PC top spot that had been so important to it over the years. Now it has reclaimed the #1 slot during the third quarter on the back of Dell's self-destruction. Overall, worldwide PC shipments hit 59.1m units in the third quarter - a 7 per cent rise from the same period last year, according to new data from Gartner. The US PC market, however, dipped 2 per cent, marking its first fall since mid-2002. Dell is particularly exposed to the US PC market, and it showed." Update: 10/20 16:37 GMT by Z : Switched link to a more current story.
Funny how all reporters are now falling in line... (Score:5, Funny)
I look forward to Sony, Microsoft, and SCO trying this next...
Re:Funny how all reporters are now falling in line (Score:3, Informative)
Yep. Zonk's so afraid, he's posting positive news articles about HP from nearly 4 years ago and passing them off as "news for nerds"!
Re:Funny how all reporters are now falling in line (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Funny how all reporters are now falling in line (Score:5, Informative)
FTA: Hewlett-Packard regained its position as the world's largest PC maker in the fourth quarter, while the industry overall saw shipments increase in the quarter and in 2002 as a whole.
This isn't to say that HP hasn't regained the top spot, but this article actually is out of date. There is no typo. It's the wrong article.
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4 year old article (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:4 year old article (Score:4, Funny)
Although, to be fair, the rest of us don't read the articles either, so it doesn't usually matter.
Re:4 year old article (Score:5, Informative)
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Also, for pretty graphs, see ArsTechnica [arstechnica.com].
Personally I don't care which of those two are on top. I'd much rather go with a Lenovo or Toshiba than an HP or Dell, any day of the week. Just because they're on top in terms of sales does not mean they're on top in terms of quality.
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I agree about the home consumer vs. business computer sentiment. HP's "workstation" XW line (particularly the XW8000) are quite nice... if expensive.
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Gamble here! (Score:4, Funny)
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Congratulations Carly Fiorina (Score:5, Funny)
About time (Score:5, Interesting)
Article is from 2003 (Score:1, Redundant)
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Not exactly. It's just that this battle between HP and Dell keeps going around in circles. 6 months from now Dell will be back on top, a year from now HP, etc. etc. etc., ad nauseam.
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This is a 2003 Article! (Score:1, Redundant)
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Why? He didn't say it first. He didn't even say it best.
Not for long (Score:1)
new Europe (Score:2)
Is that the 'new Europe' Grand Moff Rumsfeld set up to compete with 'old Europe' in the hope the former will eventually replace the latter?
Customer service still sucks. (Score:2, Insightful)
I have five newer Dell systems at home and at this time I wouldn't buy a keyboard from them due to my recent
experience with Dell customer service. I spent five grand to get insulted by a condescending customer service staff.
No thank you I will pay more for better service.
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How is this like the Compaq thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obviously in a year with slow US growth, Dell is going to underperform. The question we should be asking, is why is US growth so low, and how can we fix it. Perhaps because US citizens are still not sure about their job stability and future in the face of a complete absence of morality on wall street.
How about market saturation? A place like India has a lot of people getting their first computer. In the US, the market is mostly people getting yet another computer.Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think it's more likely that customers are deserting Dell (because their hardware is no unreliable that it causes small children to have nightmares and sysadmins to have psychotic, nightmare-inducing rampages) and HP just happened to be the next one down the list, so any reduction in Dell's sales will cause HP to become #1.
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Also people who are neopyhtes buy HP products because of the commericals they see on TV. THey just want a pc to do work and showing what the pc can do and including great software for graphics makes their life easier. ITs not like they can go just buy a Dell. They would need to know the numbe
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Kind of, it's just Dell's turn to think they are IBM, and folk buy their machines because of the brand name, or their legendary support. "If we increase our margins, and outsource all our support to India, customers will keep buying our stuff, right?" Wrong.
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Randy: Hmmm... I don't know. I'm such a loyal Dell employee.
HP: Fine, we'll give you a hot secretary and blinds for your office.
Randy: I'm in!
Yes, horrible wheeling and dealing. How about offer a good employee what he is worth to you and see if he bites.
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should I switch? (Score:5, Funny)
Firefox, Notepad, & Popcorn are all I mostly use, anyhow.
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No. What they do have is cheap and I'm not talking price.
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Upgrade only if you have a compelling reason. If it works fine on your dial up connection for reading Slashdot, then there is no reason to upgrade. However if you want to play trackmania while talking on Skype on a broadband connection, then you might want to look into an upgrade.
De Ja Vue? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:De Ja Vue? (Score:5, Funny)
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So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
HP doesn't make significant profit selling PCs.
It hardly sets any technology standards - those are all set by the rest of the industry.
If Dell is #1 next month, so what?
The vendor making all the money in the PC business is still...
that same company from Washington state.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
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But it looks to me as if Steve finally saw the light, and has built a strategy to very aggressively go after the home consumer market. A
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The ink industry has been good to them. It's a PC product isn't it? They also make some printers, but the real money is in the ink.
no seriously (Score:1)
3.75 year old dupe? (Score:4, Funny)
Zonk Creates Time Machine (Score:3)
As part of an experiment, Zonk set a number of stories in January 2003 while the idea of giving subscribers access to stories before the unwashed masses. Indeed, this story was seen by beta subscribers in 2003 and has suddenly re-appeared after a quantum mishap involving Cowboy Neal zapped a few posts from the database.
Today, they're showing back up as a new singularity in Cowboy Neal's SQL-Optimising-Time-Compressor caused bits originally lost in 2003 to show up in their original state three and a half years later.
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Re:Zonk Creates Time Machine (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, in that case, any time Slashdot mentions a tech company, I vote that the article include the company's stock price at the time of the article posting...
(man, I'm gonna be rich!)
Uh, was that my outside voice?
Shoddy product and customer service will do that (Score:5, Interesting)
Judging from what I read on the net while I was researching my son's second problem, I don't think my experience with poor quality product and poor quality tech support from Dell is unique.
There's a limit to cost cutting - go too far and you destroy the reason people initially bought from you. In my case, it'll be a long time before I ever buy another Dell. In the past 4 years, that's 3 computers Dell hasn't sold me.
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HP Quality (Score:2)
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I'd say HP machines have given me less problems, but not a lot less. Support is a
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PCChips is made in China, and so is Gigabyte... Are you going to tell me they have the same quality, because they're made in the same country?
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There are a couple of areas I won't risk low quality: memory and optical media. It's all made in China, often the same
Re:Shoddy product and customer service will do tha (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Shoddy product and customer service will do tha (Score:5, Interesting)
My 12" powerbook G4 acted up once. I finially figured out that several of the fonts had gotten corrupted on the HD, ncreasing their size by an order of magnitude.(yea 3 gigs of fonts when it's supposed to be less than 200 megs) and it was doing random things to the OS. I was upgrading to 10.4 at the time so I wasn't too upset. But I also waited until the second or third revision came through of the hardware.
Personally I would deal with it for a couple more months and upgrade to the "new" macbooks when they come out in a few more months. Then sell the old one on ebay for as much as you can.
there is a sucker out there who wll pay you good money and at least underwrite part of the replacement costs.
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I refuse to reward Apple with yet another sale after dealing with their shoddy engineering twice now. If I do end up replacing the MacBook, it most assuredly will not be with another Apple.
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Apple's no worse than the rest, and at least their customer service is usually pretty good. I have a coworker who has been thru 4 laptops over the past six months, from Dell, Toshiba and Sony. All junk.
Dell was the worst of the bunch, though - not only were two machines defective, they were impossible to deal with. The
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Well, the whole "Apple Quality" idea is shot to hell, then.
Nobody wants to buy from a company that makes good products only if bought on the 2nd Tuesday of months that have the letter "U" in them.
Just try and tell me that first-generation notebooks from IBM or HP have such horrible problems...
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real world hardware always has those kinds of bugs.
Phone Quest time! (Score:3, Funny)
1)Customer looks for tech support number in product manual and literature. No luck.
2)Customer looks for tech support number on web site. No luck.
3)Customer finds the support number by looking in the company's domain registration record.
4)Customer calls number. After being re-routed and bounced and made to call other numbe
Quality stats case study (Score:3, Interesting)
You get what you pay for (Score:4, Informative)
We've got a fleet of notebooks from Dell, Gateway, and HP. The hard drives in laptops all seem to die much more quickly vs those in desktops. I've always assumed it is due to the increased physical traumua a traveling laptop gets subjected to.
"After quite a bit of trouble with customer service reading scripts in Indiglish we finally got an RMA. "
When Dell sells you a computer, they also offer you a choice of service plans. If you go the cheap route, you get the guy in India reading a script in broken English for hours, and mail in service. If you buy the Gold support, you get a native English speaker, 1 minute hold times, and next-business-day, on-site service. Plus Accidental Damage replacement (you drop it, you break it, you get a new one).
With Dell, you get exactly what you pay for.
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I didn't pay chump change for that support and over the course of two hard drive failures, sound card death, and eventu
Re:Shoddy product and customer service will do tha (Score:2)
My experience shows that by not moving the laptop while the drive is spinning (regular desktops too) your hard drive will last longer. For a feeling of why, remember those toy gyroscopes you had as a kid
Put the laptop on a hard flat surface.
Turn on.
Use.
Turn off.
Move laptop.
Hard drive lasts almo
Re:Shoddy product and customer service will do tha (Score:2)
Nor is it from any other manufacturer.
2003 article. Slashdot has really gone downhill (Score:2, Funny)
Err.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:1)
Remember when HP made _technical_ news... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, HP is now the top PC vendor.
And this means what? Vista will run in some new, exciting way different from the way it runs on Dells? Interesting new _kinds_ of peripherals will come to market first on HP boxes, the way the Sony 3.5" diskette did?
Or does it just mean (yawn) that on the right day with the wind behind it, some HP models may offer incrementally more RAM or an incrementally faster processor than the equivalent Dell, especially for corporate purchasing agents purchasing them in quantities of a thousand?
How long has it been since HP tried anything like NewWave?
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To be fair, HP was the first major PC vendor to support Expresscard.
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It's because Dell sucks (Score:2, Informative)
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IBM the real story here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dell's Unfair Advantage (Score:4, Funny)
"Hello these ees 'Dan'...may I be of knowing and becoming on the eashew?"
Ahem... (Score:3, Interesting)
Dell's penchant for hollowing out suppliers is just one of the 'thin-line' tactics that finally knocked the company off. No one wants their business these days and they certainly can't compete in the current growth markets.
Don't expect Dell to ever regain from this...going down, down, down.
Good riddance to bad rubbish!
Not just PC's (Score:2)
But we recently had need of a server to use for RSnapshot, and Dell wanted too much money so we hit up HP. Got a hell of a deal on a server with 2TB of disk space. Now if they'd just ship the damned thing.
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So you're saying they give you good deals selling you things that they don't have. No wonder they've passed Dell in sales!
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If it was good enough to say to Steve Jobs (Score:3, Funny)
HP/Compaq Quality has improved siginificantly (Score:3)
Motherboard: Manufactured by Asus with open PCIe slot.
Hard Drive: Seagate SATA drive (SR1910NX, I forget what was in the SR1710NX)
Sure, they're not exactly a full featured systems but I can add to them when I find good deals on stuff I want to upgrade. Quality components, no generic motherboard and no cheaper Maxtor drive, that I would have likley seen from the Compaq of the past in their Presario line. The SR1710NX has been use since Feb, and so far no problems. (Of course I had to get rid of a lot of crap that they pre-install... but all the consumer retail systems come with that)
I now recommend the Compaq systems with Asus boards (you can research that on their website) for friends and family. Figure it's a better bet than a cheap Dell these days. (As for support - my friends and family end up calling me anyway.. so I have no idea how good that is)
Physical Retail vs. Internet Mail Order (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast forward to 2006 though and the picture isn't so rosy for Dell. The average inflation-adjusted price of a new PC is probably closer to $1000 today. The shipping costs alone can add 5% or more to the cost of a PC, not to mention the added hassle if there's a problem and you need to return it. So Dell's mail order model has become something of a disadvantage. Everybody has implemented the kind of component and assembly optimization Dell pioneered, and they're all just putting together kits of standardized equipment supplied by the same handful of vendors - Intel, nVidia, ATI, etc., so Dell gains no traction there. The standard $1000 PC comes with so many built-in features there's little demand for the kind of customization that once set Dell apart.
On the cost side, Carly butchered HP's workforce, so a lot of the old R&D overhead is gone, and HP has the combined retail channel of both the old HP and Compaq, plus all of their old corporate accounts. There are fewer retail players to deal with as well, lowering HP's costs even more, and HP's size gives them more leverage to push retailers around with. In this new environment, HP is poised to beat Dell at their own game.
The only problem is, this has turned into an extremely low-margin game for all of the players. HP makes a lot of revenue off the PC market, but their margins are all in corporate hardware and services and of course in printer ink that costs more per-ounce than gold. Beyond that, they're now a hollowed-out shell, living off of support for legacy products designed and frequently sold a decade ago. Corporate hardware is slowly marching down the commoditization path as well, though it's probably 5-10 years behind the kind of margin erosion we've seen in the PC space.
IBM saw what was coming and bailed on the PC market a couple of years ago, retreating entirely to the corporate space. HP bet the company on beating Dell, and while it looks like they may in fact pull that feat off, my guess it's going to be a pyrrhic victory. I think the PC market isn't going to be worth diddlysquat in a couple of years. Apple is rapidly carving out a big niche for itself in the only remaining retail segment that's profitable - the high end. That leaves everybody else - Lenovo, HP, Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Gateway - to squabble over the low margin to no margin mid and low end of the market. I think it's only a matter of time before most of them are squeezed out, leaving probably just Lenovo and either Dell or HP standing.
Which of those two ultimately wins out probably depends upon when the Chinese enter the printer market and begin to consume market share from HP. If it happens within the next 3 years, Dell will probably be victorious, as HP will have its legs shot out from beneath it due to the drop in sales of their highest-margin retail product, printer ink. If cheap printer rivals don't enter the market in the next 3 years, HP will probably survive as the other big player in the PC market, leaving Dell to implode as their revenues continue to decline.
In the end, IBM will probably buy out the loser in that battle, take the corporate hardware and service for its