Dealing with the Dell...
even with standard shipping. The order was correct, with nothing missing. Lavie was able to unbox the system and hook it up without any issues.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-run of bad news for Dell's direct model: a confirmed third-quarter earnings decline reported in October 2005, the September 2005 decision to stop free home delivery of low-end machines to cut costs, and a year-end blog firestorm over hold times and service, including Jeremy Zawodny's public breakdown over Dell technical support on December 31 alongside a report of a broken 2405FPW monitor arriving at a corporate buyer. Against that backdrop, this post documents the opposite case — a correctly picked order on standard shipping that Lavie unboxed and hooked up with no issues.
The same-day pickup is what makes it interesting rather than reassuring: Ed Bott reframed it around why new PCs ship loaded with junkware, and TechBlog timed the real cost at 4.5 hours to a usable PC. A clean logistics story becomes a referendum on what 'working out of the box' means. It also sits next to an unconfirmed Piper Jaffray call from Les Santiago that Dell will reverse course and sell AMD-based systems.
First-order effects
- Dell gets a confirmed counterdata point to the December support complaints, but the same write-up hands critics a new angle — the junkware load and hours-long setup between unboxing and a usable machine.
Second-order effects
- Out-of-box experience becomes a comparison metric other OEMs get measured on too, since Ed Bott's junkware question and the 4.5-hours-to-usable figure apply to any vendor shipping preloaded consumer PCs.
Third-order effects
- For a build-to-order vendor with no retail channel, individual customers blogging their unbox-and-setup experience becomes a standing reputational dataset — support quality and preload choices turn into public, comparable evidence rather than private complaints.
The trend: PC quality assessment is shifting from spec sheets and RMA statistics toward publicly documented unboxing, preload, and support experiences that direct vendors cannot filter.