The end is nigh!

Posted on Thursday, March 23, 2006 at 9:18 am

Good lord. What is with big business these days? First we had Apple announcing the use of Intel CPUs in their boxes. Crazy, yes, but not necessarily horrible outright. Then came the news that Adobe bought Macromedia. Crazy, truly, and possibly bad because Macromedia was, for all intents and purposes, Adobe’s only major competition for most of their stuff. Somehow this ended up being alright, though, as even without any legitimate competition, Photoshop’s retail price actually went down.

And what happens now, dear children? Why, nothing less then Dell buying Alienware. The one company where build quality ranks somewhere below who’s restocking the fridge with Red Bulls, and where competitive pricing reigns supreme, is buying the one company where the two situations are exactly opposite. According to El Reg, “Dell plans to let Alienware operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary with its own marketing, sales and support staff. The Alienware brand will continue under this arrangement.” So this marginally lightens the news for now, given that hopefully nothing will change with the one pre-built computer maker I actually respect. But how long can it last?

In my opinion, Dell is a company who only cares about the bottom line. Build quality is crap – even in their supposedly top-of-the-line gaming systems. I’ve got an XPS 600 at work – with friggin’ DUAL GeFORCE 7800GTXs!!!!! And it couldn’t even make it through one round of 3dmark06 without the entire box locking up. How sad is that? I’ve got a damn 2.8ghz Pentium D, SLI’d GF7800GTXs, and 2gb of DDR2 memory. This system SHOULD be able to eat 3dmark06 for breakfast. Instead, it gets halfway through the test and just locks up with a bunch of red streaks all over my monitor. And their customer support is pretty much worthless unless you or someone you know happens to speak Hindi. Given that, even though they say they’re pretty much leaving Alienware to keep track of its own pants, how long do you think it’ll be before they start getting pressured to make cutbacks?

It all goes without saying, of course, that in all reality this probably doesn’t affect me that much. I haven’t bought an off-the-shelf (or even configured online) PC since I was in high school. (And you’ll note that I said “PC,” so my little iBook doesn’t count.) I can’t imagine buying one now, be it from Dell or Alienware or any other company. If I’m in the market for a new laptop, and for some reason I decide that I don’t want to get a MacBookPro, Alienware is probably my next choice. But I’m not in the market for a new laptop, and won’t be for some time, as a new desktop comes first. So it’s true that I’m more mad because of the principle of the thing than because I’ll actually be negatively impacted by this. It all comes down to the fact that Alienware has always been the king of the pre-built gaming systems. If you’ve got enough money, you buy an Alienware for, if nothing else, the simple “yeah, it’s an Alienware” factor. For the same reason, you’d buy a Corvette over a Cavalier if you had the available funds. Both will get you from Point A to Point B, but the Vette will sure look a helluva lot better doing it.

It’s a sad day for gaming.

1 Comment »

Comment by ralph — March 23, 2006 @ 11:33 am

Glad I got my Alienware when I did.

I hope I can buy an Alienware for 399 in the coming months… THAT would be great, as the cases usually run that much