Heretic said:
@Vrmithrax
I don't care if it IS a bunch of high quality parts. That price tag is mostly the brand name. I could just as easily put together a really nice laptop with top notch quality parts at ibuypower.com and come up with a comparable laptop that would serve me just as well. And I'd be getting a LOT more for my money. Besides...there's only so far a laptop can go in terms of reliability. It's not like this thing is running a RAID setup or anything fancy.
Oh, I don't doubt you could. So could I. But, again, missing the point of what market sector this product is aimed at. You (or I) could PERSONALLY build such a killer machine, but not come close to the workstation efficiency and optimization unless we could get our hands on those workstation quality mobile GPUs, which are expensive as hell. But, even with that in mind, consider this... Yes, you can build a nice notebook. But that's yours. Now, are you going to build 100 of them? A thousand of them? And ship them all over the country (or world) to your engineers who need them? And then drop everything and fly to each and every one of those engineers when they have an issue, within 24 hours? Still think you can do it cheaper?
Yah, some of the price is brand, but Dell is usually pretty competitive compared to many other common brands. What you are really paying for is reliability and the support structure behind the product. These workstation laptops will be in situations where they are the bread and butter for the person using them, their entire job will be done on them every day. If it breaks, they can't just send it off to some service center and wait for a week or two to get it back. It has to be fixed NOW, or they are often completely and utterly screwed. Which is why the companies in these situations will pay big money to know that they are covered in such events. Pay up front and have some peace of mind, or save some initial build costs and end up costing you much MUCH more at the back end when things go wrong. I've seen it happen many, many times in my experiences with big IT departments where accounting got their noses into the process and decided to go the cheap route, and it ended up costing them far more in the long run than it would have if they had bought the premium stuff up front. And, ironically enough, the IT department usually got the blame for the whole fiasco, even though they were overridden on their preferences.