Filed under: Products and services, Apple Inc (AAPL), Dell (DELL)
When Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) became the biggest cheerleader for the new SSD (solid say drive) laptop Personal computer, many other companies were waiting to see if the new product would be a success. SSDs are hard drives without moving parts and use computer memory chips to store data instead of a spinning hard drive. One problem is that laptops with the SSD feature cost about $900 more than standard laptop PCs. You can buy an entire extra laptop for that.
Even worse, it seems that the first crop of these PCs isn’t living up to the hype. The one saving grace is that an SSD-equipped laptop is silent — but the speed gains and performance that would be the main selling points are just not there. And while Dell has been the largest proponent of the SSD laptop, Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is also taking orders for Mac laptops with SSD drives. Other manufacturers might follow.
Reports say that a “computer manufacturer” is seeing a return rate of SSD-equipped laptop PCs of 20% to 30%. This is due to a high failure rate. Is the $900 price premium just not slicing the mustard? Probably not. The combination of slow performance and outright failure is said to be responsible for the high return rate of SSD laptop PCs, and this is probably not sitting well with Samsung Electronics, which makes the SSD drives inside these laptop PCs. Although nothing is perfect out of the gate, didn’t OEMs like Dell and Apple test (and test and test) these newer SSD devices extensively in multiple scenarios before allowing these products to be sold inside their own products? From reading this, that’s hard to believe.
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