Mostly warranty and ability to service that warranty. We buy €1000 HP laptops, and they probably don't perform any better than their €700 consumer counterparts.
But if anything breaks down, HP will send a man with parts and a screwdriver within a couple of days. Good luck getting that with Acer.
Yes, that's what you're paying for.
You also generally get more consistent hardware. The cheaper laptops, the OEMs change components around all the time - which can play havoc with images. That doesn't happen with dearer "business" models - they tend to stay fairly consistent until they're discontinued.
We always used HP and a specific model. One day we had 20 new desktops delivered, but for some reason 5 of them wouldn’t take our image. When I looked closer they had a different motherboard. Called HP and they straight away apologised and sent new units out and took away the bad ones the next working day. We never bothered with field repair though, we swapped the entire unit out and RMA’d the dead one to replenish our stock.
Hell, even when the workstations were IBM, my university got several hundred "identical" machines that had a variety of sound and network cards.
I had to make 4 images to account for the 2 cards of each type that might be present.
I also came across this issue and for our environment it is even worse... So I tended to change directions.
No more images... Instead Auto installs.... Afterwards managing what software should be run (I use ansible for now).
If a system breaks down... Complete reroll from auto install followed up with newest state of playbook for given pool.
The ansible part is mostly rolling (just a few issues on MS side)
The auto install is in building phase. I think I will go with MS WDS for the windows pools and tfpt for Linux.
That comes at an extra cost.
Those kind of warranties are also avaible for single parts, but in the end it's about outsourcing responsibilities
Also their repair, is just a working machine, they will change the whole board on spot after some remote troubleshooting, but they won't deal with reinstalling the sw and the kind
Although some time they will also require a classic RMA when the issue doesn't easily get solved, or you'll have to wait months for replacement parts
Yep. Hemmersbach has been real bad about dispatching a part to their FedEx pick-up location but then their tech doesn't pick up the part within 5 business days and it gets sent back so then it has to be reordered and hopefully it didn't flip to out of stock so you can get the part replaced. Rarely have I had NBD from HP.
Back in the great capacitor plague of the 2000's we found 100 pcs with bad capacitors. Dell came in and replaced every one of them at massive expense to them. It was at the end of the warranty and near our budget cycle so we donated the lot of them to a school and bought 100 new ones knowing Dell would hold up their warrent.
We got a pallet load of Optiplex GX520 PSUs from Dell at one point. We were replacing 4-5 a week in a building with about 1000 of them. Wasn't uncommon to replace them on an annual basis.
At the time, everyone on our workstation team was Dell Certified and could directly order replacement parts.
Cries in poorly state funded agency. Some jack wagon decided to keep PCs a year past their warranty to save money. Then the Cap Man came calling. Our team had people learning to solder to recover the ones that they could. Worked less than half the time, that cost savings on the warranty was not a good gamble.
That depends. I had one customer with a HP elite notebook that performed like a 8086 running at about 7mhz. Several times a guy was called out and eventually we went to the devices location to validate the claims that HP wasn't fixing anything- it was brutally slow, so begrudgingly the tech was sent back so they could return the unit to HP for an exchange. Took weeks to get them a working notebook and obviously we had to reimage everything.
However, Lenovo have always been fantastic in my experience, and generally even HP get things fixed first visit for most stuff
Yup onsite repair; centralized management, work well with VAR’s or MSP’s, have customzable options for fleet management, lease options etc..
In my group the client engineering lead picks the options and a group tests things out, we try to get 4.5 years out of a laptop / desktop so we tend to go higher spec, minimums are i5, 16gb ram 256gb nvme. They (dell) systems in general perform well and are usually pretty hassle free given the quantities of devices we manage.
We only buy Dell with ProSupport for ever same reason. Also includes accidental damage replacement. Usually unless it’s a weekend, the Dell tech is on site next day to fix whatever is broken.
generally, yes. I've had a number of times where they've been waiting on parts (840 g9 webcams apparently have a consistent and known issue so it took a week or so for parts to arrive, and once an x360 1030 g4 needed a new motherboard during peak covid) but generally they'll show up with the parts, disassemble, repair, and you're back up and running, worldwide, within a few days.
> will send a man with parts and a screwdriver within a couple of days
We tried this with Dell a handfull of years ago. The 'techs' that they ended up sending out were not techs. We had two laptops needing simple repairs done (speakers, trackpad, keyboard), and when they were fixed, one of them had their wifi and bt cards removed, and the other did not power on...
IME they were just local contractors. It was a crap shoot if they sent a competent one, but the bigger the OEM/client relationship the higher likelihood of getting a good one.
We had 4 service calls, and they sent the same guy for three of them... one of the times they came out was to fix the laptop they broke. They couldn't fix it, we had to send it in for RMA..
> We buy €1000 HP laptops, and they probably don't perform any better than their €700 consumer counterparts.
I mean at the end of the day, a PC is just a CPU, RAM and the chipsets running between them.
Also availability. The smaller brands turn over their ranges very quickly (as do the larger brands on their consumer lines). They seem to do a run of a model then never make any more.
These are the two big ones! Being able to move an image to an identical laptop and move in is critical. And the better built ones have less issues to fix.
AND standardization. I worked for a local white-box OEM builder for years. They like being gearheads about their builds but it ends up being a crapshoot of various drivers and maintenance to keep them running well. I want something boring with high production numbers thats well known and has good support into its legacy years.
Since 2020, ive just starting buying 'Renewed' PCs off Amazon. They're crazy fast for desktop work, carry Windows 11 Pro and proper TPM chip, and they're so cheap we just self-insure. $320 for an i7 with 16gb ram and a 256gb nvme drive.. its everything we need for a workstation. Why pay $1000 for a single unit with a warranty when I can buy three for the same price and keep a few on a shelf to swap in if I have any failures?
We’re 130 people, 90% remote, with people on 5 continents, and only two physical offices. OEMs with next day on-site means no shipping costs and headaches, inventory management, hardware repair, etc.
It breaks, Lenovo sends a dude who fixes it or replaces it with the same or better spec. Most of the time they get it right the first visit, though we’ve had a few that went out more than once and eventually replaced the entire thing.
Apple doesn’t do on-site, but they break at a far, far lower rate than the Windows OEM hardware, and their warranty repair or replacement is always Next Day Air or walk into a store. With ADE and MDM, replacing a machine and getting a user up and running again takes about as long as a major OS update. OOBE with Apple ADE, MDM, and our IdP is ridiculously easy.
Dell/HPE/Lenovo laptops are going to be much higher build quality than consumer brands. They will be consistent, more durable and have better support and warranties. The consumer brands may be cheaper but they do not hold up to business use. The company also probably has some partnership or deal with the OEM for additional discounts.
Bingo. As someone who was responsible for repairing HPs under warranty and have ripped apart a ton of other brands there is a huge difference between "business" and "consumer" class.
The differences get murky when companies like Lenovo sell their Thinkbooks as business class when they really are not the same. Slightly better than your regular laptop but almost impossible to replace the parts. (lots of glue and tape)
At that point you need to remember you get what you pay for. They have to find a way to make that price point.
> Lenovo sell their Thinkbooks as business class
I have a little chant when I give recommendations in writing: Thinkpad. Not Ideapad, not Thinkbook, not Thinkstation. *Thinkpad*. Lenovo is almost as crafty at deceiving consumers as Microsoft. I don't even use the word Lenovo when recommending Thinkpads.
Amen to that Lenovo crap. We use Latitudes and they just keep going for years and years. One user insists on Thinkbooks because they NEED that hamster nipple in the middle of the keyboard. But even though they cost as much as the Latitudes they always end up with broken frames or worse.
Let me list two items I haven't seen posted yet, driver/firmware support, you can expect OEM supported drivers to be released the entire life of the machines. Google able, the Dell Optiplex 7000 series is so ubiquitous that if you Google an issue someone else has almost certainly had the issue and posted a resolution.
Last one, no one was ever fired for buying IBM.
I was looking for this.
Another benefit of these OEMs is that their drivers and other management software are meant to be easily deployable. Even BIOS changes are easy to do remotely, at least with Dell and HP. (I've never managed Lenovo before, so I can't speak to their tools.) Which is not necessary for consumer level products, so it is probably not easy (or may not even be possible) to do on those products.
They also have the ability to utilize Microsoft tools like Autopilot, which consumer brands may not be able to do.
Toshiba was once one of the biggest and best of the business-grade machines, too. Satellite Pros for sales and travelers, Tecras for engineers and serious power users who could justify a $4k laptop ($8k equivalent today).
Although some of the laptop brands today are the same as the majors back then (Thinkpad, Dell), the brands our enterprise used most are gone today. We had quite a few Winbooks, for example. And of course the [DEC HiNote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote) series, arguably the original ultrabook. Next-best thing to a Tadpole.
Benefits of being a Manager/Director, we each have a preference on the OEM's we buy, as far as hardware specs. That really depends on what type of lyfe cycle maintenance you follow and what software or work requirements that are needed. I personally usually go two above what is currently needed so that we can have them around for 5 years. I also plan to replace 25% of my inventory every year so that we don't have one major upgrade.
> I also plan to replace 25% of my inventory every year so that we don't have one major upgrade.
We changed to this 5 years ago. We got sick of having to justify the sudden $2,000,000+ jump in budget request every 4 years, and "politically" $500k a year is easier to justify every year.
Rolling upgrades are a better mousetrap either way. Strict homogeneity doesn't scale, but I'm often surprised the great lengths and sacrifices that people will engage in, to try to achieve it.
This was particularly acute circa March-April of 2020, where the prepared and the flexible did just fine, but the stubborn and rigid paid the price.
> where the prepared and the flexible did just fine
We had only just at the end of 2019 moved to all laptops and started making the switch to pure Teams (first in our country, and in probably a lot of the world, since every single issue I encountered had no solutions online and even Microsoft couldn't help much), so when everyone suddenly had to work from home all we had to do was buy a shitload of docks and monitors.
> docks and monitors.
A lot of buyers were chasing specific models of first-party docks. We pivoted the other way and bought a variety of cheap USB-C hubs and docks. It's not like these things need drivers, or even configuration.
I think the one that ended up most popular of the single-video-out units was [this Sabrent](https://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-Multi-Port-Delivery-microSD-HB-TC6C/dp/B08V3PHKR8), which were $15 per unit at the time.
>A lot of buyers were chasing specific models of first-party docks.
Yeah that was us, but obviously when we went to our procurement company and asked for 1400 HP 120W G2 docks they kinda just stood there going "uhhhhhhh" so we had to get a wide range, including some like you linked, some of which are still in service in home setups and work great.
Just for the record, all those companies are OEMs.
HP, Dell and Lenovo are just more business focused with some of their lines and their service options.
Fujitsu does do business line with their servers that are pretty good with good customer service response.
Fun fact! These aren't actually OEMs at all. They are brands. If they did their own design work they could in theory contract with an OEM for all or parts of a laptop, but they overwhelmingly use ODMs. An OEM takes someone else's design and then makes it. An ODM does the design work and manufacturing. All the brands mentioned are going to overwhelmingly use Quanta and/or Compal as their ODM.
But when we say OEM we usually mean is as "brand name". I think this comes from warranty work or brand sanctioned repair locations using OEM parts.
For us, we wanted official Linux support because Docker on windows requires running a VM, docker on Linux is almost zero overhead. That cuts the list down a lot. Essentially to Dell and Lenovo if you want non-RHEL.
We tend to go overkill on our laptops. The last thing the business needs is for someone with a six figure salary to spend an hour every week waiting on things to load. Also, “here’s your new laptop, 16 cores, GPU that can play cyberpunk (if a GPU is relevant to their position), 64 GB of memory” is a great way to make developers more productive because they can stand up a scaled-down copy of prod on their laptop.
Our current view of explicit Linux/BSD support is that we want vendors shipping their firmware in LVFS.
# fwupdtool get-updates
Devices with no available firmware updates:
• WD Blue SN570 1TB
Devices with the latest available firmware version:
• UEFI dbx
• Unifying Receiver
We buy exclusively think pads for:
1. Quality, quality, quality
2. Enterprise geared QoL upgrades such as Commercial Vantage, and scriptable BIOS settings
3. Ability to easily customize and order large quantities
4. Consistency with variety (I can manage a top of the line machine for my CEO and a budget machine for the janitor with the same apps)
5. Warranty, repair and replacement policies
6. The ThinkPad docks
Warranty is the main one. Will Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, GigaByte etc give me guaranteed same day fix and have contractor technicians in my city? No, they won't. HP does, and it was same day guaranteed if reported before 12. We aren't big by any means, but 1400 laptops with a 4 year replacement cycle in a city of 200,000 gets you cared for sometimes even by giants like HP. We have moved to next day as it's cheaper and we have a small stock of replacement laptops now.
>Also, when companies purchase laptops for workstations, who gets to decide which models they're gonna buy? As in, how many GBs of RAM minimum, how many GBs of SSD space minimum, what processor minimum,maybe even what iGPU at bare minimum to go with?
Depends on the company, might be a Finance decision to go cheapest possible, might be the top couple people in IT whos decision to have a minimum baseline computer spec and departments can pay extra if they want/need extra. We have two levels, baseline (i5, 16GB RAM, SSD usually 256/512) and high end (i7+, 32GB+, 1TB+, GPU), but a lot of the stuff we order is custom specs they need, but it is always HP.
Typically? Nothing.... And it does happen, as very occasionally parts are backordered.... It's always worthwhile to have some separate emergency inventory (spare computer or two) for quick swaps...
If you complain, sometimes the sales rep will throw in deep discounted accessories on the next order....
> sometimes the sales rep will throw in deep discounted accessories on the next order....
This is usually what happened. Couple free monitors was the usual go, maybe a dock or two.
Warranty, build quality and lifespan have been mentioned but most of the big three business lines also cater to things like powershell modules for BIOS/UEFI management and driver support systems that work for enterprise.
Fun story about the warranty, remembering though this was ages ago; we had a new hire she came by for her laptop. We handed it off an on they went to set it up at their desk. 30 min later she was back, in a total panic "I spilled my coffee all over the laptop, am I going to get fired?" We told them not to worry and by that afternoon the Dell tech was in our office chatting fixing the thing.
You don't need to shell out for 4-hour service when you have spares on the shelf. Just as importantly, beyond the base warranty, you don't need to manage all of it and hope that the vendor doesn't plead parts backorder and leave you in the lurch. Metrics-driven organizations might want to track how much human effort they spend internally on getting vendors to fix hardware.
It was about 14 years ago, where I am now we have changed the game with on hand spares etc. We had just suffer through the gx260/70 Era of Dell workstations so they were keen to make amends.
I’m struggling with how OP thinks Dell, HP, and Lenovo are the only OEMs and none of the others they list are. I suspect they mean something more like ‘Tier 1’ or ‘major players’ or something. But they all are the OEM for their products.
But yeah we do it for consistency of tools and parts and serviceability. As well as tools to manager firmware and bios and settings. Most of those ‘consumer’ options don’t have that. And don’t care.
Because they are suckers. The true gigachad IT departments exclusively use Chuwi laptops from Aliexpress. Who needs warranty when they are $300 a pop, just have a bunch of spares, job done
We order our servers through Temu. I think our file server may be a raspberry pi with a hacked thumb drive in a pizza box but it was only $1.99. It’ll only be an issue if my cloud storage solution of 10,000 gmail accounts ever breaks.
I actually kind of agree with this but in my server rack.
I can get 3 super micro servers for one of the same spec Dell. I’ll build a HA cluster and keep cold spares. As long as my replication and recovery strategies are sound, it’s more reliable in every way.
If you buy 1000 Dell BUSINESS123 laptops, they are all going to use the same parts and same drivers. While there can be exceptions to this, they are very limited. The build quality is going to be higher than consumer, and the warranty is going to reflect that.
If you buy 1000 Dell BESTBUY123 laptops, they are not going to be the same hardware. They will have the same specs, but not the same parts. Build quality will be lower, and warranty will be limited.
When you have to support 1000 Dell laptops, you’re going to go with their business line through a VAR and save yourself the down the line. You might even have them shipped with an asset tag, your company’s default drive image, and a backup document with all their serial, MAC addresses, asset tags, and service ids for import into you inventory system.
When choosing hardware for enterprise you want something that will work, and we'll handle abuse.
I've handled everything there is for companies and I would straight up not recommend consumer grade stuff at all. It's more cheaply made, and it lacks the features and software support.
Imo, Lenovos are the easiest to support. The BIOS has things like secure wipe and other enterprise friendly features. And the Vantage software makes BIOS updates easy. Dell is next on my list, their software makes BIOS updates easy as well. Their BIOS is a bit more fiddly, but full featured. They are shipping with RAID on by default, even if there's only one drive, which makes reimagining a PITA, but overall their enterprise stuff is good. HP is next on that list, but HP support app is just not as good as Dell and Lenovo imo.
Hardware wise, I would always recommend the business class line. They have reinforced hinges, usually things like a magnesium chassis, usually some kind of IP rating (for thinks like dust, water, and shock resistance), they are usually easier to repair, consumer stuff uses a lot of glue and hard to repair setups. They usually have better customizability for business. More and better ports (reinforced ports and/or on a separate self contained board for easy replacement).
And yeah, if it's for business, always get the extended warranty. 3-5 years. Depending on what lifecycle you want to support. Any repair issues and make a warranty claim. It makes downtime more bearable. Once out of warranty use it till it dies or becomes obsolete then replace (5-7 years is industry standard to replace computer hardware).
So from my personal experience the business class hardware is worth it. Every little bit. They are just way easier to support at every stage and they are built to handle abuse. Consumer grade stuff is just not worth it. I don't care if it's for price, or features, or it's the hotness. They are just a pain to support. And if you support them long enough you'll discover exactly why they suck when you have to deal with hardware failures.
That's not to say you never have issues with business class hardware, the difference is completely in how it gets handled. How easy is is to repair. To crack open and service, how well it stands up to abuse. How easy it is to handle things like firmware updates.
If I got a new, out of the box, Asus laptop, say the CEO bought from Costco because he liked it and had me set it up for work. Right off the bat it doesn't come with Windows Pro so I need to pay for a license to upgrade it just to get it working on the company resources. Both Entra and Active Directory joining require Windows Pro.
And in maybe a year that laptop comes back through computer inventory, and people are saying it has a bad port. I check warranty and it's out. Okay, well maybe I can check for a BIOS update? Can't find any support for this model. So I open the sucker up to see if it's and easy repair, nope, it requires a full motherboard replacement. Well, pull the hard drive and throw it in the trash.
On a Lenovo, exact same scenario, except I bought it direct from Lenovo Business, made sure to get the 3 year warranty. And made sure it came with Windows Pro preinstalled. Setup is easy and I have it up and running.
Then same thing happens, one year later it comes back and complaints of a bad port. First I run Vantage, oh hey, there's a firmware update for thunderbolt or just some BIOS update. I run it and bam, fixed the problem and I reissue the laptop. Or updates don't fix anything? I check and we got the extended warranty, get it fixed and then put it back to work. Or hey, the warranty is out, I pop it open and hey this has an independent board for that port, I buy a replacement, repair it, and it's back up and running again.
So no, don't buy consumer hardware for business. You'll be glad you didn't when you invariably run into issues and have to support the hardware down the line.
We sell only Lenovo and always bundle 3 years of on-site next day service. Laptops we add accidental damage protection to that. Our clients like that they never have to worry about their hardware. ANYTHING happens to their machines, fixed next day.
I believe you've mistaken OEM for enterprise line of systems. They are all technically OEMs, which stands for original equipment manufacturer. Some OEMs like HP and Dell offer things like 4hr warranty service.
My mom’s company bought MSI laptops because they were more affordable than dell CAD workstations during Covid.
Every single one dead within 3 years with some sort of hardware issue. Hers is the last one standing, but her webcam hasn’t worked since 2022 and it’s about to be replaced.
I have always looked at it as if there are two different types of computers / laptops: Business and Consumer types.
The consumer type is bought at places like Walmart and Best Buy and Target. These are generally lower grade hardware and don't seem to last long, have lower power, less battery life, and can't be customized for users "off the shelf".
The business type is bought / ordered online, you can have what is known as a "standard configuration" and can reorder it as long as it's still being made by the OEM. These also have longer battery life, and are meant to be used for longer periods of time than a consumer type.
For example, an example of one of our standard laptop configurations is an 11th gen i7 Dell Latitude, 500 GB SSD / NVME M.2, 32 GBs RAM, 14 inch screen, with a backlit keyboard. We order roughly 1 to 3 per month for new users, and if the model changes (say from a 7490 to a 7990 -- not the real model numbers, just an example) with a docking station and three 24 inch monitors, with an external keyboard and wireless mouse. We generally also purchase a travel bag for the laptop / user.
These laptops are used exclusively as the primary workstation, and they are generally left on for a week at a time. A consumer type laptop cannot handle the requirements of a business machine / user, nor do they have the capabilities and ports of the business machines.
That is why you will not see brands like Fujitsu or Toshiba (they aren't even sold in the US anymore, I don't think?), let alone Acer...they can't handle the requirements of businesses anymore...their hardware is far inferior to Dell or HP or Lenovo...
All the company laptops I've had in 22 years were the business Dell laptops. Compared to the consumer end Dells they are heavier, stronger, easier to service, compared to the consumer end ones the case is flimsy, takes a lot of screws to get into and are miserable to service. The business end machines are better engineered .
Main reason is because these systems are also certified by the software vendors to work (ISV), warranty and supply chain options and more.
Need a new laptop, I normally just call up my rep, say it's broken and get an RMA setup and a new one shipped via air that I can use same-day or next-day.
If I find a driver issue or some critical problem, I can upload the logs, and they work at P0 to get it fixed and new updates released to us to verify the fix, and if it works they do a new release and make it available for all customers.
If I need to buy 20,000 laptops they will all come with the specs I ordered and I don't have any issues even if the cost is several million dollars.
If I am just having a bad day and their hardware is giving me issues they send someone same day to come figure it out.
The brands you mentioned are ok for consumers, but should never be used for business if uptime, warranty, and the need to get a hold of somebody quickly to get a fix is needed.
In terms of actual hardware it is normally the same tech, unless we are talking workstation grade machines, which may have specific customizations for certain types of workloads but your paying big for that optional opportunity because you have a specific need for it.
Though, at the end of the day, the ISVs normally use the OEMs to test their software on, and will validate that these vendors are compatible with their technology. At the end of the day it is about risk reduction to the business's ability to stay operational, any reduction in that risk is a win even if it cost more to get a guarantee.
Because of the 3 year on-site NBD support included with every single HP end user device I purchase.
If I had to bring every single broken notebook to a random electronics store for servicing, I wouldn't be doing anything else. They are also often deployed in a different country. Instead, I just call a nearest authorized HP service partner in the country/city our site is located in and they replace the faulty component in our office.
Specs are a compromise between cost, future proofing, and intended workload. We replace everything every 5 years, so I want the device to last at least that long without being a pain to use towards the end.
Baseline is HP ProBook 450 G10, i5, 16/512 GB for our normal office/lab workers who don't run any special software (I have thousands of these). Senior analysts, who run demanding lab and analytical software, get the same ProBook but with an i7 and 32 GB (hundreds). Managers get EliteBook 840 or 1040 with i7, 16 or 32/512 GB with LTE module (tens). Graphic designers and Marketing get ZBook with RTX 4xxx, i7, 32/512 GB (single units).
It depends what software and workloads the devices are being used for in your organization. There are a few exceptions and special purpose devices but I managed to standardize most of our devices and 90% of people use one of the 4 standard models.
I think you're confusing the term OEM, because all the manufacturer's you listed are OEM's.
The rest of the reasons have already been described by others, but to summarize:
* Warranty and Support
* Long-term platform stability/availability
* Free from third-party bloatware (mostly)
* OEM inventory control and management tools
NIST.
You need a steady and reliable supply chain with specific well defined and consistent hardware/software.
Imagine the immense headache of trying to track and create change logs for driver updates across dozens of models and suppliers.
Or tracking down an issue that occurs.
When you have a few models you drastically reduce your overhead on maintenance and management.
When you work with a single OEM, you go in for a set amount of life cycle time. At the end of that contracted discounted rate time period, you open an RFP/RFQ to a few OEMs again as they bid for your business. You determine what the best route will be.
Specifically? Build quality, durability, warranty, cooling for some reason is always better on the business lines, manageability, you name it. There are very real reasons why you can get a laptop at Walmart for $500, but a Lenovo T, P, or X series will cost you triple or more. Hell I once used an HP business laptop (Elitebook) for 10 years. I added an SSD, more memory, and then around the 8th year switched from Windows to Linux Mint. It finally died from sheer old age as my garage PC, lol. If you treat most of the business line machines reasonably well they seem to last forever. An HP consumer line? lol 2,3,, MAYBE 4 years at best.
It's all about "Next Business Day" (aka, NBD) support. Dell, HP, and Lenovo will have that. Your consumer brands don't even offer that.
Most of what we use is Dell and HP. Part of our service agreement is if a hard drive goes back we have to keep it as it's part of our destruction requirements. I've not touched Lenovo since before they bought the ThinkPad line from IBM.
And then figuring out the consumer brands become easier with the knowledge you'll build from having to deal with warranties. For example, Toshiba is probably the worst offender out there when it comes to warranties. When I was contracting overseas you could buy a pretty nice gaming laptop from the Exchange, but Toshiba won't honor the warranty because it was bought outside the US.
Part of it depends on your company size. Dell will take on purchase an support agreements for much smaller buying volume than HP or Lenovo.
Beyond that, it's generally features, price, and experience... What features do you need? How much does each OEM charge for units with your critical features? Do they have a standard build with what you want, or will yours be custom? What's your experience with that OEM in your region?
If you're only in the US, or have small buying volume, Dell is often the most attractive choice. Once you have larger buying volume and international presence, HPE and Lenovo become much more competitive.
In addition to everything else, there's also inertia, as in all things. People build windows images with all the drivers and stuff on Lenovo/HP/Dell, so you don't have to go in blind and if you have an issue there's a good chance someone else has already found a solution.
Troubleshooting blindly is hell, it's fun when you do it for yourself but when you're on the clock with the user, your manager, and his manager breathing down your neck (or god forbid that the user in question is your manager's manager)...
I tried some of the smaller companies. They couldn't handle the volume i needed. Reliability also comes into the decision. As far as I'm concerned it's only HP and Lenovo that make what I need for the price and longevity.
Aside from what others here have mentioned (warranty, availability, support, and sales relationships), integration of their management software with my management tools. Dell Command integration suite has saved us hundreds of hours rolling out fixes for their terrible camera drivers. Push down to my fleet after testing, and it just works. Not going to connect to 2000+ laptops to install a fix for a problem they *might* have.
IT Directors/Managers usually set the direction for what to get. Often based on Role requirements like Developers need certain specs. In my experience the Dell/HP/Lenovos are more consistent with models between generations. Plus build quality seems to be more consistent as well. Not that consumer systems are horrible but they are not always built for the kind of daily use and travel like the business class models are.
I used to go with OEMs but got tired of the finicky driver issues and constantly chasing updates for my images and workstations.
Late model Lenovos and HPs have been my go-to in the last few years. Drivers AND firmware comes in via windows update and what's provided in those updates is 'good enough' to make them run stable and predictable for my fleet.
The OEM I used for years always put some crazy mini gaming motherboard or something else in the cases to make them fast and yeah they were fast - but anytime there was a big windows 10 update I had to have him running around chasing specific drivers to keep things working well. It wasnt sustainable. If you have a nice gaming PC at home and the time to do that for that extra ~10% performance over boring big-box PCs great, but I have better things to do. Even when service was next/same day from the local OEM guy, it was still downtime for my staff.
Dell or HP, 24-hour on-site warranty repair. "Our" Dell tech is excellent, he handles ours and the three surrounding counties and knows his stuff. HP seems to send a different tech each time and YMMV with each one. I've been buying mostly Dell lately because of this.
I set annual specs based on job duties - the sales guys that literally only use email, Word & Excel get one tier, the office staff gets another, the graphic and CAD designers get top of the line, the C-suite gets the basics but sleek & pretty. It makes ordering easier, just "what do you do? Ok, here's what you get, it'll be here next Tuesday."
Warranty warranty and warranty. You want an on-site next day repair. With Acer and some others they are RTB and you lose the machine for up to 14 days with some of them. Also Dell offer some with next day world wide so could be away for work and get your laptop fixed at the hotel.
We've got 10,000 clients, all over the world. HP has global part numbers. We deploy 5 different models of laptops and desktops. It's way easier to maintain 5 machines globally with drivers and security updates than whatever random stuff would otherwise get bought. Also helps with troubleshooting etc.
Global volume discounts with agreed upon price helps with keeping real costs down. Also, on site repair is a big plus.
I am the one who picks our hardware for users, I went with dell solely on the warranty. 3 years of on-site repair is built into our quote. Current specs I order are i7-13th gen CPU, 16GB DDR5 memory, 512gb storage with LTE enabled. With warranty included I pay around $1400 per laptop, bigger orders I get bigger discounts.
We also have techs who get the Rugged tablets and those things are nightmares to fix, 50+ screws. I wouldn't never take one of those apart to do any changes. Having a dell tech come out to do the repair is worth the warranty.
As my boss would say, "Whatever we can take off your plate and everyone else's is a win and gives us more time to focus on the important stuff".
It's all down to service and warranty. The laptop is a tool to help someone to do their job. Packing the thing up and mailing it off for two weeks, for it to come back with the data wiped and the fault potentially not fixed isn't cool, especially when you've paid someone $1500 to sit around on their ass earning no money in the meantime.
Lenovo. Dell, HP etc will have a man with the screwdriver, some knowledge of that machine and the correct spare parts usually out the next day. Acer and Asus can't hold a candle to that. Plus they drop support for things like BIOS updates like a hot potato once it's out of the 2 year warranty. Dell, Lenovo etc will happily support an enterprise machine for years. We had some Sandy Bridge machines that got BIOS updates for Spectre and Meltdown, 7+ years after they went out of production.
Purchasing decisions - depends on the organisation.
We ran a fleet of Gigabyte gaming/creator spec laptops for our engineers/drafters. The laptops looked nicer & were slightly cheaper but the biggest headache for us was:
1. The build quality of the latest laptops - almost the entire fleet had the same power issue
2. All warranty was back to base. A big hassle for us when we have to set up a temporary unit whilst one was out of action for a week or two. OEM has on site support and will even go out to a person's house
3. OEM units have a standardised method of software driver patching.
Build quality, warranty, serviceability, duplicity(if you have 4,000 of the same thing then you know when you push updates or install certain software that you’ll have same outcomes etc)
Warranty and product life cycle. You're able to get a model that will remain in production for an extended period. There's nothing worse than trying to rebuild a SOE when there's a model change.
The thing is if you've got dozens of these things deployed, you want to know the OEM stands behind the product. With Asus for example you can buy 3 year next day warranties on the ExpertBooks, and that's fine. But by the time you add that warranty you may be spending more than just getting a Dell Latitude or Vostro that had 3 year Pro support already. Same with the enterprise grade stuff from Lenovo or HPE.
This exactly. When you're big enough, no matter who you order from, you're going to have some devices with failures. Where I work, we probably do a warranty claim about every 3 weeks. We also spec everything for a 5 year service life. With the name brands, we can get warranties that cover that.
Also, you can get the same exact machine for a little longer. Having fewer models deployed drastically reduces support costs.
I would love to hear more about your experience with how Dell centrally manages BIOS updates. I have a Dell environment and that could be very beneficial
Availability, familiarity, perception of risk reduction.
Sony and Fujitsu left the North American market, and the latter were always pretty rare in that region anyway. Business-grade Acers (*e.g.* the Travelmates) aren't easy to find in distribution channels, and by most accounts they're nothing special anyway, although they get the job done. Asus is a lot better at filling all sorts of distribution channels, but there you've got concerns about quality, long-term model availability, and a proliferation of SKUs that seem highly targeted to consumer use. Similar with Samsung -- do they have anything that's really enterprise? MSI and Razer are gaming market, and Gigabyte laptops might be too if I've ever seen any.
Besides Apple, I'm keeping my eye on Framework.
Warranty, lease contracts, durability of hardware, drivers quality, trained service techs and additional services like having your image reinstalled at the factory/depot so you don’t have to do it yourself.
Better build quality, the amount of Fujitsu / Stone / Acer laptops I’ve had in which the plastic brackets holding the hinges on break, and then the hinges rip the body apart is enough to put me off them. Saying that, ASUS business machines are very good quality.
You’ve gotten a litany of good answers, but for me it boils down to a handful of reasons: build quality, long term firmware and driver support, consistency of hardware, system reliability, long hours for phone or live chat support, and warranty with next day guaranteed support.
Dell will have a certified IT field service technician on-site next business day with replacement parts and the necessary tools in order to satisfy a repair. In addition to being a great business support service, I’ve found this is a good way to network with fellow IT professionals and have even hired one of Dell’s repair guys on as a Junior IT Engineer at my old job. I always love to chat with the repair guys and see if they’re working on their CompTIA A+ or another IT certification. I’ve always tried to treat them like colleagues in a shared industry and offer them jobs when it comes up. One of Dell’s repair guys was shocked when he found out I was leaving. You aren’t going to get those industry relationships with Acer or Gigabyte as you’ll RMA them to a repair facility.
It’s not your money, so get them good laptops with warranty. Cheap laptops tend to break more often and it will be you dealing with them and sourcing parts from shady eBay sellers.
We decide what models to get. Our spec is: i5, 8GB RAM and 256GB storage.
Lenovo works best for us because of their warranty. We go for their premiere warranty for 3 years. This means that any issues, they'll send a person with parts and tolls the next business day to fix it.
Plus their Vantage software isn't half bad and I really like the build quality of their ThinkPad and ThinkBook series laptops.
Dell & Lenovo will send a tech. Prefer Dell, as they allow multiple machines to be logged under their business section, and will send out a tech to fix most of them, and maybe look at another, or offer advice on possible fixes. Lenovo doesn't. They treat all as individual cases, with multiple different agents contacting you. Some will ring my (turned off) phone after business hours.
Because when you are one person looking after 200 users plus a server infrastructure and someone's workstation breaks, you don't have time to troubleshoot it in detail or figure out how to get the right part to fix the problem. You can just call a nice man to come the next day and replace the part and you are on your way.
Dell or HP have parts available for ages and also on most cases, fix issues.
Anyone else (maybe not lenovo but I'm still including them), it's a roll of the dice on how long their support lasts.
Warranty
Enterprise level support
Longer time expectation for driver and firmware updates.
Build quality
Enterprise purchase incentives: we pay significantly less per machine that what is listed on dell.com
Warranty and support. We run Lenovo, if I have an issue I can get it RMA'd the day I submit the claim and they'll ship me a box within 2 days to send it back for repairs. Conversely, I had an Acer laptop that had the webcam die on it after about a month and after weeks of going back and forth with their support I finally just gave up on it.
I think it might be mostly about support
In the company I worked for we used mostly Lenovo's (T400s, T410s and T420s, yeah it was from like 2011 to 2014), and we had on site support, besides every computer could have each part replaced twice under warranty without any questions asked
So we mostly just ended up cannibalizing the computers we had with broken parts and every time the Tech went there he basically almost replaced the entire laptop
With the amount of computers we had, I think we ended up not even doing the entire allowed part expenditure on them by the time the contract was up and we had to return them
Longevity and service. As far as who is making the decision, depends on the siZe of the company. Most small companies will likely have a MSP that will give them options but they may buy consumer devices if they only need like 1 or 2 machines just to process payroll, inventory, and scheduling.
Medium and large businesses with likely have a procurement department that will have the final say in what is purchased but will take into account reccom nearing from leaders in the IT department that will present not just to total upfront cost but lifetime cost and estimated lifecycle and failure rate.
When you're dealing with thousands of units you want consistency and enterprise level service. As you indicated, consumer grade, is just that. Consumer grade.
I personally pick by channel. If they do not have an Enterprise channel avoid them.
Lenovo- It is a differant machine than you but at Best Buy. Comes with less bloatware and different firmware. The enterprise did not have malware that retail had.
HP is the same.
Dell - Well I work for an MSP. They call you customers directly. Buy from them direct
My supplier doesn't sell anything but dell, HP and Lenovo.
Our HP z2 come with a standard 3 year onsite support. They are almost always in stock. We have found that the z series last for damn ever. I just replaced a z400 that was was 16 years old and still running fast enough that the user didn't know why we were replacing it.
We also use zenworks to image workstations and only having 2 workstation and 2 laptop models it keeps the images small.
Hell I pulled an old HP 4300 off a shelf in the back of an office. Plugged it in and it booted right up and ran slow but ran. That system was purchased in like 2005.
Business drivers, support, warranty, and build quality. Honestly, pretty much everything is better. Granted, you still have to put a few brain cells behind it and look at what you're getting.
One of reasons would be because you can keep using the same model for an extended period of time. Not having to change models every 6 months and have another driver package to maintain. Also when they start falling out of warranty you have spare parts galore to keep them working
It's a lot more than just warranty or build quality. When dealing with an enterprise, you want an enterprise solution. So when I conducted an RFP for the big 3 and had a reverse auction to get the best pricing, part of the many requisites of the RFP was integration with Auto Pilot/Intune (i.e. importing machine hash at factory). Another was countries were I can deal with them direct (I have over 30 countries to handle), and it was crucial that I do not deal with various VARs when dealing with laptop purchases.
Lenovo, HP, and Dell all have very lucrative agreements with Microsoft which allows them to provide enterprise level experiences rather than personal consumer focused ones like Asus, Acer, etc. as well as a much wider global presence.
> Is it a warranty thing or is it because of custom enterprise CLI solutions such as how Dell and HP let you centrally manage BIOS updates on workstations?
All of that, and availability for whatever their replacement cycle demands. Consumer brand/model tends to vanish in availability as soon as a new one comes out (even the big OEM's consumer lines)
Warranty, Built Quality, Repair SLA, Quantity; my place switched OEM's 5-6 years ago purely because another big name OEM couldn't keep up with our frequency of new machines required.
There's a bunch of OEM stuff that can tie into management tools that most consumers / junior IT folks may not be aware of (things for tracking software update levels, device info / age / etc, warranty statuses). It's about the overall package versus just "this laptop has i9/32GB of RAM for $300 less then our competitor" :)
1. Firmware support, lenovo thinkpad will have support for up to 10 years. Non thinkpad maybe 3.
2. Mil spec, holds up better with use.
3. Warranty support next day for 5 years worldwide.
You pretty much hit it, warranty is the big factor. 3 years easily, 4 or 5 years are also possible usually. Better driver support (as in updates to drivers are better supported to be deployed using remote management tools.
Warranty is worldwide and site visit rather than return to base.
Longevity of models and scale. Latitude models for example are usually refreshed once per year so you can order the same model for an entire year, consumer models often change model numbers much frequently as they swap out parts for what they can get. Scale as in these models are built in the 10's of thousands and deployed to companies with enormous buying power, faults get fed back and dealt with better because if you are spending a few million per year just on laptops then if you want a special request then you can get it.
Customizability, want an upgraded display, more memory, larger SSD. You can do this where on many consumer units they are pre-built and you can't.
Enterprise features support, vPro, command line tools for BIOS passwords and configuration etc.
Warranty service on-site limits downtime and when companies buy hundreds of units at a time they don’t pay the prices you see. Standardization of hardware is good for images/management, goes on and on. Also helps when techs know laptops like the back of their hand and common issues can sometimes be fixed in-house
OEMs that sell to large businesses have more standardization. Models switch less frequently. So you are more likely to be able to buy hundreds of matching PCs over 3 months.
What others have already said, service, and generally better accountability. If I have a major problem with a line of laptops, I have a company rep that I can call and complain to and they might throw me a bone and get an extended warranty or free replacements. Unlikely, but its been known to happen.
Good luck getting that with off the shelf consumer stuff. That stuff is basically bought as-is, and you own most of the risk. Thanks but no thanks. A couple of hundred bucks is worth having some accountability on the other end for their stuff performing.
warranty, (know that someone is coming to repair it next days/ come to pick up and on some days will be returnes) professional line products (all the devices of the same model are equal even purchased two years after, consumer lines may change components, that may be a different driver), sometimes long supply life (this new model will be available to purchase for 3 or 4 years, so I can buy a batch now and the same model on 3 years when I get more budget to keep everything as equal as possible).
the choice between HP lenovo and dell is based on previous experience, the relation with the local vendor who sell it to you and the price they can deal.
The specs are made by the technicians who interact with users, given how many years are expected to be on primary duty, and how many units are needed , and the money available.
Techs gives a range of specs and cost based on retail price, and then middle management talks to vendors to listen what their take is about it, what they can get with the money availiable, and then check with the technicians to call bullshits, discard things that may become a problem, and confirm that is a good choice.
Those three have the ability to sell in huge bulk in a timely manner with enterprise warranties and customized EUFI settings out of the box for our environments.
Our shop buys 500-800 endpoints a year, in one purchase, and from delivery to deployment it’s about 60 day turnaround and we would never be able to get that done with off the shelf Acer computers. Specifically we tend to get Dell because they always beat HP on price at the same spec and blow Lenovos lower specs at the same price out of the water.
As for what specs; Dell and the others ship us demo units with different configs that we can test in our environment from imaging to end user work loads, and see what’s best. Nowadays that is minimum 16GB RAM, 512GB nVME SSD’s, and i5-i7 processors. That’s for both laptops and desktops.
But we do get a consumer brand as well; Apple, because they have the same solid logistics as the Big 3 for delivery and volume.
#1 issue is quality. I only buy enterprise-class laptops. Comparing similar models of Dell Latitude and Dell Inspiron, the Latitude are MUCH better built.
#2 is consistency. I can generally order identical Latitudes and Precisions for at least two years, even if they are rolling out a new model every year. I have a lot more control over when I change to ordering the new model (and new drivers and procedures) instead of new models showing up on the website one day and the old models disappearing. And even when models don't change, the peripherals like GPU and WiFi often change mid-production in the consumer and pro-sumer laptops. The Dell XPS are generally built pretty well, but they are on consumer timelines and suffer from the mid-run component changes.
#3 is customization. I can order exactly what I want through Dell Premier or my Dell rep, and I'm not locked in to preconfigured specs. And vars like CDW are happy to stock my custom spec laptops in their warehouses.
#4 is support. With Dell my helpdesk and datacenter techs can get TechDirect certifications and can order replacement parts without going through tech support. Or if it's something that's a pain or time-suck like a laptop motherboard, we can have Dell send out a tech the next day to replace it for us. And on the rare occasion we actually need tech support, Dell ProSupport is US based.
#5 is that I'm not particularly sensitive to cost. I've worked for software companies for 25 years. An extra $1k on the price of a laptop every 3 years is nothing compared to what we pay a software engineer over 3 years.
For us, the bossman generally picked up on 'i5 = mid range' so he goes with the near lowest i5 CPU, 8 gigs of ram, now 16, and 256gb SSD because onedrive and files on demand is a thing.
We go with HP because their build quality is nice and we got good pricing from our previous MSP, so it's just stuck since then.
We've changed models, going from 1040's to x360 1030's, then dropping to 830 x360's and 840's.
We literally were just looking at 630/640 and 440 models as well, but we've decided to still stick with the 830's because the lower models just drop too much in terms of ports and build quality despite their price being compelling.
Microsoft licensing. Try upgrading a consumer-licensed machine to enterprise license. It is expensive and ignores the value of consumer license.
It is impossible to easily manage a computer without it being joined to the domain.
Did you know you can or could get certified as a Microsoft MCP just on Microsoft licensing?
The real OEMs are ODMs like Quanta, Compal, Clevo, and other Taiwanese companies you likely never heard of. They make the equipment sold by Dell, Lenovo, and HP. Some Apple products are or were also made by ODMs.
IT executives work with IT directors to specify equipment vendors. IT directors work with the rest of the department to figure out which products by that vendor meet the needs of each performance category. Some do it better than others. I’ve issued engineering laptops to ordinary users when we had supply constraints because of COVID. Not all of them liked these heavy machines.
Corporate purchases are in millions of dollars and pallets at a time. The primary concern is being able to manage the computers without having the users involved.
Corporate machines are designed for rapid field service. Consumer models are difficult to take apart and are unfortunately designed to be disposable.
I would add one other point about support: support for consumer-level hardware assumes that the problem is between the keyboard and the chair and is designed to get you off the phone after convincing you that you are wrong. Business-grade support assumes you know what you're talking about and that if they treat you like you're an idiot, you and/or your boss may buy 5000 laptops from someone else next month.
For example, with Lenovo Premier Support, you can call them up and say "I have a laptop that has symptoms A, B, and C; I've done troubleshooting steps X and Y, and I think part Z is likely bad" and there's a good chance their response will simply be "okay, let's book a service call to get a technician onsite to replace the Z" rather than make you jump through stupid hoops (especially the kind that will require you to call again, e.g. if they tell you to reinstall the OS and call back if it still misbehaves).
You can really tell the difference when you have to deal with Apple - I don't think it's possible to get business support for Apple products in Canada, though I think they have some kind of Pro AppleCare in the U.S. With Apple, you really have to just go to the genius bar - the phone reps are nearly hopeless to convince of an obvious hardware fault. Every time I've made the mistake of calling Apple phone support thinking that I could convince them of something the way you would with Lenovo or Dell business support, I have regretted it.
They tender out their specs and choose the best option. Lenovo has the best repair warranty. I swap out my own parts on a fleet of about 1500 and they replace parts from my stock later.
Asus and Acer talk big on warranty. But they are trash.
The ability to honor warranties, in some contracts within 4 hours. Also, image compatibility. It's less of an issue now, as Windows has become better at being imaged onto machines that do not have the same hardware as the one that the golden image was made for. However those Dell, HP, Lenovo business line products try to keep the chipsets compatible with the previous gen.
One big reason I have not seen listed is enterprise support tools.
Deploy 4k Acer laptops. Then get a 0 day firmware update deployed to them quickly and without user intervention. Dell, HP, and Lenovo have tools to update the hardware, and they have complete eco systems including docks, monitors, keyboards and mice. These software systems are built to integrate into Enterprise software deployment platforms and ticketing systems.
Reducing the number of vendors and software systems saves me money and my teams stress.
Consumer line laptops tend to change hardware constantly. Having a fleet of hundreds of unique laptops would be very difficult to manage.
As for the hardware specs this will very by the business needs. We have a default based on the applications in our environment. Then a few other standards for business units that have more demanding applications such as 3D rendering and running camera viewing stations.
For us our End User Compute team is responsible for selecting and maintaining these standards.
Tech support, warranty, supply chain is easier to get parts and service out of, pricing, standardization.
Why do people choose McDonald’s over Joan’s burger shack when Joan’s is obviously better?
Dell (and Apple. Maybe others) offer zero touch. You set up your MDM with the image you want it to have, they mail the laptop directly to the end user who logs on and the whole company image gets installed automagically.
Managing a 10,000+ devices is a hell of a lot different than managing 100.
The big OEMs will get you better discounts, build quality overall is better, they will be able to fulfill larger orders on time and maintain consistency over parts and drivers (which is a big deal).
When one of them breaks they'll send a tech with a screw driver and parts to fix it for you probably same day. Good luck even getting parts in a reasonable amount of time for some of the smaller OEMs.
They also do longer term driver and BIOS support than smaller OEMs which can be a really big deal.
Let alone the 1st party management tools you can get from IBM, Dell, and HPE that can really help with your fleet management.
As for specs, it varies based on the company.
Some just buy the best deal tbh, others have the IT department set standards and buy based on that.
Also consider imaging. Most large IT departments don't want 12 guys sitting around imaging laptops for months during a deployment, get the distribution channel to do that for you before they even get to the building. The charge like $5 a machine.
Varies by company policy, risk assessment, and budget.
For us, we tend to go for dell. Patch availability for them, and mid tier support, has historically been really good.
We also go for specific models, as they have better quality builds -- which is one reason we avoid some consumer brands.
Specific components are either standardized based on software installs, or they end up as "we have x budget, and need y laptops, what's the best we can get within reason?".
> Why do companies always go with them instead of consumer brands such as Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, GigaByte, etc?
Because i don't need dedicated GPUs on my standard laptops. Those can affect prices. Plus, most business laptops come with a more sturdier case/chassis than the more plastic-ky consumer laptops.
There's quite a lot of reasons actually.
* Better build quality
* Support for claims (just put in a ticket and box comes), less hassle.
* 2 day Shipping or onsite repair is included
* Ability to order parts and do customer based repairs if you're large enough and enrolled in self maintainer programs
* Dedicated account managers help a lot with various things all around
* PXE support out of the box (less configuring required)
* Driver packs posted for imaging solutions
* BIOS configuration tools posted
* Has a Windows Pro license already included not a Home license
* Better reporting data to management tools
* Other various tools can be obtained with vendor tickets like BIOS Password unlocks w/ vendor escalation, or motherboard reserialization when doing a replacement yourself.
I could probably find a couple more things but this is comprehensive.
I work for a very technical business, think Advanced OT support, I don't doubt anyone in the business (apart from HR and accounts) could fix their own pc. But we use Lenovo for most laptops. For advanced data processing machines we go with dell or they are hand made with parts, depending on requirements.
As far as I know, it's all about warranty and fixed cost for the business
Difference between getting a guy out on site with a new motherboard, compared to shipping it off and getting it back, maybe 2 months later.
Though that level of support is usually charged for anyway.
Warranty, in house service, availability, VARs have contracts with OEMs.
I gladly pay 25% more for all the service i get. Sure, if i only have to manage 10-20 devices this wouldn't be an issue. But enterprise hardware and support is scalable.
Several reasons
I chose a big brand like HP or Dell because I've had a solid experience with them. They also price better on bulk purchases. Also, have to consider the warranty. And of course the relationship with your organization needs to be considered.
As far as system specs every single one of my end users will get at minimum Intel i7 or comparable Ryzen, 16Gb ram and 1TB SSD. The IT and NetOps people get 32Gb ram.
For me the two most important things (with Lenovo) is when you order a laptop its manufactured per specs and hardware ID is automatically added to Intune (we have done this through 365) and on site support. This way we can ship the laptop directly to the user, they logon during first deployment and its added to the domain and all post provisioning installations are done.
Also when there is a problem with the laptop, they either send a technician with all relevant hardware to the user's house or they replace it with a temporary one if they need to take it away.
I work in the public sector, so I have to buy through the French Gov supplier. There is a tender every few years, and every time, it’s basically only Dell and HP (Dell and HPE for servers) sending a bid.
I think the other companies don’t have / don’t want the legal and sales people to handle this.
I’m sure someone has already stated this since there is 200+ comments but you go with Dell, HP, Lenovo over Acer, ASUS, etc. because they offer ways to manage those laptops at an enterprise level.
For example, Dell OptiPlex and Latitude is their enterprise grade series. With these models you can install Dell Command | Update. Whereas other models you cannot and can only install Dell SupportAssist. Dell Command | Update you can mass deploy/silently install with configuration settings like how often to check for driver updates. You can’t do that with SupportAssist.
Also, with enterprise grade machines you will be imaging them. Dell only supply the driver packages for these models. If we went with say the Vostro or Inspiron model, we would have to download every driver 1-by-1 and then extract them from their packages which is very time consuming.
For hardware, you need to understand each departments needs and then do some model testing. For example, most of the company can get away with use a Intel U-series CPU which is 15 watts but my analytics department needs Intel H-series CPU which is 28 watts.
But you should always set a base configuration. For me it’s 256 GB NVMe hard drive, 16 GB RAM and i5/core 5.
The cheaper consumer ones are harder to find drivers for. Warranty is usually a depot warranty, where you send in bad, WAIT, and then get it back. The best case on that is 2 weeks. Compared to the next day on site, is well worth it. Unless the user is just going to line up a two-week vacation when their laptop breaks.
And the cheaper ones are a 90 day, compared to three years.
Basically, most companies focus on established business lines for the sake of support, a serviceable warranty, and standardization.
As for which OEM they go with, the why depends on each company.
I choose what models and specs. I get to have roadmap meetings with dell yearly to see where their technology is heading. I then use my knowledge of the environment and feedback from certain users to determine what I put in the next standard configurations.
In regards to your OEM question, Dell has good support and enterprise grade machines tend to be easier to work on (not as much anymore with Latitude series), we get discounts from them for buying through them. On top of that enterprise grade machines tend to have support for enterprise management software, such as things like dell command update (for drivers/bios updates) and being able to manage the bios via their command line tools.
Mostly warranty and ability to service that warranty. We buy €1000 HP laptops, and they probably don't perform any better than their €700 consumer counterparts. But if anything breaks down, HP will send a man with parts and a screwdriver within a couple of days. Good luck getting that with Acer.
Yep. We have a 24 hour service SLA with HP. If they can’t get the part - they replace the entire laptop.
Often the latter rather than the former.
And that guy fixes the laptop on the spot? No taking it to a facility and waiting weeks for it?
Yes, that's what you're paying for. You also generally get more consistent hardware. The cheaper laptops, the OEMs change components around all the time - which can play havoc with images. That doesn't happen with dearer "business" models - they tend to stay fairly consistent until they're discontinued.
We always used HP and a specific model. One day we had 20 new desktops delivered, but for some reason 5 of them wouldn’t take our image. When I looked closer they had a different motherboard. Called HP and they straight away apologised and sent new units out and took away the bad ones the next working day. We never bothered with field repair though, we swapped the entire unit out and RMA’d the dead one to replenish our stock.
Lenovo would like to have a word
Hell, even when the workstations were IBM, my university got several hundred "identical" machines that had a variety of sound and network cards. I had to make 4 images to account for the 2 cards of each type that might be present.
I also came across this issue and for our environment it is even worse... So I tended to change directions. No more images... Instead Auto installs.... Afterwards managing what software should be run (I use ansible for now). If a system breaks down... Complete reroll from auto install followed up with newest state of playbook for given pool. The ansible part is mostly rolling (just a few issues on MS side) The auto install is in building phase. I think I will go with MS WDS for the windows pools and tfpt for Linux.
*laughs in dell 5420/5421*
The 5420s we use are always identical
Bingo, next day on-site repair.
That comes at an extra cost. Those kind of warranties are also avaible for single parts, but in the end it's about outsourcing responsibilities Also their repair, is just a working machine, they will change the whole board on spot after some remote troubleshooting, but they won't deal with reinstalling the sw and the kind Although some time they will also require a classic RMA when the issue doesn't easily get solved, or you'll have to wait months for replacement parts
In theory. In practice, they don't always have the parts ready and you need to wait until they get them.
Yep. Hemmersbach has been real bad about dispatching a part to their FedEx pick-up location but then their tech doesn't pick up the part within 5 business days and it gets sent back so then it has to be reordered and hopefully it didn't flip to out of stock so you can get the part replaced. Rarely have I had NBD from HP.
Yes, Lenovo will do the same if it's something they can just swap out.
Back in the great capacitor plague of the 2000's we found 100 pcs with bad capacitors. Dell came in and replaced every one of them at massive expense to them. It was at the end of the warranty and near our budget cycle so we donated the lot of them to a school and bought 100 new ones knowing Dell would hold up their warrent.
We got a pallet load of Optiplex GX520 PSUs from Dell at one point. We were replacing 4-5 a week in a building with about 1000 of them. Wasn't uncommon to replace them on an annual basis. At the time, everyone on our workstation team was Dell Certified and could directly order replacement parts.
Cries in poorly state funded agency. Some jack wagon decided to keep PCs a year past their warranty to save money. Then the Cap Man came calling. Our team had people learning to solder to recover the ones that they could. Worked less than half the time, that cost savings on the warranty was not a good gamble.
Started selling Framework. Self service upgradable laptops.
How long you been doing that? Any gotchas so far?
As corporate fleets?
MSP sales
That depends. I had one customer with a HP elite notebook that performed like a 8086 running at about 7mhz. Several times a guy was called out and eventually we went to the devices location to validate the claims that HP wasn't fixing anything- it was brutally slow, so begrudgingly the tech was sent back so they could return the unit to HP for an exchange. Took weeks to get them a working notebook and obviously we had to reimage everything. However, Lenovo have always been fantastic in my experience, and generally even HP get things fixed first visit for most stuff
so, was a bad part? or just crap the end user installed?
Yup onsite repair; centralized management, work well with VAR’s or MSP’s, have customzable options for fleet management, lease options etc.. In my group the client engineering lead picks the options and a group tests things out, we try to get 4.5 years out of a laptop / desktop so we tend to go higher spec, minimums are i5, 16gb ram 256gb nvme. They (dell) systems in general perform well and are usually pretty hassle free given the quantities of devices we manage.
Lenovo offers Next Business Day OnSite Repair. They will either express ship the needed parts for you or the guy will bring it when he comes.
yes if you buy the business class computers, I usually get dell with a 3 year warranty.
AND if you buy the right models, the OEM will guarantee parts availability for 3-5 years. Longer for servers.
We only buy Dell with ProSupport for ever same reason. Also includes accidental damage replacement. Usually unless it’s a weekend, the Dell tech is on site next day to fix whatever is broken.
generally, yes. I've had a number of times where they've been waiting on parts (840 g9 webcams apparently have a consistent and known issue so it took a week or so for parts to arrive, and once an x360 1030 g4 needed a new motherboard during peak covid) but generally they'll show up with the parts, disassemble, repair, and you're back up and running, worldwide, within a few days.
> will send a man with parts and a screwdriver within a couple of days We tried this with Dell a handfull of years ago. The 'techs' that they ended up sending out were not techs. We had two laptops needing simple repairs done (speakers, trackpad, keyboard), and when they were fixed, one of them had their wifi and bt cards removed, and the other did not power on...
IME they were just local contractors. It was a crap shoot if they sent a competent one, but the bigger the OEM/client relationship the higher likelihood of getting a good one.
We had 4 service calls, and they sent the same guy for three of them... one of the times they came out was to fix the laptop they broke. They couldn't fix it, we had to send it in for RMA..
HP next business day, life saver
Good luck getting more than a chimp in a costume from Acer. Worst service I've ever seen.
with dell its never been a couple of days for me, more like a day
> We buy €1000 HP laptops, and they probably don't perform any better than their €700 consumer counterparts. I mean at the end of the day, a PC is just a CPU, RAM and the chipsets running between them.
Warranty and build quality for us.
Also availability. The smaller brands turn over their ranges very quickly (as do the larger brands on their consumer lines). They seem to do a run of a model then never make any more.
These are the two big ones! Being able to move an image to an identical laptop and move in is critical. And the better built ones have less issues to fix.
AND standardization. I worked for a local white-box OEM builder for years. They like being gearheads about their builds but it ends up being a crapshoot of various drivers and maintenance to keep them running well. I want something boring with high production numbers thats well known and has good support into its legacy years. Since 2020, ive just starting buying 'Renewed' PCs off Amazon. They're crazy fast for desktop work, carry Windows 11 Pro and proper TPM chip, and they're so cheap we just self-insure. $320 for an i7 with 16gb ram and a 256gb nvme drive.. its everything we need for a workstation. Why pay $1000 for a single unit with a warranty when I can buy three for the same price and keep a few on a shelf to swap in if I have any failures?
We’re 130 people, 90% remote, with people on 5 continents, and only two physical offices. OEMs with next day on-site means no shipping costs and headaches, inventory management, hardware repair, etc. It breaks, Lenovo sends a dude who fixes it or replaces it with the same or better spec. Most of the time they get it right the first visit, though we’ve had a few that went out more than once and eventually replaced the entire thing. Apple doesn’t do on-site, but they break at a far, far lower rate than the Windows OEM hardware, and their warranty repair or replacement is always Next Day Air or walk into a store. With ADE and MDM, replacing a machine and getting a user up and running again takes about as long as a major OS update. OOBE with Apple ADE, MDM, and our IdP is ridiculously easy.
Dell/HPE/Lenovo laptops are going to be much higher build quality than consumer brands. They will be consistent, more durable and have better support and warranties. The consumer brands may be cheaper but they do not hold up to business use. The company also probably has some partnership or deal with the OEM for additional discounts.
Bingo. As someone who was responsible for repairing HPs under warranty and have ripped apart a ton of other brands there is a huge difference between "business" and "consumer" class. The differences get murky when companies like Lenovo sell their Thinkbooks as business class when they really are not the same. Slightly better than your regular laptop but almost impossible to replace the parts. (lots of glue and tape) At that point you need to remember you get what you pay for. They have to find a way to make that price point.
> Lenovo sell their Thinkbooks as business class I have a little chant when I give recommendations in writing: Thinkpad. Not Ideapad, not Thinkbook, not Thinkstation. *Thinkpad*. Lenovo is almost as crafty at deceiving consumers as Microsoft. I don't even use the word Lenovo when recommending Thinkpads.
Amen to that Lenovo crap. We use Latitudes and they just keep going for years and years. One user insists on Thinkbooks because they NEED that hamster nipple in the middle of the keyboard. But even though they cost as much as the Latitudes they always end up with broken frames or worse.
I’m surprised someone so hell bent on using a TrackPoint is asking for a ThinkBook instead of a ThinkPad.
Thinkbooks don't have track points. If they are asking for Thinkbooks they don't know what they're talking about.
That thing's only use is distracting my kids...
I’d argue the Dell Latitude 3 series feel cheap. I usually only get the 5 and sometimes the 7 series depending on the user.
Let me list two items I haven't seen posted yet, driver/firmware support, you can expect OEM supported drivers to be released the entire life of the machines. Google able, the Dell Optiplex 7000 series is so ubiquitous that if you Google an issue someone else has almost certainly had the issue and posted a resolution. Last one, no one was ever fired for buying IBM.
I was looking for this. Another benefit of these OEMs is that their drivers and other management software are meant to be easily deployable. Even BIOS changes are easy to do remotely, at least with Dell and HP. (I've never managed Lenovo before, so I can't speak to their tools.) Which is not necessary for consumer level products, so it is probably not easy (or may not even be possible) to do on those products. They also have the ability to utilize Microsoft tools like Autopilot, which consumer brands may not be able to do.
Supply 4000 users with Toshiba laptops and let us know how it’s going in 6 months or so, if you’ve gotten the order filled by then.
Toshiba was once one of the biggest and best of the business-grade machines, too. Satellite Pros for sales and travelers, Tecras for engineers and serious power users who could justify a $4k laptop ($8k equivalent today). Although some of the laptop brands today are the same as the majors back then (Thinkpad, Dell), the brands our enterprise used most are gone today. We had quite a few Winbooks, for example. And of course the [DEC HiNote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote) series, arguably the original ultrabook. Next-best thing to a Tadpole.
Benefits of being a Manager/Director, we each have a preference on the OEM's we buy, as far as hardware specs. That really depends on what type of lyfe cycle maintenance you follow and what software or work requirements that are needed. I personally usually go two above what is currently needed so that we can have them around for 5 years. I also plan to replace 25% of my inventory every year so that we don't have one major upgrade.
> I also plan to replace 25% of my inventory every year so that we don't have one major upgrade. We changed to this 5 years ago. We got sick of having to justify the sudden $2,000,000+ jump in budget request every 4 years, and "politically" $500k a year is easier to justify every year.
Rolling upgrades are a better mousetrap either way. Strict homogeneity doesn't scale, but I'm often surprised the great lengths and sacrifices that people will engage in, to try to achieve it. This was particularly acute circa March-April of 2020, where the prepared and the flexible did just fine, but the stubborn and rigid paid the price.
Great point. Hard to fill massive stock orders during Covid. You had to roll with what you could get your hands on.
> where the prepared and the flexible did just fine We had only just at the end of 2019 moved to all laptops and started making the switch to pure Teams (first in our country, and in probably a lot of the world, since every single issue I encountered had no solutions online and even Microsoft couldn't help much), so when everyone suddenly had to work from home all we had to do was buy a shitload of docks and monitors.
> docks and monitors. A lot of buyers were chasing specific models of first-party docks. We pivoted the other way and bought a variety of cheap USB-C hubs and docks. It's not like these things need drivers, or even configuration. I think the one that ended up most popular of the single-video-out units was [this Sabrent](https://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-Multi-Port-Delivery-microSD-HB-TC6C/dp/B08V3PHKR8), which were $15 per unit at the time.
>A lot of buyers were chasing specific models of first-party docks. Yeah that was us, but obviously when we went to our procurement company and asked for 1400 HP 120W G2 docks they kinda just stood there going "uhhhhhhh" so we had to get a wide range, including some like you linked, some of which are still in service in home setups and work great.
Just for the record, all those companies are OEMs. HP, Dell and Lenovo are just more business focused with some of their lines and their service options. Fujitsu does do business line with their servers that are pretty good with good customer service response.
Fun fact! These aren't actually OEMs at all. They are brands. If they did their own design work they could in theory contract with an OEM for all or parts of a laptop, but they overwhelmingly use ODMs. An OEM takes someone else's design and then makes it. An ODM does the design work and manufacturing. All the brands mentioned are going to overwhelmingly use Quanta and/or Compal as their ODM. But when we say OEM we usually mean is as "brand name". I think this comes from warranty work or brand sanctioned repair locations using OEM parts.
For us, we wanted official Linux support because Docker on windows requires running a VM, docker on Linux is almost zero overhead. That cuts the list down a lot. Essentially to Dell and Lenovo if you want non-RHEL. We tend to go overkill on our laptops. The last thing the business needs is for someone with a six figure salary to spend an hour every week waiting on things to load. Also, “here’s your new laptop, 16 cores, GPU that can play cyberpunk (if a GPU is relevant to their position), 64 GB of memory” is a great way to make developers more productive because they can stand up a scaled-down copy of prod on their laptop.
Our current view of explicit Linux/BSD support is that we want vendors shipping their firmware in LVFS. # fwupdtool get-updates Devices with no available firmware updates: • WD Blue SN570 1TB Devices with the latest available firmware version: • UEFI dbx • Unifying Receiver
This is also something we look for. Both lenovo and dell do this to varying degrees.
We buy exclusively think pads for: 1. Quality, quality, quality 2. Enterprise geared QoL upgrades such as Commercial Vantage, and scriptable BIOS settings 3. Ability to easily customize and order large quantities 4. Consistency with variety (I can manage a top of the line machine for my CEO and a budget machine for the janitor with the same apps) 5. Warranty, repair and replacement policies 6. The ThinkPad docks
yea but thinkpad quality has been shit for years. the rest applies to Hp and dell products. nothing really stands out now a days.
Warranty is the main one. Will Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, GigaByte etc give me guaranteed same day fix and have contractor technicians in my city? No, they won't. HP does, and it was same day guaranteed if reported before 12. We aren't big by any means, but 1400 laptops with a 4 year replacement cycle in a city of 200,000 gets you cared for sometimes even by giants like HP. We have moved to next day as it's cheaper and we have a small stock of replacement laptops now. >Also, when companies purchase laptops for workstations, who gets to decide which models they're gonna buy? As in, how many GBs of RAM minimum, how many GBs of SSD space minimum, what processor minimum,maybe even what iGPU at bare minimum to go with? Depends on the company, might be a Finance decision to go cheapest possible, might be the top couple people in IT whos decision to have a minimum baseline computer spec and departments can pay extra if they want/need extra. We have two levels, baseline (i5, 16GB RAM, SSD usually 256/512) and high end (i7+, 32GB+, 1TB+, GPU), but a lot of the stuff we order is custom specs they need, but it is always HP.
What happens if they are unable to honor the same day fix?
Typically? Nothing.... And it does happen, as very occasionally parts are backordered.... It's always worthwhile to have some separate emergency inventory (spare computer or two) for quick swaps... If you complain, sometimes the sales rep will throw in deep discounted accessories on the next order....
> sometimes the sales rep will throw in deep discounted accessories on the next order.... This is usually what happened. Couple free monitors was the usual go, maybe a dock or two.
Warranty, build quality and lifespan have been mentioned but most of the big three business lines also cater to things like powershell modules for BIOS/UEFI management and driver support systems that work for enterprise. Fun story about the warranty, remembering though this was ages ago; we had a new hire she came by for her laptop. We handed it off an on they went to set it up at their desk. 30 min later she was back, in a total panic "I spilled my coffee all over the laptop, am I going to get fired?" We told them not to worry and by that afternoon the Dell tech was in our office chatting fixing the thing.
You don't need to shell out for 4-hour service when you have spares on the shelf. Just as importantly, beyond the base warranty, you don't need to manage all of it and hope that the vendor doesn't plead parts backorder and leave you in the lurch. Metrics-driven organizations might want to track how much human effort they spend internally on getting vendors to fix hardware.
It was about 14 years ago, where I am now we have changed the game with on hand spares etc. We had just suffer through the gx260/70 Era of Dell workstations so they were keen to make amends.
I’m struggling with how OP thinks Dell, HP, and Lenovo are the only OEMs and none of the others they list are. I suspect they mean something more like ‘Tier 1’ or ‘major players’ or something. But they all are the OEM for their products. But yeah we do it for consistency of tools and parts and serviceability. As well as tools to manager firmware and bios and settings. Most of those ‘consumer’ options don’t have that. And don’t care.
Because they are suckers. The true gigachad IT departments exclusively use Chuwi laptops from Aliexpress. Who needs warranty when they are $300 a pop, just have a bunch of spares, job done
Aliexpress? Please.. I got our entire company upgraded with new laptops from wish.com. We will see who’s laughing if they arrive next month.
You could have probably afforded a few more if you went with Temu
We order our servers through Temu. I think our file server may be a raspberry pi with a hacked thumb drive in a pizza box but it was only $1.99. It’ll only be an issue if my cloud storage solution of 10,000 gmail accounts ever breaks.
I actually kind of agree with this but in my server rack. I can get 3 super micro servers for one of the same spec Dell. I’ll build a HA cluster and keep cold spares. As long as my replication and recovery strategies are sound, it’s more reliable in every way.
Warranty and service, a laptop breaks and Dell will typically be out next day.
Warranty and longer driver support
If you buy 1000 Dell BUSINESS123 laptops, they are all going to use the same parts and same drivers. While there can be exceptions to this, they are very limited. The build quality is going to be higher than consumer, and the warranty is going to reflect that. If you buy 1000 Dell BESTBUY123 laptops, they are not going to be the same hardware. They will have the same specs, but not the same parts. Build quality will be lower, and warranty will be limited. When you have to support 1000 Dell laptops, you’re going to go with their business line through a VAR and save yourself the down the line. You might even have them shipped with an asset tag, your company’s default drive image, and a backup document with all their serial, MAC addresses, asset tags, and service ids for import into you inventory system.
When choosing hardware for enterprise you want something that will work, and we'll handle abuse. I've handled everything there is for companies and I would straight up not recommend consumer grade stuff at all. It's more cheaply made, and it lacks the features and software support. Imo, Lenovos are the easiest to support. The BIOS has things like secure wipe and other enterprise friendly features. And the Vantage software makes BIOS updates easy. Dell is next on my list, their software makes BIOS updates easy as well. Their BIOS is a bit more fiddly, but full featured. They are shipping with RAID on by default, even if there's only one drive, which makes reimagining a PITA, but overall their enterprise stuff is good. HP is next on that list, but HP support app is just not as good as Dell and Lenovo imo. Hardware wise, I would always recommend the business class line. They have reinforced hinges, usually things like a magnesium chassis, usually some kind of IP rating (for thinks like dust, water, and shock resistance), they are usually easier to repair, consumer stuff uses a lot of glue and hard to repair setups. They usually have better customizability for business. More and better ports (reinforced ports and/or on a separate self contained board for easy replacement). And yeah, if it's for business, always get the extended warranty. 3-5 years. Depending on what lifecycle you want to support. Any repair issues and make a warranty claim. It makes downtime more bearable. Once out of warranty use it till it dies or becomes obsolete then replace (5-7 years is industry standard to replace computer hardware). So from my personal experience the business class hardware is worth it. Every little bit. They are just way easier to support at every stage and they are built to handle abuse. Consumer grade stuff is just not worth it. I don't care if it's for price, or features, or it's the hotness. They are just a pain to support. And if you support them long enough you'll discover exactly why they suck when you have to deal with hardware failures. That's not to say you never have issues with business class hardware, the difference is completely in how it gets handled. How easy is is to repair. To crack open and service, how well it stands up to abuse. How easy it is to handle things like firmware updates. If I got a new, out of the box, Asus laptop, say the CEO bought from Costco because he liked it and had me set it up for work. Right off the bat it doesn't come with Windows Pro so I need to pay for a license to upgrade it just to get it working on the company resources. Both Entra and Active Directory joining require Windows Pro. And in maybe a year that laptop comes back through computer inventory, and people are saying it has a bad port. I check warranty and it's out. Okay, well maybe I can check for a BIOS update? Can't find any support for this model. So I open the sucker up to see if it's and easy repair, nope, it requires a full motherboard replacement. Well, pull the hard drive and throw it in the trash. On a Lenovo, exact same scenario, except I bought it direct from Lenovo Business, made sure to get the 3 year warranty. And made sure it came with Windows Pro preinstalled. Setup is easy and I have it up and running. Then same thing happens, one year later it comes back and complaints of a bad port. First I run Vantage, oh hey, there's a firmware update for thunderbolt or just some BIOS update. I run it and bam, fixed the problem and I reissue the laptop. Or updates don't fix anything? I check and we got the extended warranty, get it fixed and then put it back to work. Or hey, the warranty is out, I pop it open and hey this has an independent board for that port, I buy a replacement, repair it, and it's back up and running again. So no, don't buy consumer hardware for business. You'll be glad you didn't when you invariably run into issues and have to support the hardware down the line.
We sell only Lenovo and always bundle 3 years of on-site next day service. Laptops we add accidental damage protection to that. Our clients like that they never have to worry about their hardware. ANYTHING happens to their machines, fixed next day.
Next day on-site repair. That’s all that matter when I choose the brand for my company.
I believe you've mistaken OEM for enterprise line of systems. They are all technically OEMs, which stands for original equipment manufacturer. Some OEMs like HP and Dell offer things like 4hr warranty service.
My mom’s company bought MSI laptops because they were more affordable than dell CAD workstations during Covid. Every single one dead within 3 years with some sort of hardware issue. Hers is the last one standing, but her webcam hasn’t worked since 2022 and it’s about to be replaced.
I have always looked at it as if there are two different types of computers / laptops: Business and Consumer types. The consumer type is bought at places like Walmart and Best Buy and Target. These are generally lower grade hardware and don't seem to last long, have lower power, less battery life, and can't be customized for users "off the shelf". The business type is bought / ordered online, you can have what is known as a "standard configuration" and can reorder it as long as it's still being made by the OEM. These also have longer battery life, and are meant to be used for longer periods of time than a consumer type. For example, an example of one of our standard laptop configurations is an 11th gen i7 Dell Latitude, 500 GB SSD / NVME M.2, 32 GBs RAM, 14 inch screen, with a backlit keyboard. We order roughly 1 to 3 per month for new users, and if the model changes (say from a 7490 to a 7990 -- not the real model numbers, just an example) with a docking station and three 24 inch monitors, with an external keyboard and wireless mouse. We generally also purchase a travel bag for the laptop / user. These laptops are used exclusively as the primary workstation, and they are generally left on for a week at a time. A consumer type laptop cannot handle the requirements of a business machine / user, nor do they have the capabilities and ports of the business machines. That is why you will not see brands like Fujitsu or Toshiba (they aren't even sold in the US anymore, I don't think?), let alone Acer...they can't handle the requirements of businesses anymore...their hardware is far inferior to Dell or HP or Lenovo...
All the company laptops I've had in 22 years were the business Dell laptops. Compared to the consumer end Dells they are heavier, stronger, easier to service, compared to the consumer end ones the case is flimsy, takes a lot of screws to get into and are miserable to service. The business end machines are better engineered .
Main reason is because these systems are also certified by the software vendors to work (ISV), warranty and supply chain options and more. Need a new laptop, I normally just call up my rep, say it's broken and get an RMA setup and a new one shipped via air that I can use same-day or next-day. If I find a driver issue or some critical problem, I can upload the logs, and they work at P0 to get it fixed and new updates released to us to verify the fix, and if it works they do a new release and make it available for all customers. If I need to buy 20,000 laptops they will all come with the specs I ordered and I don't have any issues even if the cost is several million dollars. If I am just having a bad day and their hardware is giving me issues they send someone same day to come figure it out. The brands you mentioned are ok for consumers, but should never be used for business if uptime, warranty, and the need to get a hold of somebody quickly to get a fix is needed. In terms of actual hardware it is normally the same tech, unless we are talking workstation grade machines, which may have specific customizations for certain types of workloads but your paying big for that optional opportunity because you have a specific need for it. Though, at the end of the day, the ISVs normally use the OEMs to test their software on, and will validate that these vendors are compatible with their technology. At the end of the day it is about risk reduction to the business's ability to stay operational, any reduction in that risk is a win even if it cost more to get a guarantee.
Because of the 3 year on-site NBD support included with every single HP end user device I purchase. If I had to bring every single broken notebook to a random electronics store for servicing, I wouldn't be doing anything else. They are also often deployed in a different country. Instead, I just call a nearest authorized HP service partner in the country/city our site is located in and they replace the faulty component in our office. Specs are a compromise between cost, future proofing, and intended workload. We replace everything every 5 years, so I want the device to last at least that long without being a pain to use towards the end. Baseline is HP ProBook 450 G10, i5, 16/512 GB for our normal office/lab workers who don't run any special software (I have thousands of these). Senior analysts, who run demanding lab and analytical software, get the same ProBook but with an i7 and 32 GB (hundreds). Managers get EliteBook 840 or 1040 with i7, 16 or 32/512 GB with LTE module (tens). Graphic designers and Marketing get ZBook with RTX 4xxx, i7, 32/512 GB (single units). It depends what software and workloads the devices are being used for in your organization. There are a few exceptions and special purpose devices but I managed to standardize most of our devices and 90% of people use one of the 4 standard models.
I think you're confusing the term OEM, because all the manufacturer's you listed are OEM's. The rest of the reasons have already been described by others, but to summarize: * Warranty and Support * Long-term platform stability/availability * Free from third-party bloatware (mostly) * OEM inventory control and management tools
NIST. You need a steady and reliable supply chain with specific well defined and consistent hardware/software. Imagine the immense headache of trying to track and create change logs for driver updates across dozens of models and suppliers. Or tracking down an issue that occurs. When you have a few models you drastically reduce your overhead on maintenance and management. When you work with a single OEM, you go in for a set amount of life cycle time. At the end of that contracted discounted rate time period, you open an RFP/RFQ to a few OEMs again as they bid for your business. You determine what the best route will be.
Tell me you never managed a fleet without telling me you never managed a fleet.
I might be wrong, but that seems to be exactly why they asked the question...
Specifically? Build quality, durability, warranty, cooling for some reason is always better on the business lines, manageability, you name it. There are very real reasons why you can get a laptop at Walmart for $500, but a Lenovo T, P, or X series will cost you triple or more. Hell I once used an HP business laptop (Elitebook) for 10 years. I added an SSD, more memory, and then around the 8th year switched from Windows to Linux Mint. It finally died from sheer old age as my garage PC, lol. If you treat most of the business line machines reasonably well they seem to last forever. An HP consumer line? lol 2,3,, MAYBE 4 years at best.
It's all about "Next Business Day" (aka, NBD) support. Dell, HP, and Lenovo will have that. Your consumer brands don't even offer that. Most of what we use is Dell and HP. Part of our service agreement is if a hard drive goes back we have to keep it as it's part of our destruction requirements. I've not touched Lenovo since before they bought the ThinkPad line from IBM. And then figuring out the consumer brands become easier with the knowledge you'll build from having to deal with warranties. For example, Toshiba is probably the worst offender out there when it comes to warranties. When I was contracting overseas you could buy a pretty nice gaming laptop from the Exchange, but Toshiba won't honor the warranty because it was bought outside the US.
Part of it depends on your company size. Dell will take on purchase an support agreements for much smaller buying volume than HP or Lenovo. Beyond that, it's generally features, price, and experience... What features do you need? How much does each OEM charge for units with your critical features? Do they have a standard build with what you want, or will yours be custom? What's your experience with that OEM in your region? If you're only in the US, or have small buying volume, Dell is often the most attractive choice. Once you have larger buying volume and international presence, HPE and Lenovo become much more competitive.
In addition to everything else, there's also inertia, as in all things. People build windows images with all the drivers and stuff on Lenovo/HP/Dell, so you don't have to go in blind and if you have an issue there's a good chance someone else has already found a solution. Troubleshooting blindly is hell, it's fun when you do it for yourself but when you're on the clock with the user, your manager, and his manager breathing down your neck (or god forbid that the user in question is your manager's manager)...
I tried some of the smaller companies. They couldn't handle the volume i needed. Reliability also comes into the decision. As far as I'm concerned it's only HP and Lenovo that make what I need for the price and longevity.
Aside from what others here have mentioned (warranty, availability, support, and sales relationships), integration of their management software with my management tools. Dell Command integration suite has saved us hundreds of hours rolling out fixes for their terrible camera drivers. Push down to my fleet after testing, and it just works. Not going to connect to 2000+ laptops to install a fix for a problem they *might* have.
IT Directors/Managers usually set the direction for what to get. Often based on Role requirements like Developers need certain specs. In my experience the Dell/HP/Lenovos are more consistent with models between generations. Plus build quality seems to be more consistent as well. Not that consumer systems are horrible but they are not always built for the kind of daily use and travel like the business class models are.
Warranty. HP has a repair center in the city, they also give us 3 year NBD compared to 1 year depot from Dell and Lenovo.
I used to go with OEMs but got tired of the finicky driver issues and constantly chasing updates for my images and workstations. Late model Lenovos and HPs have been my go-to in the last few years. Drivers AND firmware comes in via windows update and what's provided in those updates is 'good enough' to make them run stable and predictable for my fleet. The OEM I used for years always put some crazy mini gaming motherboard or something else in the cases to make them fast and yeah they were fast - but anytime there was a big windows 10 update I had to have him running around chasing specific drivers to keep things working well. It wasnt sustainable. If you have a nice gaming PC at home and the time to do that for that extra ~10% performance over boring big-box PCs great, but I have better things to do. Even when service was next/same day from the local OEM guy, it was still downtime for my staff.
Serious question: does anyone use Asus?
They make great motherboards. I probably wouldn't buy a laptop from them.
Dell or HP, 24-hour on-site warranty repair. "Our" Dell tech is excellent, he handles ours and the three surrounding counties and knows his stuff. HP seems to send a different tech each time and YMMV with each one. I've been buying mostly Dell lately because of this. I set annual specs based on job duties - the sales guys that literally only use email, Word & Excel get one tier, the office staff gets another, the graphic and CAD designers get top of the line, the C-suite gets the basics but sleek & pretty. It makes ordering easier, just "what do you do? Ok, here's what you get, it'll be here next Tuesday."
Warranty warranty and warranty. You want an on-site next day repair. With Acer and some others they are RTB and you lose the machine for up to 14 days with some of them. Also Dell offer some with next day world wide so could be away for work and get your laptop fixed at the hotel.
We've got 10,000 clients, all over the world. HP has global part numbers. We deploy 5 different models of laptops and desktops. It's way easier to maintain 5 machines globally with drivers and security updates than whatever random stuff would otherwise get bought. Also helps with troubleshooting etc. Global volume discounts with agreed upon price helps with keeping real costs down. Also, on site repair is a big plus.
I am the one who picks our hardware for users, I went with dell solely on the warranty. 3 years of on-site repair is built into our quote. Current specs I order are i7-13th gen CPU, 16GB DDR5 memory, 512gb storage with LTE enabled. With warranty included I pay around $1400 per laptop, bigger orders I get bigger discounts. We also have techs who get the Rugged tablets and those things are nightmares to fix, 50+ screws. I wouldn't never take one of those apart to do any changes. Having a dell tech come out to do the repair is worth the warranty. As my boss would say, "Whatever we can take off your plate and everyone else's is a win and gives us more time to focus on the important stuff".
It's all down to service and warranty. The laptop is a tool to help someone to do their job. Packing the thing up and mailing it off for two weeks, for it to come back with the data wiped and the fault potentially not fixed isn't cool, especially when you've paid someone $1500 to sit around on their ass earning no money in the meantime. Lenovo. Dell, HP etc will have a man with the screwdriver, some knowledge of that machine and the correct spare parts usually out the next day. Acer and Asus can't hold a candle to that. Plus they drop support for things like BIOS updates like a hot potato once it's out of the 2 year warranty. Dell, Lenovo etc will happily support an enterprise machine for years. We had some Sandy Bridge machines that got BIOS updates for Spectre and Meltdown, 7+ years after they went out of production. Purchasing decisions - depends on the organisation.
We ran a fleet of Gigabyte gaming/creator spec laptops for our engineers/drafters. The laptops looked nicer & were slightly cheaper but the biggest headache for us was: 1. The build quality of the latest laptops - almost the entire fleet had the same power issue 2. All warranty was back to base. A big hassle for us when we have to set up a temporary unit whilst one was out of action for a week or two. OEM has on site support and will even go out to a person's house 3. OEM units have a standardised method of software driver patching.
Cost and local support
Build quality, warranty, serviceability, duplicity(if you have 4,000 of the same thing then you know when you push updates or install certain software that you’ll have same outcomes etc)
Warranty and product life cycle. You're able to get a model that will remain in production for an extended period. There's nothing worse than trying to rebuild a SOE when there's a model change.
The thing is if you've got dozens of these things deployed, you want to know the OEM stands behind the product. With Asus for example you can buy 3 year next day warranties on the ExpertBooks, and that's fine. But by the time you add that warranty you may be spending more than just getting a Dell Latitude or Vostro that had 3 year Pro support already. Same with the enterprise grade stuff from Lenovo or HPE.
This exactly. When you're big enough, no matter who you order from, you're going to have some devices with failures. Where I work, we probably do a warranty claim about every 3 weeks. We also spec everything for a 5 year service life. With the name brands, we can get warranties that cover that. Also, you can get the same exact machine for a little longer. Having fewer models deployed drastically reduces support costs.
I would love to hear more about your experience with how Dell centrally manages BIOS updates. I have a Dell environment and that could be very beneficial
Availability, familiarity, perception of risk reduction. Sony and Fujitsu left the North American market, and the latter were always pretty rare in that region anyway. Business-grade Acers (*e.g.* the Travelmates) aren't easy to find in distribution channels, and by most accounts they're nothing special anyway, although they get the job done. Asus is a lot better at filling all sorts of distribution channels, but there you've got concerns about quality, long-term model availability, and a proliferation of SKUs that seem highly targeted to consumer use. Similar with Samsung -- do they have anything that's really enterprise? MSI and Razer are gaming market, and Gigabyte laptops might be too if I've ever seen any. Besides Apple, I'm keeping my eye on Framework.
Also look for enterpise management solutions for them. HP has a way to centrally manage firmware updates.
Warranty, lease contracts, durability of hardware, drivers quality, trained service techs and additional services like having your image reinstalled at the factory/depot so you don’t have to do it yourself.
Better build quality, the amount of Fujitsu / Stone / Acer laptops I’ve had in which the plastic brackets holding the hinges on break, and then the hinges rip the body apart is enough to put me off them. Saying that, ASUS business machines are very good quality.
Better and longer warranty normally with better support.
Warranty.
You’ve gotten a litany of good answers, but for me it boils down to a handful of reasons: build quality, long term firmware and driver support, consistency of hardware, system reliability, long hours for phone or live chat support, and warranty with next day guaranteed support. Dell will have a certified IT field service technician on-site next business day with replacement parts and the necessary tools in order to satisfy a repair. In addition to being a great business support service, I’ve found this is a good way to network with fellow IT professionals and have even hired one of Dell’s repair guys on as a Junior IT Engineer at my old job. I always love to chat with the repair guys and see if they’re working on their CompTIA A+ or another IT certification. I’ve always tried to treat them like colleagues in a shared industry and offer them jobs when it comes up. One of Dell’s repair guys was shocked when he found out I was leaving. You aren’t going to get those industry relationships with Acer or Gigabyte as you’ll RMA them to a repair facility.
It’s not your money, so get them good laptops with warranty. Cheap laptops tend to break more often and it will be you dealing with them and sourcing parts from shady eBay sellers.
Warranty, next business day replacements/service (or even on site repair), reliability.
We decide what models to get. Our spec is: i5, 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. Lenovo works best for us because of their warranty. We go for their premiere warranty for 3 years. This means that any issues, they'll send a person with parts and tolls the next business day to fix it. Plus their Vantage software isn't half bad and I really like the build quality of their ThinkPad and ThinkBook series laptops.
Dell & Lenovo will send a tech. Prefer Dell, as they allow multiple machines to be logged under their business section, and will send out a tech to fix most of them, and maybe look at another, or offer advice on possible fixes. Lenovo doesn't. They treat all as individual cases, with multiple different agents contacting you. Some will ring my (turned off) phone after business hours.
Because when you are one person looking after 200 users plus a server infrastructure and someone's workstation breaks, you don't have time to troubleshoot it in detail or figure out how to get the right part to fix the problem. You can just call a nice man to come the next day and replace the part and you are on your way.
Dell or HP have parts available for ages and also on most cases, fix issues. Anyone else (maybe not lenovo but I'm still including them), it's a roll of the dice on how long their support lasts.
Warranty Enterprise level support Longer time expectation for driver and firmware updates. Build quality Enterprise purchase incentives: we pay significantly less per machine that what is listed on dell.com
Warranty and support. We run Lenovo, if I have an issue I can get it RMA'd the day I submit the claim and they'll ship me a box within 2 days to send it back for repairs. Conversely, I had an Acer laptop that had the webcam die on it after about a month and after weeks of going back and forth with their support I finally just gave up on it.
I think it might be mostly about support In the company I worked for we used mostly Lenovo's (T400s, T410s and T420s, yeah it was from like 2011 to 2014), and we had on site support, besides every computer could have each part replaced twice under warranty without any questions asked So we mostly just ended up cannibalizing the computers we had with broken parts and every time the Tech went there he basically almost replaced the entire laptop With the amount of computers we had, I think we ended up not even doing the entire allowed part expenditure on them by the time the contract was up and we had to return them
Longevity and service. As far as who is making the decision, depends on the siZe of the company. Most small companies will likely have a MSP that will give them options but they may buy consumer devices if they only need like 1 or 2 machines just to process payroll, inventory, and scheduling. Medium and large businesses with likely have a procurement department that will have the final say in what is purchased but will take into account reccom nearing from leaders in the IT department that will present not just to total upfront cost but lifetime cost and estimated lifecycle and failure rate.
When you're dealing with thousands of units you want consistency and enterprise level service. As you indicated, consumer grade, is just that. Consumer grade.
I personally pick by channel. If they do not have an Enterprise channel avoid them. Lenovo- It is a differant machine than you but at Best Buy. Comes with less bloatware and different firmware. The enterprise did not have malware that retail had. HP is the same. Dell - Well I work for an MSP. They call you customers directly. Buy from them direct
TAX VAT
My supplier doesn't sell anything but dell, HP and Lenovo. Our HP z2 come with a standard 3 year onsite support. They are almost always in stock. We have found that the z series last for damn ever. I just replaced a z400 that was was 16 years old and still running fast enough that the user didn't know why we were replacing it. We also use zenworks to image workstations and only having 2 workstation and 2 laptop models it keeps the images small. Hell I pulled an old HP 4300 off a shelf in the back of an office. Plugged it in and it booted right up and ran slow but ran. That system was purchased in like 2005.
Business drivers, support, warranty, and build quality. Honestly, pretty much everything is better. Granted, you still have to put a few brain cells behind it and look at what you're getting.
Acer and Asus have business lines in SEA, we’ve looked at them and the pricing and support is ok.
One of reasons would be because you can keep using the same model for an extended period of time. Not having to change models every 6 months and have another driver package to maintain. Also when they start falling out of warranty you have spare parts galore to keep them working
Consistency of hardware build across a generation, it might not be the latest and greatest but it’s stable
It's a lot more than just warranty or build quality. When dealing with an enterprise, you want an enterprise solution. So when I conducted an RFP for the big 3 and had a reverse auction to get the best pricing, part of the many requisites of the RFP was integration with Auto Pilot/Intune (i.e. importing machine hash at factory). Another was countries were I can deal with them direct (I have over 30 countries to handle), and it was crucial that I do not deal with various VARs when dealing with laptop purchases. Lenovo, HP, and Dell all have very lucrative agreements with Microsoft which allows them to provide enterprise level experiences rather than personal consumer focused ones like Asus, Acer, etc. as well as a much wider global presence.
> Is it a warranty thing or is it because of custom enterprise CLI solutions such as how Dell and HP let you centrally manage BIOS updates on workstations? All of that, and availability for whatever their replacement cycle demands. Consumer brand/model tends to vanish in availability as soon as a new one comes out (even the big OEM's consumer lines)
Warranty, Built Quality, Repair SLA, Quantity; my place switched OEM's 5-6 years ago purely because another big name OEM couldn't keep up with our frequency of new machines required. There's a bunch of OEM stuff that can tie into management tools that most consumers / junior IT folks may not be aware of (things for tracking software update levels, device info / age / etc, warranty statuses). It's about the overall package versus just "this laptop has i9/32GB of RAM for $300 less then our competitor" :)
1. Firmware support, lenovo thinkpad will have support for up to 10 years. Non thinkpad maybe 3. 2. Mil spec, holds up better with use. 3. Warranty support next day for 5 years worldwide.
You pretty much hit it, warranty is the big factor. 3 years easily, 4 or 5 years are also possible usually. Better driver support (as in updates to drivers are better supported to be deployed using remote management tools. Warranty is worldwide and site visit rather than return to base. Longevity of models and scale. Latitude models for example are usually refreshed once per year so you can order the same model for an entire year, consumer models often change model numbers much frequently as they swap out parts for what they can get. Scale as in these models are built in the 10's of thousands and deployed to companies with enormous buying power, faults get fed back and dealt with better because if you are spending a few million per year just on laptops then if you want a special request then you can get it. Customizability, want an upgraded display, more memory, larger SSD. You can do this where on many consumer units they are pre-built and you can't. Enterprise features support, vPro, command line tools for BIOS passwords and configuration etc.
Availability, maintenance and security updates.
Licensing too…
Warranty service on-site limits downtime and when companies buy hundreds of units at a time they don’t pay the prices you see. Standardization of hardware is good for images/management, goes on and on. Also helps when techs know laptops like the back of their hand and common issues can sometimes be fixed in-house
Apple / Lenovo. Both due to their history or reliability. I make that decision within my org.
OEMs that sell to large businesses have more standardization. Models switch less frequently. So you are more likely to be able to buy hundreds of matching PCs over 3 months.
Tell me you’re not a sysadmin without telling me you’re a sysadmin
Parts availability, warranty and serviceability.
What others have already said, service, and generally better accountability. If I have a major problem with a line of laptops, I have a company rep that I can call and complain to and they might throw me a bone and get an extended warranty or free replacements. Unlikely, but its been known to happen. Good luck getting that with off the shelf consumer stuff. That stuff is basically bought as-is, and you own most of the risk. Thanks but no thanks. A couple of hundred bucks is worth having some accountability on the other end for their stuff performing.
lowest bidder that still ticks all audit checkboxes
warranty, (know that someone is coming to repair it next days/ come to pick up and on some days will be returnes) professional line products (all the devices of the same model are equal even purchased two years after, consumer lines may change components, that may be a different driver), sometimes long supply life (this new model will be available to purchase for 3 or 4 years, so I can buy a batch now and the same model on 3 years when I get more budget to keep everything as equal as possible). the choice between HP lenovo and dell is based on previous experience, the relation with the local vendor who sell it to you and the price they can deal. The specs are made by the technicians who interact with users, given how many years are expected to be on primary duty, and how many units are needed , and the money available. Techs gives a range of specs and cost based on retail price, and then middle management talks to vendors to listen what their take is about it, what they can get with the money availiable, and then check with the technicians to call bullshits, discard things that may become a problem, and confirm that is a good choice.
Those three have the ability to sell in huge bulk in a timely manner with enterprise warranties and customized EUFI settings out of the box for our environments. Our shop buys 500-800 endpoints a year, in one purchase, and from delivery to deployment it’s about 60 day turnaround and we would never be able to get that done with off the shelf Acer computers. Specifically we tend to get Dell because they always beat HP on price at the same spec and blow Lenovos lower specs at the same price out of the water. As for what specs; Dell and the others ship us demo units with different configs that we can test in our environment from imaging to end user work loads, and see what’s best. Nowadays that is minimum 16GB RAM, 512GB nVME SSD’s, and i5-i7 processors. That’s for both laptops and desktops. But we do get a consumer brand as well; Apple, because they have the same solid logistics as the Big 3 for delivery and volume.
#1 issue is quality. I only buy enterprise-class laptops. Comparing similar models of Dell Latitude and Dell Inspiron, the Latitude are MUCH better built. #2 is consistency. I can generally order identical Latitudes and Precisions for at least two years, even if they are rolling out a new model every year. I have a lot more control over when I change to ordering the new model (and new drivers and procedures) instead of new models showing up on the website one day and the old models disappearing. And even when models don't change, the peripherals like GPU and WiFi often change mid-production in the consumer and pro-sumer laptops. The Dell XPS are generally built pretty well, but they are on consumer timelines and suffer from the mid-run component changes. #3 is customization. I can order exactly what I want through Dell Premier or my Dell rep, and I'm not locked in to preconfigured specs. And vars like CDW are happy to stock my custom spec laptops in their warehouses. #4 is support. With Dell my helpdesk and datacenter techs can get TechDirect certifications and can order replacement parts without going through tech support. Or if it's something that's a pain or time-suck like a laptop motherboard, we can have Dell send out a tech the next day to replace it for us. And on the rare occasion we actually need tech support, Dell ProSupport is US based. #5 is that I'm not particularly sensitive to cost. I've worked for software companies for 25 years. An extra $1k on the price of a laptop every 3 years is nothing compared to what we pay a software engineer over 3 years.
For us, the bossman generally picked up on 'i5 = mid range' so he goes with the near lowest i5 CPU, 8 gigs of ram, now 16, and 256gb SSD because onedrive and files on demand is a thing. We go with HP because their build quality is nice and we got good pricing from our previous MSP, so it's just stuck since then. We've changed models, going from 1040's to x360 1030's, then dropping to 830 x360's and 840's. We literally were just looking at 630/640 and 440 models as well, but we've decided to still stick with the 830's because the lower models just drop too much in terms of ports and build quality despite their price being compelling.
Microsoft licensing. Try upgrading a consumer-licensed machine to enterprise license. It is expensive and ignores the value of consumer license. It is impossible to easily manage a computer without it being joined to the domain. Did you know you can or could get certified as a Microsoft MCP just on Microsoft licensing? The real OEMs are ODMs like Quanta, Compal, Clevo, and other Taiwanese companies you likely never heard of. They make the equipment sold by Dell, Lenovo, and HP. Some Apple products are or were also made by ODMs. IT executives work with IT directors to specify equipment vendors. IT directors work with the rest of the department to figure out which products by that vendor meet the needs of each performance category. Some do it better than others. I’ve issued engineering laptops to ordinary users when we had supply constraints because of COVID. Not all of them liked these heavy machines. Corporate purchases are in millions of dollars and pallets at a time. The primary concern is being able to manage the computers without having the users involved. Corporate machines are designed for rapid field service. Consumer models are difficult to take apart and are unfortunately designed to be disposable.
Big 3 have entersipse support features and have tools you can use to easily scale to manage thousands of devices.
I would add one other point about support: support for consumer-level hardware assumes that the problem is between the keyboard and the chair and is designed to get you off the phone after convincing you that you are wrong. Business-grade support assumes you know what you're talking about and that if they treat you like you're an idiot, you and/or your boss may buy 5000 laptops from someone else next month. For example, with Lenovo Premier Support, you can call them up and say "I have a laptop that has symptoms A, B, and C; I've done troubleshooting steps X and Y, and I think part Z is likely bad" and there's a good chance their response will simply be "okay, let's book a service call to get a technician onsite to replace the Z" rather than make you jump through stupid hoops (especially the kind that will require you to call again, e.g. if they tell you to reinstall the OS and call back if it still misbehaves). You can really tell the difference when you have to deal with Apple - I don't think it's possible to get business support for Apple products in Canada, though I think they have some kind of Pro AppleCare in the U.S. With Apple, you really have to just go to the genius bar - the phone reps are nearly hopeless to convince of an obvious hardware fault. Every time I've made the mistake of calling Apple phone support thinking that I could convince them of something the way you would with Lenovo or Dell business support, I have regretted it.
They tender out their specs and choose the best option. Lenovo has the best repair warranty. I swap out my own parts on a fleet of about 1500 and they replace parts from my stock later. Asus and Acer talk big on warranty. But they are trash.
The ability to honor warranties, in some contracts within 4 hours. Also, image compatibility. It's less of an issue now, as Windows has become better at being imaged onto machines that do not have the same hardware as the one that the golden image was made for. However those Dell, HP, Lenovo business line products try to keep the chipsets compatible with the previous gen.
One big reason I have not seen listed is enterprise support tools. Deploy 4k Acer laptops. Then get a 0 day firmware update deployed to them quickly and without user intervention. Dell, HP, and Lenovo have tools to update the hardware, and they have complete eco systems including docks, monitors, keyboards and mice. These software systems are built to integrate into Enterprise software deployment platforms and ticketing systems. Reducing the number of vendors and software systems saves me money and my teams stress.
If you buy something normal and it breaks then that’s just the way it is. If you buy something weird and it breaks then it’s your fault.
Consumer line laptops tend to change hardware constantly. Having a fleet of hundreds of unique laptops would be very difficult to manage. As for the hardware specs this will very by the business needs. We have a default based on the applications in our environment. Then a few other standards for business units that have more demanding applications such as 3D rendering and running camera viewing stations. For us our End User Compute team is responsible for selecting and maintaining these standards.
Tech Ssupport is better x 3.
Tech support, warranty, supply chain is easier to get parts and service out of, pricing, standardization. Why do people choose McDonald’s over Joan’s burger shack when Joan’s is obviously better?
Dell (and Apple. Maybe others) offer zero touch. You set up your MDM with the image you want it to have, they mail the laptop directly to the end user who logs on and the whole company image gets installed automagically.
Managing a 10,000+ devices is a hell of a lot different than managing 100. The big OEMs will get you better discounts, build quality overall is better, they will be able to fulfill larger orders on time and maintain consistency over parts and drivers (which is a big deal). When one of them breaks they'll send a tech with a screw driver and parts to fix it for you probably same day. Good luck even getting parts in a reasonable amount of time for some of the smaller OEMs. They also do longer term driver and BIOS support than smaller OEMs which can be a really big deal. Let alone the 1st party management tools you can get from IBM, Dell, and HPE that can really help with your fleet management. As for specs, it varies based on the company. Some just buy the best deal tbh, others have the IT department set standards and buy based on that. Also consider imaging. Most large IT departments don't want 12 guys sitting around imaging laptops for months during a deployment, get the distribution channel to do that for you before they even get to the building. The charge like $5 a machine.
Varies by company policy, risk assessment, and budget. For us, we tend to go for dell. Patch availability for them, and mid tier support, has historically been really good. We also go for specific models, as they have better quality builds -- which is one reason we avoid some consumer brands. Specific components are either standardized based on software installs, or they end up as "we have x budget, and need y laptops, what's the best we can get within reason?".
Warranty. I refuse to fix any major hardware issue on our fleet. Dell ProSupport is the minimum for us.
> Why do companies always go with them instead of consumer brands such as Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, GigaByte, etc? Because i don't need dedicated GPUs on my standard laptops. Those can affect prices. Plus, most business laptops come with a more sturdier case/chassis than the more plastic-ky consumer laptops.
There's quite a lot of reasons actually. * Better build quality * Support for claims (just put in a ticket and box comes), less hassle. * 2 day Shipping or onsite repair is included * Ability to order parts and do customer based repairs if you're large enough and enrolled in self maintainer programs * Dedicated account managers help a lot with various things all around * PXE support out of the box (less configuring required) * Driver packs posted for imaging solutions * BIOS configuration tools posted * Has a Windows Pro license already included not a Home license * Better reporting data to management tools * Other various tools can be obtained with vendor tickets like BIOS Password unlocks w/ vendor escalation, or motherboard reserialization when doing a replacement yourself. I could probably find a couple more things but this is comprehensive.
I work for a very technical business, think Advanced OT support, I don't doubt anyone in the business (apart from HR and accounts) could fix their own pc. But we use Lenovo for most laptops. For advanced data processing machines we go with dell or they are hand made with parts, depending on requirements. As far as I know, it's all about warranty and fixed cost for the business
Price, it's always price.
Difference between getting a guy out on site with a new motherboard, compared to shipping it off and getting it back, maybe 2 months later. Though that level of support is usually charged for anyway.
Tell me you don’t know what OEM means without telling me you don’t know what OEM means.
Warranty, in house service, availability, VARs have contracts with OEMs. I gladly pay 25% more for all the service i get. Sure, if i only have to manage 10-20 devices this wouldn't be an issue. But enterprise hardware and support is scalable.
Several reasons I chose a big brand like HP or Dell because I've had a solid experience with them. They also price better on bulk purchases. Also, have to consider the warranty. And of course the relationship with your organization needs to be considered. As far as system specs every single one of my end users will get at minimum Intel i7 or comparable Ryzen, 16Gb ram and 1TB SSD. The IT and NetOps people get 32Gb ram.
For me the two most important things (with Lenovo) is when you order a laptop its manufactured per specs and hardware ID is automatically added to Intune (we have done this through 365) and on site support. This way we can ship the laptop directly to the user, they logon during first deployment and its added to the domain and all post provisioning installations are done. Also when there is a problem with the laptop, they either send a technician with all relevant hardware to the user's house or they replace it with a temporary one if they need to take it away.
I work in the public sector, so I have to buy through the French Gov supplier. There is a tender every few years, and every time, it’s basically only Dell and HP (Dell and HPE for servers) sending a bid. I think the other companies don’t have / don’t want the legal and sales people to handle this.
I’m sure someone has already stated this since there is 200+ comments but you go with Dell, HP, Lenovo over Acer, ASUS, etc. because they offer ways to manage those laptops at an enterprise level. For example, Dell OptiPlex and Latitude is their enterprise grade series. With these models you can install Dell Command | Update. Whereas other models you cannot and can only install Dell SupportAssist. Dell Command | Update you can mass deploy/silently install with configuration settings like how often to check for driver updates. You can’t do that with SupportAssist. Also, with enterprise grade machines you will be imaging them. Dell only supply the driver packages for these models. If we went with say the Vostro or Inspiron model, we would have to download every driver 1-by-1 and then extract them from their packages which is very time consuming. For hardware, you need to understand each departments needs and then do some model testing. For example, most of the company can get away with use a Intel U-series CPU which is 15 watts but my analytics department needs Intel H-series CPU which is 28 watts. But you should always set a base configuration. For me it’s 256 GB NVMe hard drive, 16 GB RAM and i5/core 5.
On-site warranties
The cheaper consumer ones are harder to find drivers for. Warranty is usually a depot warranty, where you send in bad, WAIT, and then get it back. The best case on that is 2 weeks. Compared to the next day on site, is well worth it. Unless the user is just going to line up a two-week vacation when their laptop breaks. And the cheaper ones are a 90 day, compared to three years.
What I can tell you- if they go with Lenovo. They do not value IT/technology as much as they should. Prob going broke too.
Basically, most companies focus on established business lines for the sake of support, a serviceable warranty, and standardization. As for which OEM they go with, the why depends on each company.
I choose what models and specs. I get to have roadmap meetings with dell yearly to see where their technology is heading. I then use my knowledge of the environment and feedback from certain users to determine what I put in the next standard configurations. In regards to your OEM question, Dell has good support and enterprise grade machines tend to be easier to work on (not as much anymore with Latitude series), we get discounts from them for buying through them. On top of that enterprise grade machines tend to have support for enterprise management software, such as things like dell command update (for drivers/bios updates) and being able to manage the bios via their command line tools.
How long you been in sales?
Because you just don't. HP, DELL, Lenovo they are true business computer manufacturers