STARDELAYS - Alienware M18x R2 Episode 632 - "Revenge of the Delivery Delays"

A Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

(Japan, which at least feels like another galaxy, trust me I live here!)....

I ordered an Alienware M18x...

*CUE MUSIC*

Episode 632 - "Revenge of the Delivery Delays"

SoooOOOOooooo, my desktop computer broke down; the power supply went and took the motherboard with it. Anyway, being an absolutely avid PC gamer I decided to order a customised version of the Alienware M18x on the 20th of May. I'm a British expat living in Tokyo, so I thought it made sense to go with a well known international company who offer support services in English, in case there were any problems along the way - so it made sense to order something from Dell Japan... Or so I thought... The order was accepted and delivery was scheduled for 30th of May. However since then things have gone from bad to worse... Before we go any further, I understand that:

"... that a system's shipping date, as provided by a Dell Sales or Customer Care Representative or on the Dell Web site, is an estimate only and is not guaranteed.  Usually, a system or product will ship on or before its estimated shipping date [unless it's an M18x r2, then it's anybody's guess right? Eds].  Occasionally, however, vendor-related issues may delay the manufacture and subsequent shipment of an order.  Please understand that in such situations, the assembly of your custom-ordered computer cannot be completed until the necessary parts have arrived at Dell."


(I wonder whether they will include that in their reply anyway? Odds anybody?)

The delivery date was put back three times, and each time it has been put back, the number of days it gets put for increases, most recently to the 28th of June! Which is over a month since I ordered the product, unbelievably late by anyone's standards. Though scrolling through this board, this seems to be a serious issue for the M18x, perhaps because deliveries of the new model are being priori.... *cough*... I mean there is a shortage of LCD screens (or is it HDD's?)... Anyway, it seems likely that this will follow the trend that had bedeviled others on here and get delayed even further... July perhaps... August? I half expect my delivery status to be updated to something along the lines of "You will get it by Christmas... Probably... We can't guarantee it".

Here's where the story gets much worse, bizarre even. I sent customer service an email in English, I can speak Japanese but struggle with reading and writing it, and Dell is an international company right? Two days later I got a response in Japanese from a Korean customer service agent who told me, I think,  that nobody at Dell could speak English! He said that production had been delayed until the 14th (at the earliest,) because of the infamously dubious "shortage of LCD screens". He couldn't confirm when the computer would be manufactured let alone delivered. 

I'm a researcher and I urgently need something to work on from home, so this really is causing me massive inconvenience, I'm unable to review papers, write drafts or really do anything like that (let alone play games or watch films), which is  in the middle of the rainy season in Japan, as I'm forced to make use of public computers which means getting positively drenched every time I leave my apartment. Moreover, one of the joys of ordering a high end model is that you get something which is top of the market at the time of delivery; this might sound silly but I have no doubt whatsoever that this sort of idea is built into Alienware's marketing strategy, and I paid an absolute premium for it - well over $2000. Sadly the delivery has been so late that the product I paid for is no longer top of the market; Alienware have since discontinued the product I bought (in Japan at least), launched a new 18 inch laptop, with a better screen, faster RAM etc. and Intel have released the Haswell series of CPUs, meaning that joy, however silly or short-lived it may have been, has well and truly gone.

I suppose I could try to cancel and reorder for the updated model which is more-or-less the same price in most regards, but this would risk incurring more and more severe delivery delays, and writing deadlines mean I simply cannot be without a computer next month, although I do seriously worry that this might be the case regardless. Moreover, the graphics cards I ordered were dual AMD HD7990M in a Crossfire configuration which have been discontinued on the new model; the only cards on the new Alienware model able to compete with these are dual Nvidia 680m in a SLI configuration, which are considerably more expensive, meaning that the new Alienware model at the same price cannot compete with the old one for gaming purposes, which is why most of us buy Alienware, right?

Nobody has got back to me to tell me whether or not production has resumed (not even in Japanese), so I'm left wondering whether or not the 28th, like all the other scheduled delivery dates, will come and go as well, and somebody will slap on another ambiguous date for some point in the distant future. In short, I can't help but feel Dell has let me down badly. I am extremely confused, disappointed and massively inconvenienced. I'm actually wavering on whether to try cancelling the order, because I really do need a computer soon... At the very least I would at least appreciate it if somebody could confirm whether or not I will receive my delivery by the time the first of the upcoming Starwars films will be released on DVD? Which will probably be in 2016.., Subject to delays of course... And that the delays are not in fact because Dell are secretly building a massive Death Star, which needs all the parts it can get. More to the point, does Dell actually propose to do anything to compensate those of us suffering these mind-numbing delays?

My order number, for what it's worth, is . The name it was ordered under is Mike Burke... Now from glancing over these forums, I know I'm supposed to send somebody a private message, but Lorna only covers the US and Canada right?