Following information from last week about the availability of the Dell XPS M1330, we now have more information about Dell’s latest semi-ultraportable laptop (with a 13.3″ widescreen display, including an LED-backlit option).
It appears now that the main holdup is colors, although displays are touched upon – LED-backlit displays, which can help increase the battery life, while reducing the weight, and adding to a better user experience, are very very popular right now.
Here is a previous posting about colors: Direct2Dell
A few days ago, over at the Direct2Dell Official Dell blog, Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s Digital Media Manager, had this to say:
Speaking of components, many of you have asked which ones are delaying your orders. The reason that’s not a simple question to answer is that the supply picture changes frequently. Once we are aware that a component is in short supply and will add time to your estimated ship date, we try to indicate that on the configurator in Dell.com to give you an indication of further potential delays. …
To date, color options are the main source of delay on Inspiron notebooks. Basic colors like black are easier to produce. Premium colors and finishes like we use on the Inspiron models introduce complexity into the process, and that’s holding things up. Just as Alex mentioned in his post about colors on the M1330, producing smaller quantities is not the issue—it’s mainly an issue of scale. We’ll continue to work directly with suppliers to ultimately increase our production on color notebooks. Besides scale, we are also focused on maintaining the levels of quality we established when we designed these notebooks. In other words, we’re not going to relax our quality standards to ship more products.
While premium colors are the main reason for delay of our Inspiron notebooks, displays are a secondary reason—some screen sizes are in short supply.
As long as we have lots of customers waiting for systems like we do now, we have some tough work ahead of us. I can assure you that people at all levels in many departments across the company are working around the clock to resolve all the issues preventing us from shipping your systems. Beyond that, we have added dedicated sales and support resources in the United States and around the world specifically to address the customer experience issues that these delays cause. We also understand that shipping your system is key, and we’ll continue to work to do that.
They do appear to be working hard on correcting their supply issues. This was kind of a “perfect storm” of a brand new laptop for Dell in a popular new size (for people who want ultraportables but felt that 12″ was just a little too small), combined with a new display technology (LED backlighting) and some color/options that are harder to manufacture than others. On top of that, it’s back-to-school for many people in various parts of the world, and many who are headed off to college want something that is powerful, but not too big, and the XPS M1330 meets that criteria.