I don’t have my own business, but my workplace allows us to buy personal products through some of their suppliers like Zones and CDW, using our corporate discount (but paying with our own personal credit card). I wonder if that’d be sufficent to order a Dell business laptop.
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snorkbubs@fedia.io 11 months agoEveryone is suggesting Dell, and I agree, with one caveat:
Order from their business division. Those machines are designed not to be a hassle, because they want return business customers. Dell business machines have no bloat, and consumer-grade extras often come as standard features on business machines. Just better all-around, even the designs.
Only catch is, you need a business license to order this way, or a friend with one.
dan@upvote.au 11 months ago
0xC4aE1e5@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
Are you sure you need a license to order them? Searching “dell latitude” on Amazon shows business Dells.
Confused_Emus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
In high school I got my laptop replaced under warranty. Whatever they sent me, the service ID tag apparently had the number for a business machine or something because I always got routed to the business support techs after that. They always seemed a little confused when they found out I wasn’t a business owner/user, but supported me anyway since that’s where the service ID for my machine got me. Support was infinitely better. Actual techs who clearly were not reading from a script. Based out of the US or Canada so no frustrating language barrier caused by your support base speaking a completely different language from your user base and having apparently the minimal amount of training in English. I could just tell them I’d already run diagnostics and had an error code for them, and they’d take it from there without wasting my time repeating the same troubleshooting I’d already done. The contrast between the two levels of support is astounding. Dell clearly gives zero shits about supporting home users.
snorkbubs@fedia.io 11 months ago
Looks like you got a taste of the good life early on, and now you're jaded. I tease (but not really).
Not sure if it's still the case, but Dell used to assign a support tech to each business account, and you could call them any time, directly. They'll dick around with home users, who'll only purchase a handful of devices over a lifetime. But, businesses order hundreds of machines at a time, and Dell isn't stupid.
Something else to consider is that home support has to do stuff like help aunt Bertha find the Facebook icon on her desktop (in the late 90s, I was one of the guys they'd send to her house, as a last-last-last resort, oh boy). Where, businesses will often have their own tech calling Dell, with real problems, that are costing money. Those are two vastly different skill sets, and it would be a waste to use the same support team for both sides.
The contrast between the two tiers really is striking though, and it seems you found that out early.