Off-the-shelf or made-to-order

Would it be wise to buy a laptop off the shelf or build one to your specifications? There are vendors who offer products in either one or the other or both ways to buy. I think it merits some thought as to which is more advantageous to you, as a buyer.

For instance vendors like ACER, Toshiba, HP offer laptops that are pre-configured and hence available off the shelf. While Dell, Lenovo, Alienware offer base laptops that are pre-built as well as ship custom-built units that are fully customizable. There are also some lesser known brands that offer purely made-to-order laptops.

Hardcore game enthusiasts (who have unlimited budget and time on their hands) may willingly advance their hard earned cash to such companies like Alienware and wait patiently for the arrival of their technological wonders. They would stop at nothing to gain, even a small edge that technology can offer, over other players (enemies?) in an online war. They may have justifications for such extreme behaviour.

Barring such cases, my question is addressed to the rest of us who buy laptops for day-to-day computing (i.e.for business, pleasure and even gaming). I think it is not hard to find pre-configured laptops from brandname vendors that would well meet our requirements .

So what advantages are there for the buyer in user-configured laptops that are made to order?

1. There is a perceived choice offered by the vendor.
2. User configured laptops can be more powerful with advanced features not available currently in the market.

These advantages are illusory in my opinion for several reasons:

• You can always find pre-built laptops that comes close to if not exactly match those made-to-order laptops.
• Often most of us are not power users who stretch the laptops to the maximum while using. So a laptop almost always is under utilized.
• Useful life of a laptop (pre-built or user configured) is a maximum of three years and soon there will be laptops coming into the market that exceed those carefully configured laptops. So there is little sense to configure a system online and wait for its arrival only to find it to become obsolete soon.

While it is not advantageous to the buyer, it is every bit advantageous to the vendor who offer custom built laptops for the following reasons:

• Vendors get the entire order amount instantly as deposit through anyone of their payment options – viz. credit card, Paypal, wire transfer, money order. Even in their ‘buy now and pay later financing offer’ they might get their invoice amount fully from the financial institution that pickup the tab. Interest gained from such deposits is pure profit though they may have only two to three weeks to deliver the promised order
• For the vendors there is the certainty of the order and hence can plan their production well. Inventory carrying costs is very much reduced.
• Because of this certainty they have less need to offer incentives to the push an otherwise pre-built, perishable (yes, laptops are perishable!) product along the line: Distributor -> Wholesaler -> Retailer -> End user
• While they may collect interest on such deposits, they have no need to raise working capital and hence save interest on it. If my memory serves me well, there was a time when Dell was so flush with cash it had negative working capital requirement. In this respect it is even better than the restaurant business which enjoys credit from its supplier while the customer pays cash and carries the benefit immediately

While these and other advantages offer a lot of savings for the vendor, will the vendor be willing to share a slice of the pie with the customer?

To you as a potential buyer, my advice would be to think if there are any real advantages to order a user-configured system and if so negotiate with the vendor to pass on some his benefits.