Why some notebooks with superior specs are cheaper than notebooks with lower specs?

Question

I noticed a pattern. There is a class of notebooks (business notebooks I think), like Dell Latitude or Toshiba Tecra, that have inferior performance compared to notebooks that are cheaper- like Dell Inspiron or Toshiba Satellite, or Asus laptops.

Why is that?

The CPU and GPU are faster on cheaper laptops. The only notable difference I see between the two classes is the display resolution. Most of the "business" laptops come with higher screen res. But I don't think that justifies the double price. Is there something in these notebooks that makes them more valuable?

Answer 1

The answer is complicated. There are many possible reasons for this. Let me enumerate the most common of them:

• Business laptops often contain some sort of enterprise management firmware, such as Intel vPro. This usually consists of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), along with some special firmware on the wireless and/or ethernet adapters that enables remote wakeup, remote management, etc.

• Business laptops often come with workstation-grade or business-grade graphics adapters. These graphics adapters tend to have firmware and clock rate tunings that lean towards ruggedness and reliability, rather than the maximum possible performance. These parts have been found by the manufacturers to have a lower failure rate, and are thus more suitable for business continuity and can be used in situations where having it fail would be very costly to the business. However, the manufacturers of these graphics adapters tend to charge significantly more per unit than for consumer adapters. This inflated cost may reflect the added amount of Quality Assurance (QA) they have to perform on each unit to be sure that it will be rugged and reliable; or, they could just be "pricing to what the market will bear". Without becoming an AMD or Nvidia employee and thus being privy to proprietary data, we don't know.

• Business laptops sometimes come with a more ruggedly-built chassis that is made to withstand accidental drops a bit better than a consumer laptop. Compare for instance, a Lenovo ThinkPad (especially the ones of old) to something like an IdeaPad or a consumer-grade Dell laptop. ThinkPads have drain holes in the keyboard for accidental spill protection; a built-in fingerprint reader; and the aforementioned "vPro" technology.

• Business laptops are likely to sell with the "Business" or "Professional" edition of Windows, whereas consumer laptops often sell with the base model of Windows, which is cheaper. So the licensing fees on a business laptop are higher.

• Laptop manufacturers are aware that businesses have more buying power than consumers, so part of the cost difference may be that manufacturers don't want to "leave any money on the table" -- in essence, they're deliberately gouging their business customers, because they know they can afford it, whereas consumers wouldn't buy their product if it weren't very cheap, and there's a lot of competition for building cheaper consumer laptops. Historically, the cheapest laptop vendor has been able to sell higher numbers of units, and therefore make more money. On the other hand, businesses tend to value what's inside the laptop more than the sticker price, so business sales are not as strongly correlated to cost.

Depending on the exact make and model you are comparing, there could be other things that the business laptops have, in terms of features and capabilities, that the consumer laptop doesn't have. These features could constitute real manufacturing cost differences between the units (i.e., the business laptop could actually cost the manufacturer more money to produce it); OR; they could be very inexpensive features that are artificially inflated in price just to wring more profit out of the buyer. Or a combination of both.