Why you will pay more for a laptop with Windows removed
It's something known as "desktop real estate". Basically Dell (for example) will be selling you a ?450 laptop for ?400 because the deal they have with Microsoft covers the overlap. This means that more often than not it'll cost more for you to receive a laptop that doesn't have Microsoft products on it that it would with them.
The logic that's hard to get your head around
I found it hard to comprehend that a ?400 laptop with a ?70 Operating System on it means that if you remove the O/S then the laptop is valued at ?330? Unfortunately not. But it's a hard concept to fully appreciate because it doesn't correlate well to every-day life.
Say you want to buy a sandwich, the baker tells you it's ?2 for a big beef sandwich. You ask them to take the beef out; meaning all you're buying is the bread. You wouldn't want to pay more for less would you? Or even the same? I didn't think so - and that's why this whole notion is so hard to grasp.
I guess we just have to wait for Dell to widen their range before things become a bit more sensible. As I blogged previously; getting manufacturers to remove the O/S means you're no better off. You *can* get refunded for the operating system but you seem to pay for the joy of getting it uninstalled - all of this time the laptop is out of your hands. So anyway, that's why it costs more. Upsetting - yes. Avoidable - not yet. Bah.
Enjoy this article? Why not subscribe to the full RSS feed?
