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Dell has once again been accused of running down its 30-day money-back guarantee in order to avoid replacing the defective and damaged new laptops that it sells. The latest example came in a Dell Laptop buyers group who initially discovered that the speakers didn’t work on his brand-new, out of the box, Inspiron 16 purchased in March this year.
When the laptop was eventually returned, the metal lid was horribly scraped but correspondence with Dell support was drawn out to the point where it refused to fix the issue, citing that it was out of the 30-day money-back period.
Dell Decline
It’s not totally surprising from Dell which, last year, fired 10 per cent of its workforce to appease shareholders, angry with the company’s poor performance. It later transpired that much of the fired workforce came from support teams – including the premium support teams that support partners and MSPs.
It’s just the latest in a series of questionable activities made by the company which, in addition to firing its support staff, is stealing IP from start-ups, that it initially promised to support (something that potential participants of Dell’s startup program should know before applying). The company has also hired an army of sketchy marketing professionals to undermine the journalists in its industry by promoting fake journalism and publishing reviews created by its own employees and paid influencers. It’s also spamming social media with promotional posts that are propped up with fake engagements from bot accounts and shill posters (see here,too) to boost visibility.
The latter isn’t a total surprise, as the company has been under fire for its ‘boring’ and ‘grey’ laptops and accessories for some years. The laptops famously run hot, too and often have been called-out for having weak hinges. Its products also have a very low, 1.4 / 5 Star rating on the Product Review website which logs thousands of customer reviews that are based upon company support and what the products are like to live with after purchase. The company responded by changing the names of its laptops to copy Apple’s popular MacBook line (and has been ridiculed for it).
The poor service and product reliability is also affecting its Alienware-brand gaming laptops – which already have a history of overheating and thermal throttling – because it uses the same, ‘shoddy’ Dell support systems.
Dell has even been caught disabling features on existing purchasers to force customers to upgrade – a practice that should be illegal and one that we’ll be following up. It also appears that Dell marketers are using shill accounts to manipulate Reddit threads that highlight its practice of changing the terms of sale, after the sale, in order to stop them being noticed.
More recently, it appears Dell prices are also being hiked. This may be due to tariffs, so we’ll check whether it affects the rest of the industry, too.
The problems aren’t unique to consumers, either. Dell partners are making numerous complaints against the company including:
- Listing under-powered Dell Laptops to be gain favourable price comparison placements.
- Cancelled orders for failed components.
- MSPs complaining about having partnership deals hijacked.
- Quality control and cost-cutting on professional Dell products.
Many MSP forums are stating that Managed Service Providers are moving to Lenovo and HP to get away from Dell. We’ll be covering that more in future articles.
Damaged Goods
In the latest incident, the poster writes…
This is how the DELL tech left my brand new DELL Inspiron 16 purchased on 3/6/2025 after replacing defective speakers on the device which came broken straight out of the box. I started calling 3/28 about the speaker problem and they had me wait multiple “24-48 hours” to look into the problem. What they were ACTUALLY doing was wearing down the 30day return window. Now, they’re refusing to replace this device that the DELL TECH damaged, even though I began requesting a new device (for the speakers) well within the 30 day time frame.
Dell Customer
He also added the following pictures:
We’ll update this article if Dell acknowledge and fix this particular issue. Unfortunately, we have little reason to believe the company will. The behaviour of its Australian team (alone) has been beyond repugnant, with its former ‘vile’ Head of Communications, Kirsty Matta, being promoted to APJ Public Affairs Director and its former Head of Marketing, the ‘awful’ Peggy Arsenis, being fired immediately before starting her long service leave before washing up at Ingram Micro as a Microsoft Partner rep. Their replacements have continued their with their anti-journalist actions into 2025.
Last Updated on April 28, 2025 by Nick Ross
