Why We Recommend Purchasing a Previously Owned Business Class Computer
A good quality “business class” computer, laptop, server, or printer will outlast a cheap consumer machine sold at Walmart, Office Depot, or Best Buy. The value and savings are further increased when you purchase a previously owned “business class” machine. A business class machine will give you several years of reliable service. This makes the total cost of ownership lower than a consumer level machine. If consumer level equipment offered a lower total cost of ownership, large companies would fill their offices with consumer level machines. These corporations would have a $35 inkjet and $399 computer system from Walmart on every desk. However, they do not. This article is an introduction and broad generalization of consumer vs business machines. It is not intended to be a definitive answer to a complex comparison.
Dell, HP, and IBM charge a premium for their business class machines. Not because they are targeting a company, but because the components tend to be a higher quality, i.e. the motherboard, power supply, case. These units are designed to offer a more trouble-free operation, and they typically have better specs than the consumer equivalents. The motherboards and power supplies will have larger capacitors and better quality circuit board material. The same is especially true for laptops. The common components like cpu, hard drive, optical drive, lcd, and even ram have very small amounts of price difference at the wholesale level. For example the difference between a 300gb hard drive and a 500gb hard drive could be as small as $4. In other words hard drives in $500 laptops are close to the same price in $1000 laptops. Case quality, circuit board quality, and case material quality will not be close.
So what can a manufacturer trim, in order to build a $499 laptop? The biggest savings come from the motherboard, material quality (case), low quality power supplies, smaller battery (fewer cells that will only last 2-4 hours instead of 6-8hours). The manufacturer can save a lot of money here, and as a result will produce an inferior product to the “business class” counterpart. Additional savings come in the form of smaller, slower hard drives, lower resolution lcds, and the number of options. While these later cuts do not save as much money, but when you are mass producing, every penny counts.
Finally, a previously owned, business class computer is more than powerful enough to run most end users applications. Unless you are an extreme 3-D gamer, digital photograph editor, 3-D designer, or run some other extreme software, you will not really gain the real world benefit of the latest greatest hardware. Email, You-Tube, Facebook, Twitter, and Ebay are not extremely hardware aggressive. The money you will save from purchasing a previously owned computer, will give you more benefit in a savings account, paying your child’s college tuition, paying off a high interest credit card, or supporting your favorite philanthropic organization.
Call us today at (225) 275-6262. We will be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
