Reasons Revealed for Dell XPS M1330 Delays... Color issues... Pearl white discontinued before it ever had a chance. ~ Ask The Admin

Saturday, August 04, 2007

Reasons Revealed for Dell XPS M1330 Delays... Color issues... Pearl white discontinued before it ever had a chance.


Do The XPS M1330 Delays Got You Down? We have some information on why some M1330's from Dell are shipping while others aren't. And it looks like it depends on what color you ordered. And here is an explanation from the Dell Blog. It looks like the fancy shmancy new paint jobs were causing QA issues. So if you didn't order the pearl white one already it has been discontinued. They are investigating other ways to produce them easier.


...One example of this is the painting process. Right now, Tuxedo Black is the
only color that is consistently meeting our quality standards. That's one reason
why some customers are getting their orders before others. The finish on the
XPS M1330 is similar to a custom paint job on a car, but with one
additional complexity—on a car, typical viewing occurs from several feet away.
With a notebook, the typical viewing range is much closer... sometimes a foot or
less. This requires a different level of attention to detail.


Why do I bring that up? There was no problem painting hundreds at a time. But as we increased the volume, otherwise manageable factors like dust contamination
caused our successful yields to decrease. Adding to the complexity, the
Crimson Red and the Pearl White colors require more coats of paint and more
touches to create the finished product—that means there is more opportunity for
dust contamination.


All this ultimately results in fewer finished parts from
the paint line than we expected. You may have noticed on Dell.com yesterday we discontinued the Pearl White color. The reason is that we are just not able to produce the kind of volumes of high quality product that we need to support demand. It takes about 5 coats of paint to get the appearance we were looking for. We are working to ship white units that meet our standards to all customers who ordered them, but those may be the last of the units using the current process, as we continue to pursue alternate methods of producing high-quality white units.
[Direct2Dell]