Thanks to all of our customers who continue to wait for your orders despite the delays. We apologize for the frustration that they have caused all of you. I know that many of you have seen the blog posts about the XPS M1330 delays, but many customers are asking for details behind the Inspiron delays. I wanted to spend a few minutes to try to address some of the fundamental issues we're dealing with.
Regardless of what product we're talking about, generally speaking there are two things that dictate when we will ship your order: 1) the order date and 2) parts availability. There are other variables that factor into this, but in general, we expect to ship products in the order they were received when we have the components to build your system.
Speaking of components, many of you have asked which ones are delaying your orders. The reason that's not a simple question to answer is that the supply picture changes frequently. Once we are aware that a component is in short supply and will add time to your estimated ship date, we try to indicate that on the configurator in Dell.com to give you an indication of further potential delays.
To date, color options are the main source of delay on Inspiron notebooks. Basic colors like black are easier to produce. Premium colors and finishes like we use on the Inspiron models introduce complexity into the process, and that's holding things up. Just as Alex mentioned in his post about colors on the M1330, producing smaller quantities is not the issue—it's mainly an issue of scale. We'll continue to work directly with suppliers to ultimately increase our production on color notebooks. Besides scale, we are also focused on maintaining the levels of quality we established when we designed these notebooks. In other words, we're not going to relax our quality standards to ship more products.
While premium colors are the main reason for delay of our Inspiron notebooks, displays are a secondary reason—some screen sizes are in short supply.
As long as we have lots of customers waiting for systems like we do now, we have some tough work ahead of us. I can assure you that people at all levels in many departments across the company are working around the clock to resolve all the issues preventing us from shipping your systems. Beyond that, we have added dedicated sales and support resources in the United States and around the world specifically to address the customer experience issues that these delays cause. We also understand that shipping your system is key, and we'll continue to work to do that.
Thanks again to all of you who continue to wait for your orders. We appreciate your patience and your business.