Lately buyers have been getting frustrated with HP for being unable to tell them what exactly is inside a laptop they’re configuring and ordering online. For instance, with the recent Envy 15 and Envy 17 release we couldn’t figure out what graphics card was being offered. It took banging on the virtual doors of HP and an internal blogger to finally get to the bottom of the issue, but there’s still no telling what the clock speeds are on those AMD 7690M graphics cards.
But this is just one example of HP doing a poor job of making specs transparent for laptops that they sell. I buy and sell a lot of laptops and am very familiar with the online configuration offered by HP and Dell. There’s no way to put it nicely, HP sucks for making it easy to figure out what your choices are and bombards you with marketing fluff terms that mean nothing. Meanwhile, Dell lays it all out there, if you want to know what video card is inside a laptop it’s not hard to find out.
The best way to demonstrate this is through an example, let’s configure one of the most popular HP laptops, the dv6t Quad Edition, and the popular Dell XPS 15 L502x to demonstrate this.
Selecting a Graphics Card:
The graphics card is an important factor for the dv6t Quad Edition, people that want to do some gaming will be buying this laptop and they want to know exactly what they are in for. However, when given the option of a graphics card it says “1GB Discrete GDDR5 Graphics AMD Radeon)”, which means nothing. Worse, I can upgrade for $25 to something of the same description. Am I supposed to assume this is something better, even though it’s of the same description?
Going to the specs page for the dv6t Quad Edition is no more help, I’m given the same fluff:
I’ll help you out since HP doesn’t, the base level graphics card is an AMD 6750 and the upgrade is to an AMD 6770. How do I know this? I bought and reviewed the dv6t Quad Edition, but having to buy a laptop to figure out what’s inside is not a way to sell more laptops.
Now let’s look at how Dell presents the graphics card options for the XPS 15:
How about that? Dell actually puts up front on the configuration page that you can choose between the Nvidia GT 525M or Nvidia GT 540M. You’ll have to do a bit of independent research to figure out which card is best for your needs and if it’s worth the upgrade, but at least you know your options.
Selecting a Screen:
Now let’s move on to the screen, another very important component. For the dv6t Quad Edition we’re given two options:
You can either choose a horribly low resolution 1366 x 768 screen or a better “Full HD” screen with 1920 x 1080 resolution. What does BrightView mean though? The “Help me decide” tool tip doesn’t help to explain what BrightView is, in actual fact it means a glossy finish screen. I’m also left wondering if there is a web camera built into the screen, but a few steps later I find out there is a web cam on the “Personalization step”
I love option pages where there are no options, what a waste of time. This page indicates that there is a built-in “HP TrueVision HD Webcam”. Many people like to know how many megapixels a web camera is that they’re getting, but HP makes it impossible to find out. “HD” is a loose term used to describe a lot of things these days, a Google search on “HP TrueVision HD WebCam” brings up a video about the camera, but no specs.
Let’s see how Dell puts together their XPS 15 screen configuration page:
Dell shows exactly what the specs are for the screen, they also have a handy “Help me Choose: LCD Displays” pop up that describes what you are getting with each screen. They specify the web camera is 2.0 megapixels.
Conclusion
This article was mostly inspired by my own frustration in purchasing an HP laptop online and trying to decipher the internal specs along with the recent debacle over misinformation on the new Envy 15 and Envy 17 laptops. It’s too bad that HP does make high quality laptops that I often recommend, but that it’s often hard to get through some of the marketing speak to figure out what you’re really getting inside. This is especially important on high end laptops that cost more than $1,000, people need to know what their money is going towards. You have to be willing to dig through Internet forums to find the answer from people that actually own the laptop, the average person doesn’t have that sort of time or patience. Dell meanwhile does a good job of presenting actual component specs and going a step further to provide a useful “Help me decide?” page with each selection. Kudos to Dell on this, and let’s hope HP improves their transparency.
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