Observations from Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine:

: As I sent my machine to Dell in the Airborne ambulance, I took the hard drive out at Dell’s demand (what if it’s the hard drive or the registry that’s broken? they will make me spend hours on the phone to diagnose that, said the man). I put it in my son’s Dell, which is exactly the same: an Inspiron 600m. Ah, but I saw that it was not exactly the same, not at all: When the machine started up, my laptop’s brain in my son’s laptop’s body started recognizing no end of new and strange hardware. And that’s to say that there is no consistency at all in the Dell product. Tom Friedman wrote about that, admiringly, in his World is Flat book: In their just-in-time gusto, they grab a part from this supplier or that supplier and slap them in there. And so there is no consistency to the product: The 600m I bought and was satisifed with two months ago is not one bit like the 600m I bought next. It’s as if I went to Burger King and they substituted pork for beef because it was cheaper today.

Even without the software concerns, the “any equivalent part” mentality may help in cutting costs down to the bone, and help in just in time manufacturing, but it can give inconsistent quality for the end users.

Apple is a company that stakes its reputation on the quality of it’s products. Sometimes it suffers because of that, often seeing shortages of “hot” products, but they don’t go putting in any old part in if they can help it.