Hi everyone. Just wanted to provide one last update. My Alienware PC was finally delivered on February 1 by Purolator. Of course, there was no previous notification so I missed the delivery and had to pick it up from their depot, but whatever. I am now writing this from the new PC and so far everything seems to be in order. Thankfully no hardware issues of any sort. I will certainly be back if something decides to stop working though. I want to point out that despite all of this drama, the actually order was only delivered about 1 week late. Considering the currently global shortage in many in-demand PC components (some of which were certainly in my PC build), I want to give Dell's production team a break because I can only imagine how much of a logistical nightmare it must be for them to meet all the delivery deadlines when there's so much uncertainty. What made the whole buying experience bitter for me was the absolutely horrible online order status/tracking system that fails to do the one thing it's designed for: show me the actual status of my order. Combined with a customer support team that seems to be winging most of their answers, I really felt like I was throwing my money into a pit and praying for my product to fall out of the sky rather than making a confident purchase from a multinational corporation. All that was needed was for Dell to create a system that would proactively send me a message telling me that a delay is to be expected when a delay occurs, along with a revised delivery timeline, and all would have been fine, since I could at least feel reassured hat things are under control. The amount of chasing I had to do to get answers that ultimately were either uninformative or inaccurate was simply confidence shattering. And that's a true shame since I feel many of us obviously made the purchase because we believed in Dell's products.
I placed my order for an Alienware on December 10th with an estimated ship date of January 7th and a delivery date of January 26th. The large gap between ship and delivery date leads me to believe that it's probably going to be assembled overseas. Which is important since if the shipping date is delayed, I would expect it to affect the delivery date as well. There has been absolutely ZERO update on the order page since the day I placed it. It still even shows the my order is "about to enter production". All of the estimated dates blew right past and not a single update from Dell.  I mean I get it, my order included an RTX3080 which is about as hard to source as unobtanium right now so chances are they're just waiting for parts. I would have been understanding if there was simply an update or a message saying "hey sorry we need to push back your delivery date because we're waiting for parts that should hopefully get here by *date*" But no, that's not what I was told when I spoke to multiple Dell agents. Every single one I spoke to said my order has been built and is in a warehouse somewhere (they can't tell me where because I don't know why) and "will ship soon" and that I can still expect to receive it on the same delivery date which makes no sense (see my first paragraph). The first agent actually said within 24-48 hours but that blew past quickly and she stopped responding to my e-mails. There's also zero explanation for why my order status page seems to have been frozen in time since December 10th. I don't want to say this but based on what I've read here from others, I feel like the agents are just spitting out scripts regardless of what's actually happening in Dell's factories (aka. I'm being lied to). I'm 100% convinced the order status page is actually correct and nothing is happening with my order. Again, I can be understanding about production delays but not when I'm being misled by customer service. Get your act together and provide some actual updates please. And if I have one more agent asking me to give them my order number so they can privately tell me the same script I've been fed multiple times already, I will flip my table. Please don't make me flip my table.
Order Status: Where's my stuff?