The scenario.then and now
Assembled or Branded, which is better?. This is the first thing that comes to mind for a potential PC buyer. Indian consumers are very conservative. This is perhaps the reason a few years ago, when the PC market was still in it’s budding stage, people preferred to buy only branded PCs against assembled ones. This was also the case in my house.
Though we could have got a very good configuration for a price around 40K, we decided not to go for an assembled one and instead bought a branded PC for 65K with bare minimum configuration. The benchmarks for buying a PC were: reliability, brand value and after sales servicing. But that was the case 5 yrs back.
With the prices of PCs following a decreasing trend in the recent yrs, Indian consumers have dared to break off from the’branded’ thinking. With the price of an assembled PC with the latest configration becoming as low as 20K, people are favouring it compared to a branded one, which may be as high as 30-35K for the same configuration. The underlying reasons for this change is that it is cheaper for the consumers to replace a faulty component with a new one, which is not the case with branded PCs.
Also, the reliablilty issue that was very prominent a few years ago has been downcasted because assembled PCs also offer almost the same warranty and guarantee periods as branded PCs offer. Any problem afterwards is charged the same by the company service centers as well the other service centres.
Also, branded PCs charge for the various operating systems and softwares that are pre-installed in the computer(and often compulsorily install them), thus leveraging the overall price . In this scenario, many people would prefer not paying for them since most of the softwares are freely available.
But the downside to getting an assembled PC is that you may miss the freebies that companies offer for branded PCs, like internet, CDs, etc. But considering the price difference, I guess that is acceptable.