Dell has finally admitted that they have shipped out millions of computers with faulty capacitors. On their blog today, Lionel Menchaca outlined the issue as one with its product supplier and that they acted diligently to amend the issue, but stopped short of saying that they were deceiving customers who were plagued with the faulty part.
What the official response fails to touch on is that Dell continued to ship out their computers with the faulty capacitors. According to the New York Times, Dell may have shipped as many as 11.8 million computers with the affected parts and continued to ship them even after complaints came in from vendors such as Wal-Mart.
"Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute."
Further, an email exchange between Dell and its law firm stated, “We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had ‘issues’ per our discussion this morning”. While other companies, including Apple and HP, were affected by the bad components, only Dell has been accused of covering up the issue in court.