Dell

My question is why do Dell computers tend to be the cheapest and giving best performance than other computer brands, such as Sony, Apple, HP, Alienware, Mesh computers etc

I was told a couple of reasons but want more...the ones I have are:

1. Dell orders its parts from all the computer brands...so its easy to replace to them. Eg: It would order 100 hard-drives from sony and like a 100 DVD drives from toshiba etc whereas other brands use thier own, so it costs them expensive to make.
2. Dell saves loads of money on having no offices...no more employment costs, electricity bills reduced, delivery costs reduced etc

Anyone got more?

Lets bust these new age myths first:

Dell employes 83,300 people worldwide. They're headquatered in Round Rock, Texas, United States of America. They're opening up a manufacturing plant in Poland (a low income country of course) and have historically employeed and manufactured PC's in Ireland.

The more suitable reason for them being cheap today is that Dell has assembly plants in Malaysia, China that assemble 95% of Dell notebooks and they have recently opened up one in Chennai, India.

Now the major reason (after studying their business model) that I've concluded so far is that they're market leaders at the moment and have been there for the past 15 odd or so years. They deal in bulk because they get more orders, so the overall cost on the equipment they have to purhcase drops significantly. Also, they work on a just in time inventory management system which means that they build system AFTER the customer has placed an order.