Dell paints Inspiron with delay brush

In a to the Direct2Dell blog on Friday, Dell's digital media manager, Lionel Menchaca, repeated what another executive had said in early August about the higher-priced XPS.

"I know that many of you have seen the blog posts about the XPS M1330 delays, but many customers are asking for details behind the Inspiron delays," said Menchaca. "Color options are the main source of delay on Inspiron notebooks. Basic colors like black are easier to produce. Premium colors and finishes like we use on the Inspiron models introduce complexity into the process, and that's holding things up."

The Inspiron 1720, 1721, 1520, 1521 and 1420 models -- all launched in late June along with the M1330 -- can be ordered in eight hues, including basic black or white, as well as brown, red, blue, green, pink or yellow. Dell has tagged the line with the marketing slogan "Yours is Here."

"Producing smaller quantities is not the issue -- it's mainly an issue of scale," Menchaca said, echoing what Senior Vice President Alex Gruzen said about the XPS laptop three weeks ago. "We'll continue to work directly with suppliers to ultimately increase our production on color notebooks," he added.

Another bottleneck for Dell: LCDs. "Some screen sizes are in short supply," said Menchaca. Earlier this month, Gruzen also called out screens, specifically backlit LED displays, as contributing to the slow delivery of M1330 orders. Dell's Inspirons are equipped with 17-in. (1720/1721), 15.4-in. (1520/1521) and 14.1-in. (1420) screens, all standard sizes for the laptop computer industry. Some analysts, however, had remarked at the beginning of August that all companies were .