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Dell online store charges 16 million dollars for new laptop with paint job

Black is free on the Inspiron 15. ‘Soft Mint’ is a very expensive option

Video If you have a spare £12m (US$16m) to hand, a kind Register reader let us know that Dell has just the laptop for you.

Said laptop is an Inspiron 15 3000, a machine that packs an 11th-gen Intel Core i5 at 4.2GHz, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, Chipzilla's Iris graphics chipset, and a 256GB SSD. There’s also a 15.6-inch FHD screen at 1920 x 1080.

And it’s black.

But Dell has in recent years woken up to the fact that black computers are a tad boring, so has added the option to choose “soft mint” as an alternative colour.

Which is where things get weird because in this product listing, the black laptop costs £589.00 (US$780) but choosing soft mint kicks the price up to a reassuringly expensive £12,000,558.98 ($15,905,500).

Dell UK £12m laptop screenshot

Dell’s price mistake ... Click to enlarge

Which seems rather a lot to pay for some pigment, seeing as the laptop has the same CPU, screen, storage, and RAM.

Here at The Register, we recognise that we live in strange times. Photoshop, deepfakes, and pandemics created by Illuminati lizard people mean we all have reason to doubt reality.

So we pressed Windows 10’s built-in video screen-capture software into service with a swift Win-Alt-R to immortalise this mess for posterity, and hopefully offer incontestable evidence of the SNAFU:

Youtube Video

Your humble hack tried to get the same result from other variants of the Inspiron 15 3000 with no success. I even tried Dell’s online stores for the USA and Australia. Only the URL above produced the price explosion.

Happy debugging, Dell UK web team! ®

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