Where is Dell making its computers? When I track shipments they seem to be coming from China.

I don't think they make their own hardware. They design it and then farm out manufacture.

Clayton Christensen has written and talked about how Dell sold their business piece-by-piece. Each individual step seemed like a good move - it lowered costs and increased profits. Until one day the companies they outsourced to had it all and they started selling better computers for less money than Dell.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/18/clayton...

It's interesting that the difference between that and Apple is that since Apple controls the OS, nobody else can make a Mac.

Unfortunately for Dell, anyone can make a PC.

What do they even design? All of the components inside their computers are off the shelf products from other companies.

Speaking of their servers, their motherboards and chassis seem to be of their own design. Often times these layouts are pretty proprietary and designed exactly around the design of the chassis. They do some level of customization of firmware on the devices they go with, as there's usually Dell firmware on things like hard drives which integrates more with their own management tools. Arguably their software stack of actually managing fleets of their hardware is something they design, along with the actual remote access controller systems they put on the boards.

Dell desktop workstations have custom cases and mobos and power supplies, at the very least. Laptops are custom cases and often SoC.