TL; DW: LTT bought computers on the phone secret-shopper style and Dell was forcing them the extended/on-site warranty, despite the shopper saying no many times the Dell rep still put these things in the order and charged them for it.
My own limited experience (one XPS 15, a Dell laser printer that Just Works™ 10 years on, and plenty of Dell monitors) have been pretty positive, but I hate how all their desktops and servers use proprietary parts and have hence never personally bought any of them.
Is it "="? To me this seems more like porsche (VW) and skoda (VW). Sure, they are owned by the same company but I wouldn't think that experience with one brand relates to the other. In fact, HPE (their enterprise segment) nowadays is a different company.
HP's consumer stuff can be quite bad, their customer stuff however is actually quite good, as you noted. So while the discussion of how to best handle branding is interesting, it would be better for the discussion to distinguish the two.
To extend this, why would you do anything over the phone if you can just do it through a website? Talking to humans is always going to cause errors and inefficiency; just getting the person to get your name spelled right is a challenge.
If you have done your research beforehand, it’s a good way to get a discount.
For example I wanted to buy a sewing machine but didn't know anything about them though I knew what I wanted to do with it. So I went to a nearby shop and asked the seller what they recommended and actually ended up with an appropriate product. Maybe for computer related stuff this is not the good way to do it anymore idk.
I can understand seeing a salesperson in person about a big purchase for some equipment: they can actually show the items to you, let you try them out, etc. You can't do any of that over the phone.
Plus, when you decide to buy the thing, you can verify, visually, that all your information is correct. Again, can't do that on the phone.
For the video the other person posted, the DELL experience seems particularly shady since they are the only manufacturer which pushed heavily for insurance and financing. They did this experience twice (in 2018 and 2020) and this issue happened both times. So the website part of the product seems fine, however if you talk to a DELL salesperson then you may have to expect shady behaviour since it looks like they are encouraged to sell things you don't need.
But yeah, don't spend thousands of dollars over the phone, I agree.
Buying in-person is the best usually, as long as the price is the same, and the item isn't something difficult to take home with you.