An MC9400 is 743 g. An MC3400 is 528 g as a gun and 442 g as a straight shooter. Across a ten hour shift, holstered or in hand, that difference is real and your people will tell you about it by three o'clock.
So the MC9400 has to earn it. On most floors it does not, and we will say so. On cold stores, yards and docks it earns it several times over — and there is one job it is the only answer to.
Neither device is better. They are built for different floors, and the honest way to choose is to start with the floor.
Each-picking, receiving, put-away and stocktakes in an ordinary distribution centre or retail back room. Devices that get dropped from shoulder height, out of a holster, off a trolley.
Lighter, cheaper, and available as a straight shooter as well as a gun — which the MC9400 is not. The MC3400.
Cold stores, yards, ports, docks and manufacturing. Devices that fall off a forklift mast onto steel decking rather than slipping out of a hand.
If your damage reports say dropped from height rather than slipped, that is a durability conversation and not a weight one. And if anything runs below freezing, the choice is already made.
Side by side, and these are Zebra's own figures rather than ours.
Both run Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, and both take a 7000 mAh battery — the freezer MC9400 takes a 5000 mAh cell rated for the cold instead. On wireless and on battery life there is nothing to choose between them, which is worth knowing because it is where people expect the difference to be.
The hazardous-area version is not sold here. Zebra build a non-incendive MC9400 for Class 1 Division 2 sites — flammable gas, dust or vapour — and it is a North American configuration that does not come through Australian channels. If that is your site, it is a different conversation and not one either of these devices finishes.
The MC3400 gives you three and you live with the choice. This gives you seven, and you can change your mind afterwards.
Two of the seven exist for one reason: what the device is talking to. There is a 53-key IBM 5250 layout and a 53-key VT layout. If your warehouse system is a green screen on an AS/400, or a telnet session against a VT host, one of those puts the function keys where the host expects them and where the operator already knows they are.
Nobody selling from a price list will mention that. It is not a preference. It is whether the keypad matches the system on the other end.
More keys usually means more space between them. If people with larger hands are mis-hitting and re-keying quantities, that is not clumsiness. It is a keypad too small for the hand using it.
The keypad does not change the price. All seven cost the same. So choose it on which one fits the job and the hand — there is nothing to save by picking a smaller one, and nothing to justify by picking a bigger one. It is the one decision here with no money attached to it, and the one people agonise over most.
And if you get it wrong, you are not stuck with it. The keypad is a field-replaceable part — undo it, lift it off, put a different one on. Zebra document the procedure with a video: removing and replacing keypads.
Which changes the shape of the decision. A fleet does not have to be one thing forever. If the pickers want the 34-key and the receiving desk needs the 58, that is not an argument about the order — it is two part numbers and a screwdriver.
The MC3400 has no cold-storage version at all. If your operation lives below zero, the decision was made before you got to this page.
A heated scanner window, a heated touch panel and a battery rated for the cold. Rated to −30 °C, and it gives up a little toughness for it — 2.1 m rather than 2.4 m across temperature.
The heaters are not there to keep the operator's hands warm. They stop the device reaching the temperature where water forms on it when it comes out into ambient air. Condensation is what kills these, and it kills them slowly enough that nobody connects the two.
From Zebra's own manual, on the Heater Control application: Touch Panel Heater (default — disabled). And then, in the same paragraph: “This option should always be enabled for the heater to function properly.”
So a freezer device that arrives in its carton has half its heating switched off. If somebody forwards you the box, nobody turns it on, and you find out the first time a screen fogs and an operator wipes it on a sleeve. It is on the list of things we do before a device leaves here.
One combination does not exist. There is no cellular freezer device — not on the MC9400 and not on the MC3400. We checked every part number in both ranges. If you need 5G and cold storage, that is worth knowing now rather than after a purchase order.
We quote this one rather than list a price — the configuration, the quantity and what you need staged all move the number.
53-key standardSE4770 — Indoor and outdoor6 GB memory, 128 GB storage
In stock
53-key standardSE58 — Up to about 30 m6 GB memory, 128 GB storageFreezer build
Made to order
53-key standardSE58 — Up to about 30 m6 GB memory, 128 GB storageCamera
In stock
53-key standardSE58 — Up to about 30 m6 GB memory, 128 GB storageCellular 5G
In stock
Memory is not a decision on this device. Every MC9400 is 6 GB and 128 GB — all forty versions of it. On the MC3400 there are three tiers and it is a real choice. Here there is nothing to weigh up, which is one fewer thing to get wrong.
Including one somebody else has quoted you. Every option is in the code — and it is the same key as the MC3400, with different keypad letters.
MC9401 - 0 G 1 J 6 D SS - A6 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ └─ keypad │ │ │ └─── memory │ │ └───── scan engine, and camera or not │ └───────── body: G gun grip, S straight └────────────────── model: MC9401 wifi, MC9450 adds cellular 5G
So MC9401-0G1J6DSS-A6 reads: wifi model, gun grip, SE4770 indoor and outdoor, no camera, 6 GB and 128 GB, 53-key standard. Which is one of the ones listed above.
Why this is worth two minutes of your time. Take any quote you have been given, for these or for anything else in the range, and read it. You will see whether you are being offered a camera you did not ask for, the standard scan engine where the job needs the long one, or a different memory tier from the one you were comparing against. That is not a trick anybody is playing — it is usually just a code nobody expanded.
We worked this out; Zebra did not publish it. Or if they did, we could not find it. The key above is read off ninety-six part numbers across both ranges and it decodes every one of them, and it agrees with the scan engines Zebra do document. We are telling you that rather than presenting it as gospel — and -A6 on the end is the region code, so a part number from another market is not the same device.
The same brick, the same gun grip, the same job, under four badges and three company names. If yours still work, nothing here is urgent — but the batteries get harder to buy every year. What replaces what, and what the move actually costs.
If your software vendor also sells hardware, you may have heard that. Software support, the manufacturer's warranty and the staging in between are three different responsibilities. How they actually divide up, and the one question worth putting in writing.
Those two answers pick the build and the keypad between them. Add how many, and we can tell you what it costs and what is on the shelf — and whether it is worth us driving out with the keypads so your people can hold them.
