I've had mostly good experiences with dell's XPS 13 laptops. Coil whine has been a problem.
Dell is the only company I know of that really stands behind their products. The default(at least here) warranty includes next business day on-site repair.
The times I've had issues during the last 15+ years Dell has sent someone to fix it, fast. Nobody else seems to be willing to do that if their product fails. Must be really expensive for Dell when something goes wrong.
They do however stop producing/selling batteries much earlier than they should...
I worked for EMC through the acquisition by Dell. I spoke with a someone in Dell MFG about their test process. In short, they test as configured by the customer. We were discussing a blade server. I asked what happens if a customer buys an additional blade and that slot on the backplane doesn’t work, because it wasn’t tested? The answer: we get them a new backplane really quickly. Dell is all about removing cost from the business and that means they made the calculation that it’s cheaper to test as configured and pay for the few cases where someone upgrades and has an issue, versus test everyone’s machine comprehensively. Needless to say, this wasn’t the EMC way. So yes, it’s expensive to overnight a new part to customers, but someone has done the ROI and figured out that is cheaper than testing every system for every anticipated problem.
Lenovo took care of my Thinkpad T14s AMD when the keyboard started acting funky. Ordered the parts and sent a tech to my house to install it within a week. So I would still recommend getting a nice Thinkpad.
Keep in mind there will be much more people complaining about how bad some electronic device is than people praising about how good it is because they have more reason to complain.
All products have lemons and unless there's a site that collects information on repairs, it's hard to tell which laptop has a bad design.
I've had 2 Dells for myself and bought one for my dad (all Inspirons) and never had a problem with them. Lattitudes are workhorses, so with people now working remotely there are companies that buy those laptops by the 100s, so the production quality of Dell Lattitudes should be high enough that Dell wouldn't have to deal with warranty issues from its corporate clients
I don't think this is a case of "some units are lemons"- from what I can see this is a design flaw of some sort. I've been buying Latitudes for personal use now for MANY years and this is the first "annoys me every day and can't be fixed (or they refuse to fix it)" issue I've had.
I'm glad that when I got a Dell XPS I noticed the problems extremely quickly so I could return it. It had a horrendously whiny fan that seemed to always be running. Battery life was unimpressive. And there was a trackpad issue where picking the machine up from a corner would cause it to click (apparently this is an issue that's been there for a few generations).
Unless you need x86, just go with an M1 Mac. They're ridiculously power efficient without sacrificing performance.
i own one and running Ubuntu on it and I confirm that it will drain the battery if left on sleep. Mine is always on charge and I make sure to shutdown before traveling. Otherwise, it is a decent machine for lagging around
Some of us, many of us, rely on these machines to do their job. Perfection is pretty well required or you’re using substandard tools which may or may not affect your productivity.
And stating Apple is just okay next to the rest of those is completely disingenuous. Apple clearly had higher quality than all of these manufacturers.
Just look at keyboard-gate to prove that, by design, Apple doesn't care about user productivity. I personally have a work issued 2019 16-inch MBP and it drives me insane.
Before this laptop, I'd never had to make sure my AC was turned on before I took Zoom meetings. With this thing, if the ambient temperature is over about 25 C, the CPU throttles to 1GHz and I get about 2 frames per second.
I have a personal Lenovo Yoga that has none of these issues, is 4 years old, and apart from the battery being degraded (my bad), has been amazing. Meanwhile, I can't wait until I hit IT's refresh window on the Mac, as I'm going to delight in destroying it myself.
> Just look at keyboard-gate to prove that, by design, Apple doesn't care about user productivity. I personally have a work issued 2019 16-inch MBP and it drives me insane.
One instance, which they fixed. Shall we enumerate the issues with the rest of the brands?
Interestingly your rage is what made that take so long in the first place. Engineers like to claim the sky is falling because their keyboard feels weird. How can anyone take someone like that seriously?
> Before this laptop, I'd never had to make sure my AC was turned on before I took Zoom meetings. With this thing, if the ambient temperature is over about 25 C, the CPU throttles to 1GHz and I get about 2 frames per second.
Meanwhile I run unreal engine on a macbook pro 13”, with no issues. Sometimes software sucks.
I bought a new Dell a couple of years ago and just after getting it I was sitting beside my wife on the couch. Her macbook had 2 out of 3 wifi bars while my dell had trouble connecting at all. Thankfully they accepted the return and issued a refund without much hassle. I got a Lenovo ThinkPad (T-Series) and it's been rock solid.
I switched to Dell because my Apple MBP was dead-dead and their existing line at the time was garbage according to everyone I knew who got one.
I had the same problem as you with my new Dell. On my own I replaced the Wi-Fi card with an Intel one and it fixed the problems. That said, I had the same battery issues, etc. as the original poster. I don't hate my XPS, but I would not buy again.
Thanks for the warning, friend!