I'm surprised they think developers would be interested in this. Having worked with Dell in IT, you couldn't pay me to use anything they put their name on. Dell have a bad reputation in both hardware and peopleware, and it's well deserved.
I worked in a university's IT department for most of my undergraduate career and have nothing but good things to report about their business class laptops. Their low-end consumer grade laptops are, well, low-end. Most of the tales of disappointment I've heard from Dell are people who decided to scrape the bottom of the bargain bin and were disappointed when they got what they paid for.
Every single interaction save for one I've had with dell has been an absolute joy. Our rep remembers me by voice, and even when I've had servers with expired support, I've had techs following up with me to make sure issues have been resolved.
I don't know who you've been dealing with, but Dell has been a complete dream to deal with for me; more companies should be like them.
First one's screen broke.
Second one's graphics card was faulty.
Third one's sound was messed up, sent the PC in for repairs. Dell technicians dropped it on the ground, blamed me for doing it, then refused to further support it.
I don't care one way or the other if anyone else buys Dell; but there's no chance in hell that I will ever again.
Okay, anecdotes with anecdotes. The dell laptops that I've had (from the latitude series. That ugly gray one) have been sturdier than most bricks. I've dropped them on my wood floor, they've been tossed around in my backpack, had things spilled on them, and been abused in every way you can imagine.
They still keep chugging.
*When I'm talking about multiple laptops, I'm talking about multiple laptops within my company. Not my personal laptop [although I have had one]
I think this is because you are comparing the business laptop to the consumer edition. While I haven't actively shopped laptops for a few years, I have noticed that the business editions, while a tad more expensive and less "stylish", are usually much better built. My friends' consumer Dell laptops consistently fail within the first 1.5 years or so. My father's 6 year old Dell survived much abuse, and is doing fine.
The business versions of laptops are usually far better built, but you cannot buy them at Best Buy and the like.
That's an approximation of a review, but "shitty" is a relative thing. Compared to what?
Nothing is more annoying than opinions like "I hate X because it sucks" without an insightful counter-point like "You should try Y because it's much better for reasons A, B and C."
Dell servers are excellent. They are beautifully engineered, sacrifice nothing, and are extremely well supported.
Such "Dell sucks" anecdotes are generally of the "my company bought 400 of the cheapest desktops that Dell manufacturers, of which a couple presented troubles. Therefore Dell sucks." variety.
I own nothing from Dell beside my 23" Ultra Sharp monitor and I will tell you that I will never ever buy anything from Dell again.
The monitor is really awesome at its price point and I don't want to miss it but the service Dell is doing is the worst I have ever seen.
Let me tell you why.
When I bought the monitor I was really happy to get a 3 year ultra warranty service from Dell for free. So the monitor gets shipped and I plug into my MacBook Air. The monitor works but the colors are really bad like a 16 bit color scheme. I call the Dell "ultra service" and tell them just what happened. After changing three different employees the guy on the other hand asks me what happens and tell him that the screen looks broken when I plug it into my MacBook and his answer is "oh we don't Mac's cause Apple doesn't conform standard graphical ports. I really don't know about Mac's so I can't help you. Don't you have a "normal PC" to plug it in?". At this point it was clear to me that I would never buy something again from Dell!
It turned out that the monitor was broken and my next monitor worked just fine with my MacBook. the monitor was not replaced by Dell but by the shop I bought from cause they swear that the fault was my Mac.
Next time I will pay the extra money and buy something from Apple again. They don't do shit like that...
Even if Dell's monitors had a 50 percent failure rate and no warranty, you would still be saving money by purchasing only Dell monitors. While price isn't likely your only concern, $1000 for a monitor(even a nice one) is really ridiculous. When you consider the fact that a 27" iMac only costs about $1700, it only seems even more absurd.
My experience with Dell support was actually pretty good. A DVD-drive in my desktop broke after a few months, and after calling Dell support and going through some obligatory motions (turning the computer on/off, re-installing some drivers etc), they just sent me a new DVD-drive.
I hardly want to defend Dell support (knock on wood but I've never, ever had to directly deal with them), however what you experienced is hardly unique -- they see a usage outside of the norm and assume the usage is to blame. Honestly if I were you I would have said "Oh yeah, plugged it into my `normal' PC and it still looks terrible" and they would have replaced it. Unfortunate that it demands a lie or two, but such is the nature of tech support.
And I would hardly give Apple a free pass. They are the ones who are quite eager to blame any issue on a water sensor that is well known to indicate false positives.
