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Haven't experience coil whine myself from my XPS 13 9333, or my XPS 15 9560. Dell seem happy to replace the entire device or mainboard if you do get one that ha

Haven't experience coil whine myself from my XPS 13 9333, or my XPS 15 9560. Dell seem happy to replace the entire device or mainboard if you do get one that has an issue though. I was under the impression the reason not to get a butterfly keyboard was because they are prone to failure due to dust and crumbs? I'm not even sure what you mean by the brightness cannot be manually adjusted? The screen brightness obviously can be manually adjusted, and every XPS laptop I've owned has at least 3 levels of keyboard brightness controllable via F10, software, and can even be set in the BIOS. Precision isn't really better, just different, since you can get one with (older) Quadro GPU rather than a GTX card, and a Xeon rather than Core CPU. The chassis, display, support, build quality is otherwise identical.

qubitcoder 8y ago
I've been very happy with the Dell XPS 9650 thus far. I've used it as my primary development machine for nearly a year. The 4k screen is simply gorgeous; Linux support is fantastic, with everything working out of the box with Ubuntu (particularly 18.04). I also use a 2017 MacBook Pro with touchbar for iOS development. And while I've long recommended the MacBook Pro to others without hesitation, that began to change sometime in the past 2-3 years. The MacBook Pro screen actually looks blurry by comparison to the XPS 4k. Text isn't as sharp, and the colors are less vibrant (although the P3 color space is a nice improvement). It's a bit disappointing that Apple has yet to fundamentally improve upon the once unbeatable 2013 MacBook Pro "retina" screen, despite a few tweaks along the way. However, the XPS 9550 definitely suffered from the annoying coil whine. Moreover, I was never satisfied with the touchpad, especially the palm rejection. There was even a slight delay after tapping, which was just enough to be frustrating during daily use. The fans also came on more than expected, likely due to lackluster power management support for the novel Skylake architecture. And perhaps strangest of all was the repeating "W" key issue. Without rhyme or reason, the "W" key would sometimes repeat, as if being held down (despite not being stuck). Interestingly, there were BIOS updates to address this issue, and based on the Dell's forums, the "W" key issue has affected numerous laptop models over the years. Fortunately, it seems that Dell has finally managed to iron out these growing pains with the 9560. After purchasing it, I quickly upgraded to 32GB of memory, installed a Samsung 960 Pro SSD, and swapped out the Wifi chip for a better performing Intel model. You'd be hard pressed to find a better spec'd machine for linux / software development. I'll be curious to see if Apple can up their game with the 2018 MacBook Pro.

qubitcoder 8y ago

I've been very happy with the Dell XPS 9650 thus far. I've used it as my primary development machine for nearly a year. The 4k screen is simply gorgeous; Linux support is fantastic, with everything working out of the box with Ubuntu (particularly 18.04). I also use a 2017 MacBook Pro with touchbar for iOS development. And while I've long recommended the MacBook Pro to others without hesitation, that began to change sometime in the past 2-3 years. The MacBook Pro screen actually looks blurry by comparison to the XPS 4k. Text isn't as sharp, and the colors are less vibrant (although the P3 color space is a nice improvement). It's a bit disappointing that Apple has yet to fundamentally improve upon the once unbeatable 2013 MacBook Pro "retina" screen, despite a few tweaks along the way. However, the XPS 9550 definitely suffered from the annoying coil whine. Moreover, I was never satisfied with the touchpad, especially the palm rejection. There was even a slight delay after tapping, which was just enough to be frustrating during daily use. The fans also came on more than expected, likely due to lackluster power management support for the novel Skylake architecture. And perhaps strangest of all was the repeating "W" key issue. Without rhyme or reason, the "W" key would sometimes repeat, as if being held down (despite not being stuck). Interestingly, there were BIOS updates to address this issue, and based on the Dell's forums, the "W" key issue has affected numerous laptop models over the years. Fortunately, it seems that Dell has finally managed to iron out these growing pains with the 9560. After purchasing it, I quickly upgraded to 32GB of memory, installed a Samsung 960 Pro SSD, and swapped out the Wifi chip for a better performing Intel model. You'd be hard pressed to find a better spec'd machine for linux / software development. I'll be curious to see if Apple can up their game with the 2018 MacBook Pro.