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On the contrary I've had great experiences with Dell's business line (Latitude, Precision models). Likewise the business warranty is excellent - log into TechDi

by branon 4y ago

On the contrary I've had great experiences with Dell's business line (Latitude, Precision models). Likewise the business warranty is excellent - log into TechDirect and I can submit a ticket for any one of the machines in my fleet. Dell will either send a technician out to service it in the field, or they'll mail me an empty box so I can send the unit in for repair. Consumer _anything_ is going to be hit or miss. This is known. Buying Dell's consumer line and having a hard time trying to cash in on the consumer warranty doesn't mean Dell is shit, just means their priorities are elsewhere. XPS in particular I see lots of complaints about so I don't know why one would willingly buy what one _knows_ is their lowend (yes, it's lowend crap - we know this because they advertise it as "consumer highend"). It probably still gets the job done for most people who own one. Buy a recent, used Latitude next time and quit worrying - they are great.

gowings97 4y ago
Oh how I wish the Latitude line had Ryzen and USB4.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  The latest Latitudes have USB4: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/latitude-15-5530-laptop/latitude_5530_ss/external-ports?guid=guid-4c4cc1ba-66a4-45f0-8dfc-6013a624ddc0&lang=en-us&lwp=rt https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/latitude-15-5530-...
bastawhiz 4y ago
> Buying Dell's consumer line and having a hard time trying to cash in on the consumer warranty doesn't mean Dell is shit, just means their priorities are elsewhere. This is the whole point of the site: don't buy products from companies whose priorities are elsewhere.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  This is same for other manufacturers too. HP: Pavilions are bad, Pro/Elite/Z series are awesome. Servers are good too. Lenovo: Ideapads are eh, Thinkpads and servers, completely different. The only company which builds all their hardware with comparable quality to other manufacturers' pro lines is Apple.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    Then again Ideapads can be dirt cheap.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      I'll rather buy an expensive machine and use for a decade without problems instead of buying a dirt cheap machine and suffer indefinitely.
      - shmoe 4y ago
        So many people go the other way on this :(
  - iknowSFR 4y ago
    Is there a website or directory where all tech companies strengths/priorities are listed out? Hardware, software, and services companies included?
  - ninjaoxygen 4y ago
    Funnily enough based off Lenovo's reputation for their higher end laptops, in April I bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen10, pretty much as they came out. The machine is a nightmare, and has been through about 10 firmware updates over the last 6 months, but has barely improved. From day one and still now... on Win11 that it shipped with it won't hibernate, just a black screen on resume, then pot luck over the next boots whether it starts or not. Sometimes from shutdown it does the same thing. Under little load, it gets hot as hell, you literally can't type on it, I use a bluetooth keyboard. If I'm doing light dev work, 3h battery life, tops. Audio drivers are broken, the internal 3.5mm just emits noise above around 10% volume and is distorted below that. Shipped with an underpowered 45W adapter... same SKU now ships with a 65W (an i7-1260p w/32GB). I don't think it's faulty, there are plenty of people with the same story about Gen10s. Mine is in for repair now, so we'll see, if it comes back with the same issues, it's getting warranty returned. I know the X1 Carbon Gen9 is a really good machine, maybe Lenovo got screwed by Intel's 12th Gen platform and Microsoft's support for the processor, but the machine should not be going out the door like that. Come to think of it... my XPS15 9560 from 2017 is STILL a better machine, which is what I switched back to while it's in for service (and cost half as much!)
- duxup 4y ago
  Do you have some suggestions on companies whose priorities are better? It would be good to know.
  - christophilus 4y ago
    Apple has been rock solid for me for a decade. Their priorities aren’t fully aligned with mine, but they’re as close as any company I know of. I really want to try a System76 or Framework as my next machine.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > Apple has been rock solid for me for a decade. Their priorities aren’t fully aligned with mine, but they’re as close as any company I know of. I really want to try a System76 or Framework as my next machine. Aren't all those premium products? Many of the complaints here read like: "I usually BMWs, but I decided to buy a Honda Fit and hated it. It's small and under-powered, nothing like the BMWs I prefer: Honda sucks. Honda should adopt the BMW strategy of making all their products premium."
      - shellfishgene 4y ago
        I think it's more the case that the Honda Fit would come with engine problems that the service doesn't effectively repair under warranty, and also with a 5000 pound trailer full of unwanted junk that's hard to remove from the car.
        tablespoon 4y ago
        > I think it's more the case that the Honda Fit would come with engine problems that the service doesn't effectively repair under warranty, and also with a 5000 pound trailer full of unwanted junk that's hard to remove from the car. No. A lot of the complaints, including in the OP are about things like product-line complexity and design compromises likely from designing to a lower price. Some people are venting anecdotes about horrible support and product quality experiences, but that's true for even Apple laptops. The literal worst laptop experience I've ever had was with a 2018 MacBook that would inscrutably and randomly freeze on wake for minutes on end. Apple replaced random parts but otherwise refused to help. The only thing that fixed the problem was a OS downgrade that Apple tried its hardest to make impossible.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  I actually was about to buy a Dell XPS machine a while back. When their ecommerce side was so incredibly crap to use that I moved over to Lenovo(which isn't that much better but seems to have much better warranty). I'm glad their priorities are elsewhere, because otherwise I would have bought it first and noticed later. The enterprises that I met, don't actually buy directly from dell. They almost always buy through a third party partnership of some sort.
bayindirh 4y ago
We have a fleet of Dell servers, and they are the fastest booting, most enduring, easily configured and managed machines. This is true for many generations we have. We also have servers from other usual big manufacturers, and while some are close, Dells are much better. Ah, also they're much more silent w.r.t. other servers even when you don't enable acoustic management.
- a2tech 4y ago
  They used to be fast booting before switching to the UEFI monster they have now.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    I need to time one of the latest ones we have, but as far as I remember, even they are faster than a certain company's servers, and Intel's reference/development servers. Both were booting in 5+ minutes under normal circumstances.
    - a2tech 4y ago
      I bet its between 3-5 with the Dells. Its long enough that I often have that sinking feeling after issuing a reboot where I think its hanging and I'll need to make a trip to the data center...just to finally breath a sigh of relief when I see that 'ssh connection closed' message as it finally gets into the linux boot sequence.
criddell 4y ago
My daughter bought an Alienware laptop and a key broke off the keyboard after about a month. I contacted Dell through Twitter and they sent a technician to her college dorm next day and fixed it.
- nullwarp 4y ago
  Yeah similar experiences. The difference between getting my dell laptops fixed vs the absolute nightmarish hellscape of dealing with the apple store to get one fixed is enough to keep me a dell customer forever.
velcrovan 4y ago
We have had terrible problems with the Precision 3000 series overheating/blue-screening on our engineers while using SolidWorks and AutoCAD, and Dell’s response to us was that they couldn’t recommend that series for that purpose, after their rep had done exactly that. Also their WD19TB docks have been terrible. The display ports randomly crap out, the power supply randomly craps out, the ethernet ports randomly crap out. Sometimes it requires driver updates, sometimes a dock firmware update, sometimes it actually is just the hardware. Such a bitch to troubleshoot. I get the appeal of Dell for business use, but I would never tell anyone that they are “great” for any kind of customer. They are the Sears of laptops.
- a2tech 4y ago
  Those docks are a mess. USB-C/Thunderbolt is an AWFUL connector for a dock. The strain on the cables (docks are always shoved in weird corners with tight turns and pressure on the cable) and the ports get worn out very fast with the stress. HPs slimline docks with the retractable plug on the side was probably the best/most reliable dock I've ever seen in production. And the Precisions have bad heat management. All it takes is a little dust and the temps go nuts. I have engineers using them on shop floors and they have to clean them constantly so AutoCAD doesn't overheat (especially when they're on the dock running full tilt with a couple of external monitors)
  - EvanAnderson 4y ago
    I'm nursing an older Elitebook w/ that side connector along right now. It's wonderful. The people sitting around me with newer models using Thunderbolt docks have been having fits-- blue screens, wild CPU usage, monitors going out, etc. I'll give up the slimline dock when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    There is a great difference between "true" Dell Precision series (e.g. the 7000 series) and those Dell Precision which are just rebranded Dell XPS and which are marketed as thin and light laptops. The Dell Precision 7xxx have excellent heat management. I have a 6-year old Dell Precision 7510 mobile workstation, in which the CPU can dissipate in the steady state 60 W for hours (even if its nominal TDP is only 45 W), while the NVIDIA Quadro GPU also dissipates around 100 W at the same time, and this without overheating and without excessive noise. Obviously, this is a rather thick and heavy laptop, not an ultrabook.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
>>Consumer _anything_ is going to be hit or miss. I kind of agree with that philosophy. I have friends who had bad customer experience with Bell for their cell, have switched to Rogers, and for the rest of their lives will yell that Bell is horrible and Rogers is awesome. But I also have friends who did exactly the opposite thing from Rogers to Bell. I have friends who have had bad personal experience with TD Canada bank teller / customer service, and switched to CIBC, and will spend the rest of their lives telling everybody how TD is awful and CIBC is awesome. And I also have friends with exact opposite experience. One of my friendships completely deteriorated when they warned me to NEVER EVER shop at Canadian Tire. Why? In 1978 her dad had a bad experience with a Canadian Tire car shop in Regina. I made a mistake of engaging and discussing there are over 500 stores with tens of thousands of employees and millions of different experiences, EVERY company will have statistical error rate, and "This one time at a bandcamp something bad happened" might not form the pinnacle of my decision making process (not that bluntly of course:), I got a look like I'm an alien being and what KIND of friend doesn't immediately take another person's word to not shop somehwere, no follow-up questions asked???!?!!!11 Anyway :). Every company will have some percentage of bad customer experiences. Stories, even reviews, are a poor and maybe even deceptive way for a person to decide how to weigh their risks. I don't know of a perfect way because we don't have perfect information - what is Dell error rate compared to Lenovo compared to HP? I do agree that every company will have an error rate especially in their consumer stuff where we are explicitly not willing to pay for quality, and only pay, at best, for superficial specs or attributes. Nothing on that website has shown me any statistics or argument that Dell is special. Like others, I've had good experience with Dell business models, just like with Lenovo business models and HP business models. And I've tended to have bad experience with plasticky crap of consumer models.
- julianlam 4y ago
  For what it's worth, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests Canadian Tire is not a chain that prides itself on quality — from LED bulbs that last a month, to their auto department that makes it a priority to overcharge and over diagnose ignorant drivers. Their markups are also a little nuts. If you can regularly discount items 90%, then you've been regularly overcharging. They have the moniker "crappy tire" for a reason.
fimbulvetr 4y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I only buy dell, and of them, I only buy latitudes. My favorite of all time was my e6440 with an socket CPU. I bought my wife one a couple of years ago, threw a quad core in there, maxed the ram and it's still working well. I had one just like it for myself but after years of my dog knocking it off the coffee table, it eventually stopped displaying. You can put three hard drives in these guys, one in the intended, one in the cd/dvd caddy and one in an m2 slot. I ran linux on it for it's entire 7-8 year life. Today I have a 5490 (4 years old) which is a beast and puts up with tons of abuse, including drops. I've run linux on it since day 1 and never had a driver issue and is a solid workhorse. I've always had dell latitudes, and will continue buying them as long as they last me 8 years each and run linux.
- bionsystem 4y ago
  I have a latitude from 2013 that I bought 2nd handed in 2015 or 16. I still run it on holidays (convenient 12.5 inches for travelling) and it still has 4+ hours of battery and works pretty well. I switched from Ubuntu 14 to Lubuntu and it feels like new :) Lacks a bit of RAM (4Go) for some tasks but still does ok. Probably its replacement when it dies will be a used thinkpad though, will see.
- olvy0 4y ago
  Me too! My main computing machine is a latitude from the e5xxx line which I bought 7 years ago, with a dual Intel-Nvidia GPU. it's still working perfectly, no issues whatsoever, and survived a few falls and travels. I also use it as my gaming machine, its GPU is good enough for most modern lite games and modern emulators, I don't expect top performance of course. It almost never gets too hot.
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
My last 3 PC's have been Dell. The most recent being a desktop I bought off-lease for about $120. Such a great experience that I can see myself never buying new again. I simply don't need top of the line performance for software development, no matter what anyone else says. There's essentially no usable difference between my 6 year-old personal laptop and the new one I got at work last year when doing development.
cptaj 4y ago
I dont know, what you describe does mean to me as a consumer that dell is shit so it seems pretty justified
sf_rob 4y ago
Granted my experience is filtered through my IT department, but my experience with Dell's enterprise warranty was anything but smooth. Replacing a faulty m2 and a motherboard were both multi-week affairs, so bad that I wrote our CTO about our machine requisition policies.
maxsilver 4y ago
I'm sympathetic to the idea that the consumer line has less support and extras than a business-class device backed by an enterprise support agreement. I'm not sympathetic to someone dropping $1,400 USD on a new laptop, and gets written off because "consumer _anything_ is hit or miss". Like, half of the complaints come from devices like the XPS 13, which isn't some $300 cheap-o WallMart special, that's supposed to be their flagship top-of-the-line device. If Apple did the same to like, the MacBook Air or whatever, there would be months-long complaint threads all over HN about it.
- tanjtanjtanj 4y ago
  It's also funny because for most years the XPS is the exact same device as the enterprise model just with a better support contract.
- JohnTHaller 4y ago
  I mean, Apple has done this repeatedly with their top of the line machines. Think the stage light issue compounded by the absurd decision to permanently connect a $7 cable to a $800 display panel or the butterfly keyboard. Or my friend who went to 3 different Apple stores to ask about her issues using Final Cut and all of them telling her she needed a new laptop to the point that she bought a brand new 16" MacBook Pro she couldn't afford... when all she needed was a USB-C external SSD and to work on her larger projects from there. Luckily I talked to her about it and loaned her mine before she'd opened the new laptop so she returned it.
jabroni_salad 4y ago
Just throwing this out there, but you can put Prosupport on anything if you ask about it in their live chat. Even the refurbs from Warehouse.
edmcnulty101 4y ago
Macintosh has entered the building
Beltalowda 4y ago
Friend of mine had an XPS; I don't remember exactly how much it cost, but it was certainly not the cheapest, so ~$1000 USD at least. After about 1.5 to 2 years the battery started swelling up, and became essentially unusable. Turns out they even had a recall for this model, but who keeps track of that so he never knew. Tried to order a new battery from Dell: they don't deliver them any more, no way to buy it from Dell. Tried to order one from 3rd party: that one won't work because "not a genuine battery detected kthxfuckyoulol". I don't care if it's "consumer" or "low end" or whatever, this is just ridiculous and in my opinion should quite literally be illegal (and perhaps it already is). If Dell doesn't want to manufacture batteries: fine. But let someone else do it so we don't have to throw away our laptops after 2 years.
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  The XPS was their higher end answer to the unibody Macbooks a few years back, and peer with Lenovo's Thinkpad X-series. The Inspiron line is a "cheap is expensive" trap for consumers, you can't blame people if they judge the whole company for their mass-consumption offering when its cheap build breaks at the hinges for everybody.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    Frankly, if they're cutting corners on one product to the point it affects their brand image, they're probably cutting corners on all of them. This is one thing Apple gets right, their products are solid all the way down to the low end (iPhone SE et al). (After reading further I see others have made the same point. Oops.)
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      Apple SE is of course not really "low end". But I do agree with your overall point; back when I worked at a computer store people would come in to buy a laptop, and they wouldn't want a HP – even when that was actually a good model and a good fit for their needs – because they had a bad experience with a HP printer. I think that's actually pretty fair too, although I usually explained that the people who design the HP printers most likely never even talked to the people who design the HP laptops, and that even within $brand laptops there are are huge fundamental differences. I suppose that overall, on balance, the brand recognition of "Dell" or "HP" outweighs the negative associations people have across the product range.
iancmceachern 4y ago
Me too. My last laptop was a dell outlet refurbished precision laptop that was 2 years old when I bought it, I then used it for 5 years and it still works today, in just replaced it with a smaller/faster precision that has also been great. I need high performance and reliability to run Solidworks all day and count on our to deliver, they haven't let me down yet (knock on wood)
kelsolaar 4y ago
I had such a bad experience with a Precision M90 that I decided to never ever buy Dell again. Motherboard changed 3 times until the warranty ran out and it was over. I discussed with the last contractor that came to repair my machine and he told me that a) he would never buy from Dell, b) that the pieces use for repair were often refurbished, c) they knew that there was an issue with my particular laptop model but was running the warranty expiring game. With that being said, their onsite servicing is outstanding.

by branon 4y ago

gowings97 4y ago

Oh how I wish the Latitude line had Ryzen and USB4.

Kwpolska 4y ago
The latest Latitudes have USB4: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/latitude-15-5530-laptop/latitude_5530_ss/external-ports?guid=guid-4c4cc1ba-66a4-45f0-8dfc-6013a624ddc0&lang=en-us&lwp=rt https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/latitude-15-5530-...

bastawhiz 4y ago

> Buying Dell's consumer line and having a hard time trying to cash in on the consumer warranty doesn't mean Dell is shit, just means their priorities are elsewhere. This is the whole point of the site: don't buy products from companies whose priorities are elsewhere.

bayindirh 4y ago
This is same for other manufacturers too. HP: Pavilions are bad, Pro/Elite/Z series are awesome. Servers are good too. Lenovo: Ideapads are eh, Thinkpads and servers, completely different. The only company which builds all their hardware with comparable quality to other manufacturers' pro lines is Apple.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  Then again Ideapads can be dirt cheap.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    I'll rather buy an expensive machine and use for a decade without problems instead of buying a dirt cheap machine and suffer indefinitely.
    - shmoe 4y ago
      So many people go the other way on this :(
- iknowSFR 4y ago
  Is there a website or directory where all tech companies strengths/priorities are listed out? Hardware, software, and services companies included?
- ninjaoxygen 4y ago
  Funnily enough based off Lenovo's reputation for their higher end laptops, in April I bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen10, pretty much as they came out. The machine is a nightmare, and has been through about 10 firmware updates over the last 6 months, but has barely improved. From day one and still now... on Win11 that it shipped with it won't hibernate, just a black screen on resume, then pot luck over the next boots whether it starts or not. Sometimes from shutdown it does the same thing. Under little load, it gets hot as hell, you literally can't type on it, I use a bluetooth keyboard. If I'm doing light dev work, 3h battery life, tops. Audio drivers are broken, the internal 3.5mm just emits noise above around 10% volume and is distorted below that. Shipped with an underpowered 45W adapter... same SKU now ships with a 65W (an i7-1260p w/32GB). I don't think it's faulty, there are plenty of people with the same story about Gen10s. Mine is in for repair now, so we'll see, if it comes back with the same issues, it's getting warranty returned. I know the X1 Carbon Gen9 is a really good machine, maybe Lenovo got screwed by Intel's 12th Gen platform and Microsoft's support for the processor, but the machine should not be going out the door like that. Come to think of it... my XPS15 9560 from 2017 is STILL a better machine, which is what I switched back to while it's in for service (and cost half as much!)
duxup 4y ago
Do you have some suggestions on companies whose priorities are better? It would be good to know.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Apple has been rock solid for me for a decade. Their priorities aren’t fully aligned with mine, but they’re as close as any company I know of. I really want to try a System76 or Framework as my next machine.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Apple has been rock solid for me for a decade. Their priorities aren’t fully aligned with mine, but they’re as close as any company I know of. I really want to try a System76 or Framework as my next machine. Aren't all those premium products? Many of the complaints here read like: "I usually BMWs, but I decided to buy a Honda Fit and hated it. It's small and under-powered, nothing like the BMWs I prefer: Honda sucks. Honda should adopt the BMW strategy of making all their products premium."
    - shellfishgene 4y ago
      I think it's more the case that the Honda Fit would come with engine problems that the service doesn't effectively repair under warranty, and also with a 5000 pound trailer full of unwanted junk that's hard to remove from the car.
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        > I think it's more the case that the Honda Fit would come with engine problems that the service doesn't effectively repair under warranty, and also with a 5000 pound trailer full of unwanted junk that's hard to remove from the car. No. A lot of the complaints, including in the OP are about things like product-line complexity and design compromises likely from designing to a lower price. Some people are venting anecdotes about horrible support and product quality experiences, but that's true for even Apple laptops. The literal worst laptop experience I've ever had was with a 2018 MacBook that would inscrutably and randomly freeze on wake for minutes on end. Apple replaced random parts but otherwise refused to help. The only thing that fixed the problem was a OS downgrade that Apple tried its hardest to make impossible.
rjzzleep 4y ago
I actually was about to buy a Dell XPS machine a while back. When their ecommerce side was so incredibly crap to use that I moved over to Lenovo(which isn't that much better but seems to have much better warranty). I'm glad their priorities are elsewhere, because otherwise I would have bought it first and noticed later. The enterprises that I met, don't actually buy directly from dell. They almost always buy through a third party partnership of some sort.

bayindirh 4y ago

We have a fleet of Dell servers, and they are the fastest booting, most enduring, easily configured and managed machines. This is true for many generations we have. We also have servers from other usual big manufacturers, and while some are close, Dells are much better. Ah, also they're much more silent w.r.t. other servers even when you don't enable acoustic management.

a2tech 4y ago
They used to be fast booting before switching to the UEFI monster they have now.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  I need to time one of the latest ones we have, but as far as I remember, even they are faster than a certain company's servers, and Intel's reference/development servers. Both were booting in 5+ minutes under normal circumstances.
  - a2tech 4y ago
    I bet its between 3-5 with the Dells. Its long enough that I often have that sinking feeling after issuing a reboot where I think its hanging and I'll need to make a trip to the data center...just to finally breath a sigh of relief when I see that 'ssh connection closed' message as it finally gets into the linux boot sequence.

criddell 4y ago

My daughter bought an Alienware laptop and a key broke off the keyboard after about a month. I contacted Dell through Twitter and they sent a technician to her college dorm next day and fixed it.

nullwarp 4y ago
Yeah similar experiences. The difference between getting my dell laptops fixed vs the absolute nightmarish hellscape of dealing with the apple store to get one fixed is enough to keep me a dell customer forever.

velcrovan 4y ago

We have had terrible problems with the Precision 3000 series overheating/blue-screening on our engineers while using SolidWorks and AutoCAD, and Dell’s response to us was that they couldn’t recommend that series for that purpose, after their rep had done exactly that. Also their WD19TB docks have been terrible. The display ports randomly crap out, the power supply randomly craps out, the ethernet ports randomly crap out. Sometimes it requires driver updates, sometimes a dock firmware update, sometimes it actually is just the hardware. Such a bitch to troubleshoot. I get the appeal of Dell for business use, but I would never tell anyone that they are “great” for any kind of customer. They are the Sears of laptops.

a2tech 4y ago
Those docks are a mess. USB-C/Thunderbolt is an AWFUL connector for a dock. The strain on the cables (docks are always shoved in weird corners with tight turns and pressure on the cable) and the ports get worn out very fast with the stress. HPs slimline docks with the retractable plug on the side was probably the best/most reliable dock I've ever seen in production. And the Precisions have bad heat management. All it takes is a little dust and the temps go nuts. I have engineers using them on shop floors and they have to clean them constantly so AutoCAD doesn't overheat (especially when they're on the dock running full tilt with a couple of external monitors)
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  I'm nursing an older Elitebook w/ that side connector along right now. It's wonderful. The people sitting around me with newer models using Thunderbolt docks have been having fits-- blue screens, wild CPU usage, monitors going out, etc. I'll give up the slimline dock when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  There is a great difference between "true" Dell Precision series (e.g. the 7000 series) and those Dell Precision which are just rebranded Dell XPS and which are marketed as thin and light laptops. The Dell Precision 7xxx have excellent heat management. I have a 6-year old Dell Precision 7510 mobile workstation, in which the CPU can dissipate in the steady state 60 W for hours (even if its nominal TDP is only 45 W), while the NVIDIA Quadro GPU also dissipates around 100 W at the same time, and this without overheating and without excessive noise. Obviously, this is a rather thick and heavy laptop, not an ultrabook.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

>>Consumer _anything_ is going to be hit or miss. I kind of agree with that philosophy. I have friends who had bad customer experience with Bell for their cell, have switched to Rogers, and for the rest of their lives will yell that Bell is horrible and Rogers is awesome. But I also have friends who did exactly the opposite thing from Rogers to Bell. I have friends who have had bad personal experience with TD Canada bank teller / customer service, and switched to CIBC, and will spend the rest of their lives telling everybody how TD is awful and CIBC is awesome. And I also have friends with exact opposite experience. One of my friendships completely deteriorated when they warned me to NEVER EVER shop at Canadian Tire. Why? In 1978 her dad had a bad experience with a Canadian Tire car shop in Regina. I made a mistake of engaging and discussing there are over 500 stores with tens of thousands of employees and millions of different experiences, EVERY company will have statistical error rate, and "This one time at a bandcamp something bad happened" might not form the pinnacle of my decision making process (not that bluntly of course:), I got a look like I'm an alien being and what KIND of friend doesn't immediately take another person's word to not shop somehwere, no follow-up questions asked???!?!!!11 Anyway :). Every company will have some percentage of bad customer experiences. Stories, even reviews, are a poor and maybe even deceptive way for a person to decide how to weigh their risks. I don't know of a perfect way because we don't have perfect information - what is Dell error rate compared to Lenovo compared to HP? I do agree that every company will have an error rate especially in their consumer stuff where we are explicitly not willing to pay for quality, and only pay, at best, for superficial specs or attributes. Nothing on that website has shown me any statistics or argument that Dell is special. Like others, I've had good experience with Dell business models, just like with Lenovo business models and HP business models. And I've tended to have bad experience with plasticky crap of consumer models.

julianlam 4y ago
For what it's worth, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests Canadian Tire is not a chain that prides itself on quality — from LED bulbs that last a month, to their auto department that makes it a priority to overcharge and over diagnose ignorant drivers. Their markups are also a little nuts. If you can regularly discount items 90%, then you've been regularly overcharging. They have the moniker "crappy tire" for a reason.

fimbulvetr 4y ago

Wholeheartedly agree. I only buy dell, and of them, I only buy latitudes. My favorite of all time was my e6440 with an socket CPU. I bought my wife one a couple of years ago, threw a quad core in there, maxed the ram and it's still working well. I had one just like it for myself but after years of my dog knocking it off the coffee table, it eventually stopped displaying. You can put three hard drives in these guys, one in the intended, one in the cd/dvd caddy and one in an m2 slot. I ran linux on it for it's entire 7-8 year life. Today I have a 5490 (4 years old) which is a beast and puts up with tons of abuse, including drops. I've run linux on it since day 1 and never had a driver issue and is a solid workhorse. I've always had dell latitudes, and will continue buying them as long as they last me 8 years each and run linux.

bionsystem 4y ago
I have a latitude from 2013 that I bought 2nd handed in 2015 or 16. I still run it on holidays (convenient 12.5 inches for travelling) and it still has 4+ hours of battery and works pretty well. I switched from Ubuntu 14 to Lubuntu and it feels like new :) Lacks a bit of RAM (4Go) for some tasks but still does ok. Probably its replacement when it dies will be a used thinkpad though, will see.
olvy0 4y ago
Me too! My main computing machine is a latitude from the e5xxx line which I bought 7 years ago, with a dual Intel-Nvidia GPU. it's still working perfectly, no issues whatsoever, and survived a few falls and travels. I also use it as my gaming machine, its GPU is good enough for most modern lite games and modern emulators, I don't expect top performance of course. It almost never gets too hot.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

My last 3 PC's have been Dell. The most recent being a desktop I bought off-lease for about $120. Such a great experience that I can see myself never buying new again. I simply don't need top of the line performance for software development, no matter what anyone else says. There's essentially no usable difference between my 6 year-old personal laptop and the new one I got at work last year when doing development.

cptaj 4y ago

I dont know, what you describe does mean to me as a consumer that dell is shit so it seems pretty justified

sf_rob 4y ago

Granted my experience is filtered through my IT department, but my experience with Dell's enterprise warranty was anything but smooth. Replacing a faulty m2 and a motherboard were both multi-week affairs, so bad that I wrote our CTO about our machine requisition policies.

maxsilver 4y ago

I'm sympathetic to the idea that the consumer line has less support and extras than a business-class device backed by an enterprise support agreement. I'm not sympathetic to someone dropping $1,400 USD on a new laptop, and gets written off because "consumer _anything_ is hit or miss". Like, half of the complaints come from devices like the XPS 13, which isn't some $300 cheap-o WallMart special, that's supposed to be their flagship top-of-the-line device. If Apple did the same to like, the MacBook Air or whatever, there would be months-long complaint threads all over HN about it.

tanjtanjtanj 4y ago
It's also funny because for most years the XPS is the exact same device as the enterprise model just with a better support contract.
JohnTHaller 4y ago
I mean, Apple has done this repeatedly with their top of the line machines. Think the stage light issue compounded by the absurd decision to permanently connect a $7 cable to a $800 display panel or the butterfly keyboard. Or my friend who went to 3 different Apple stores to ask about her issues using Final Cut and all of them telling her she needed a new laptop to the point that she bought a brand new 16" MacBook Pro she couldn't afford... when all she needed was a USB-C external SSD and to work on her larger projects from there. Luckily I talked to her about it and loaned her mine before she'd opened the new laptop so she returned it.

jabroni_salad 4y ago

Just throwing this out there, but you can put Prosupport on anything if you ask about it in their live chat. Even the refurbs from Warehouse.

edmcnulty101 4y ago

Macintosh has entered the building

Beltalowda 4y ago

Friend of mine had an XPS; I don't remember exactly how much it cost, but it was certainly not the cheapest, so ~$1000 USD at least. After about 1.5 to 2 years the battery started swelling up, and became essentially unusable. Turns out they even had a recall for this model, but who keeps track of that so he never knew. Tried to order a new battery from Dell: they don't deliver them any more, no way to buy it from Dell. Tried to order one from 3rd party: that one won't work because "not a genuine battery detected kthxfuckyoulol". I don't care if it's "consumer" or "low end" or whatever, this is just ridiculous and in my opinion should quite literally be illegal (and perhaps it already is). If Dell doesn't want to manufacture batteries: fine. But let someone else do it so we don't have to throw away our laptops after 2 years.

forgetfulness 4y ago
The XPS was their higher end answer to the unibody Macbooks a few years back, and peer with Lenovo's Thinkpad X-series. The Inspiron line is a "cheap is expensive" trap for consumers, you can't blame people if they judge the whole company for their mass-consumption offering when its cheap build breaks at the hinges for everybody.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  Frankly, if they're cutting corners on one product to the point it affects their brand image, they're probably cutting corners on all of them. This is one thing Apple gets right, their products are solid all the way down to the low end (iPhone SE et al). (After reading further I see others have made the same point. Oops.)
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    Apple SE is of course not really "low end". But I do agree with your overall point; back when I worked at a computer store people would come in to buy a laptop, and they wouldn't want a HP – even when that was actually a good model and a good fit for their needs – because they had a bad experience with a HP printer. I think that's actually pretty fair too, although I usually explained that the people who design the HP printers most likely never even talked to the people who design the HP laptops, and that even within $brand laptops there are are huge fundamental differences. I suppose that overall, on balance, the brand recognition of "Dell" or "HP" outweighs the negative associations people have across the product range.

iancmceachern 4y ago

Me too. My last laptop was a dell outlet refurbished precision laptop that was 2 years old when I bought it, I then used it for 5 years and it still works today, in just replaced it with a smaller/faster precision that has also been great. I need high performance and reliability to run Solidworks all day and count on our to deliver, they haven't let me down yet (knock on wood)

kelsolaar 4y ago

I had such a bad experience with a Precision M90 that I decided to never ever buy Dell again. Motherboard changed 3 times until the warranty ran out and it was over. I discussed with the last contractor that came to repair my machine and he told me that a) he would never buy from Dell, b) that the pieces use for repair were often refurbished, c) they knew that there was an issue with my particular laptop model but was running the warranty expiring game. With that being said, their onsite servicing is outstanding.