I guess it really boils down to whether or not you specifically received a lemon or not. There's always going to be anecdotal evidence on either side of the led

I guess it really boils down to whether or not you specifically received a lemon or not. There's always going to be anecdotal evidence on either side of the ledger. That said, there's plenty of customer complaints that appear to point towards poor QA/QC by Dell. In particular, there's a very specific hardware defect with keyboards in the XPS line. Just search for "XPS tilde (~), F1, F2 not working". You'll quickly see this is an issue plaguing various models of XPS.