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Dell needs to admit they're in deep shit. I just bought our entire G&A team M4 Macbook Air 15" for the same price as our Dell Pro laptops. They are 20% faster
by bearjaws 9mo ago
Dell needs to admit they're in deep shit.
I just bought our entire G&A team M4 Macbook Air 15" for the same price as our Dell Pro laptops.
They are 20% faster, have 2x the battery life, and 8 more gb of RAM. Also standby actually works.
We had done an initial batch of Dell Pro 16 laptops and with 16gb of ram + the 255h (now 258v) it's over $1100 a laptop. Only problem is... they need 32gb of RAM on Windows 11 because the performance was terrible. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team at 16gb. The upgrade to 32gb of RAM moves the price to $1500+ each, they also recently swapped to soldered RAM for both Intel and AMD, so we are forced to the $1500+ option with a faster CPU.
Initial reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, about 50% of them are new to Macs and have figured it out, additionally they all love the battery life and performance (most are switching from 11th and 12th gen Intel).
Our more tech savvy members have mentioned the better screen, webcam and audio as positives.
I am considering switching our call center (~200 members) to Mac mini's, the same price as our Lenovo mini PCs and will last a long time, the Core Ultra 210 is not great. My only fear is people stealing them really.
Why would I pay $2000 for Dells mid line series of business laptops? How much is this XPS going to cost vs a Mac book Pro?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- walterbell 9mo agoApple has kept prices stable for existing models, but is rumored to be paying 50% more for DRAM in 2026, which may impact pricing of new Apple devices that will be launched in 2026. edit: https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-market-in https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-mar... > The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
- bearjaws 9mo agoIf Apple can keep the price near $1500 for the M5, it will still be a no brainer. They are currently $200 cheaper, granted for less memory. I also am in the camp of you don't need quite as much memory on Apple, our most significant usage is Chrome, Excel and Teams. My main reason Apple can charge slightly more: Better performance, screen, battery, camera, microphone, and trackpad.
- ghaff 9mo agoIn my last job, I just bought my own laptops for a variety of reasons. Know that may not work for everyone. Also for a variety of reasons. But worked dor me.
- bitmasher9 9mo agoApple may be a good deal now, but historically they have been the expensive option. I would be concerned about the rug pull of spending time training people on macOS, setting the expectation that they will have it in the future, and then Apple returning to premium pricing before the next upgrade cycle. At least with Windows you have several hardware vendors competing to force market rate pricing. There are several good reasons to choose Apple, but I question the wisdom of choosing them for price.
- bearjaws 9mo agoHard to know for sure, I'd be curious the breakdown in cost for enterprise laptops, it's hard for me to understand why the price has increased 50% while Apple has increased 10%. Lenovo, Dell and HP are pretty much all the same price at this point. It's basically an oligopoly. The prices have crept up over the past 5 years and they have no reason to lower them. They know they aren't even competing with Apple since most large enterprises are all in on Windows. My bet is they have basically made their prices the same as Apple, and they plan to keep it that way.
- Moto7451 9mo agoIf you have the freedom to buy from Best Buy, Amazon, etc, this is certainly the case. However, depending on how you procure this hasn’t been the experience for over 20 years. By the time you’re done with CDW or whomever is your VAR, you’re not comparing a $600 basic PC laptop to a $1200 basic Mac Laptop. They know you’re like the GP and going to pay $1500 minimum and are probably game for $2000. They sell the “Business” line with whatever terms added. When I did this in K12 in the late 00s the price for a truly terrible Dell or IBM/Lenovo was the same as an iMac. For the corporate world there have been times you couldn’t get Virtualization support, hardware dock ports, and various other bits of support until you moved to buying the “Business” line and after a certain number of units the direct to retail options send you down the VAR path. There’s simply too much money involved for them to make it easier for you. I have not had to deal with this as a buyer since 2019 but the song seems to be the same as I work for a company that sells through CDW. Per the reps, the same stupid games are being played. The only times I haven’t had to deal with this is when the companies I’ve worked for just hand you a credit card to walk down to the Apple Store or are using Apple’s program which is basically the same thing but comes with a shared App Store account and some better support for swap outs.
- cptskippy 9mo agoWhat a weirdly worded post. You could have said something like: "Dell has priced it's Pro line of laptops in-line with Apple's Air equivalents, however Window 11's high resource utilization means we have to pay for higher spec machines while still ending up with reduced battery performance, and inferior screens, webcams and audio." But instead you make weird misleading statements like "and 8 more gb of RAM" and "it's over $1100 a laptop" that need to be decoded but are easily misunderstood if the reader lacks certain domain knowledge. Then you have these unqualified statements like "they also recently swapped to soldered RAM for both Intel and AMD" which implies that it's a bad move but don't articulate why or acknowledge that Apple has been doing this since 2008.
- _DeadFred_ 9mo agoBro, this is HN where the are so many obscure acronyms, frameworks, random Saas providers assumed everyone knows. This isn't a site where discussion can break down to the level of detail you seem to want. It just needs to be on the level anyone who knows what an XPS even is can follow.
- g947o 9mo agoThis is HN. I much prefer someone's raw, unfiltered words than ChatGPT generated legalese. I have enough of that nonsense at work.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo agoMaybe they should just shut the company down and give the money back to shareholders…
- Marsymars 9mo ago> We had done an initial batch of Dell Pro 16 laptops and with 16gb of ram + the 255h (now 258v) it's over $1100 a laptop. Only problem is... they need 32gb of RAM on Windows 11. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team at 16gb. Is that really much different than macOS? Checking my 32gb Mac Mini now, I'm sitting at 84% memory usage with just browsers, chat apps, some RDP/terminal windows, Mail and Apple Music open. I'd also note that Dell does sell Qualcomm laptops - I've got a 12-core/32gb Dell Qualcomm as my work PC - every piece of software I use for work is now native ARM64 and I've got no complaints about performance/functionality.
- bearjaws 9mo agoHow much is cached files? That is one thing I always note on Apple, typically I sit around 6-8gb of cached files.
- Marsymars 9mo ago4.3GB... which seems roughly similar to my 32GB Windows PC - it's sitting at 89% memory use with 3.5GB cached.
- gruez 9mo agoFor windows specifically cached memory looks very similar to unused memory so when someone is complaining about "windows is using all my memory" it's very unlikely to be caused by caches. https://softwareg.com.au/cdn/shop/articles/Windows-11-RAM-type.png https://softwareg.com.au/cdn/shop/articles/Windows-11-RAM-ty...
- ZiiS 9mo agoIt you bought anything except RAM, a laptop refusing to use 12% for no obvious reason would be note worthy.
- ghaff 9mo agoWhen I joined my last company, it would have been politically unpalatable to run Windows which was what I was used to, Linux was sort of frustrating to me at the time (even if I'm sure I could have adapted and it has improved in the last 15 years), and then there were Macs--which I had never used but turned out to be very straightforward. And I've been mostly in the Mac camp ever since even if I'll use other OSs as needed.
- dkarl 9mo agoI take the "premium" experience of Apple hardware for granted, and if I wanted to buy a Windows laptop, I'd have no idea which brands make similar quality laptops for Windows. I'm shocked at the Windows laptops I see in the wild. Is that what Microsoft Surface laptops are? Did Microsoft get in the game themselves to make sure a premium-quality laptop is available for Windows?
- g947o 9mo agoYes about the surface part. They thought all other 2-in-1 touch devices were terrible and needed to do something. But Microsoft stopped caring about hardware a long time ago. I would never recommend overpriced Surface Pro to anyone unless you have a special need for that form factor. As to Surface Laptop, you have so many better choices.
- neal_jones 9mo agoI’ve worked on a Lenovo Carbon X1 and was impressed with the whole thing. The keyboard is legit superior to Mac.
- regress_express 9mo agoI've found the X1s to be very easy to service as well. Maybe it's a Thinkpad thing.
- viraptor 9mo ago> Also standby actually works. That's a Windows issue. The recent active sleep (or whatever it's called) has been buggy across basically all hardware.
- yellottyellott 9mo agoomg is this a thing? i thought i was dumb or something. i bought an expensive 240hz qd oled and i kept coming into my office with the damn thing on without the screensaver, just burning in after having left it asleep. i’m so paranoid i just turn the whole computer off now.
- viraptor 9mo agoYup, it's extremely broken for software reasons. I see this across multiple Dells and ThinkPads. Linux has no problems sleeping on them. Windows just wakes up randomly on its own or never goes to sleep. Sleepstudy debugging doesn't show any reason. You can do some hacks to force it to hibernate instead of sleep to work around some of those problems.
- rationalist 9mo agoA long time ago, when I went to I think the Event Manager or something, it showed a Bluetooth event when my laptop woke up while it was in my backpack. I don't know if the Bluetooth software caused it, or after it woke up it did a Bluetooth thing. I imagine Event Manager or whatever still exists for those that want to investigate after it happens. I no longer use Windows and use Ubuntu instead.
- g947o 9mo agoModern Standby https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/modern-standby https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de... Yes it's shit. I have a work laptop that have all sorts of problems. I would leave work and return the next morning to find that the laptop had a bluescreen and rebooted. Many times. So IT disabled modern standby. (Now it takes almost as long to boot as a cold start, but at least I don't lose my work.) Although I have a personal laptop at home that seems to do fine. Still, that's nowhere as responsive as "instant on" experience as you would find on a Macbook. Of course, Microsoft lied again.
- Aurornis 9mo ago> We were seeing average 88% memory usage My 64GB MacBook Pro sits around that level after using it for a while, too. So do my Windows and Linux machines even with different amounts of RAM. There's a popular page explaining it for Linux, but it's applicable to every OS: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ Isolated RAM usage numbers aren't useful because spare memory is used for caching. Even if you are using 88% of the RAM, that's not indicative of a problem unless you're encountering a lot of swapping. Even swapping a little bit isn't bad if it's not stalling the machine out. You have to look at actual performance, not RAM usage percentages.
- zenoprax 9mo agoI don't understand why the default way to show RAM usage on Linux isn't to simply show "In Use vs. Available". I don't care how much cache is being used and I can't really do anything about it even if I did.
- fhdkweig 9mo agoatop (one of the many variants of top) reports numbers for "free", "available", and "cache" in its total systems report. As long as "available" is high, I don't worry about the RAM.
- Ferret7446 9mo agoCache is super important though. Not having enough memory for cache will tank your system performance, even if you have a ton of "available" memory
- zenoprax 9mo agoI'm not saying it's not important. It's that I don't have any control over it. Do I have enough "cache" in your opinion? Presently I have: Used: 14.6 Avail: 16.6 Cache: 4.2 Free: 6.4 If I'm asking the question "Is my system starved of RAM?" I am going to look at USED and AVAIL. CACHE is a curiosity more than anything else and FREE tells me nothing. Also, under what circumstances would I have a ton of AVAIL and be starving the CACHE? That's an OS/kernel problem. If AVAIL drops to zero I can expect to get OOM crashing pretty quick.
- lostlogin 9mo ago> They are 20% faster, have 2x the battery life, and 8 more gb of RAM. I thought the minimum spec was 16gb ram as of a while ago? > Mac mini If you’re paying for power, it would be interesting to see what effect that change to Mac’s has. I went from a nuc 9 to a mini and use less than 10% the power on the mini, and it’s more powerful.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- TacticalCoder 9mo ago> Dell needs to admit they're in deep shit. Yup, since forever and the reason is: > ... on Windows ... There's no fixing that. It doesn't matter how much inconsistent and how much suckage there's in every new MacOS release: it's simply impossible to suck as much as Microsoft products.
- smt88 9mo agoYou can install Linux on Dell laptops, or Dell will do it for you: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops/appref=ubuntu-linux-os https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops/app...
- tacker2000 9mo agoWhat is G&A?
- newsclues 9mo agoGeneral and administration staff?
- financetechbro 9mo agoYup
- giancarlostoro 9mo agoThing I hare about the Air is no internal fan. The Macbook Pro has them so if you do anything intensive like AI inference you have actual airflow. Additional point since you are considering Mac Minis. My wifes 2008 and 2010 Macbooks (the 2010 is a Pro) still turn on and run the OS just fine. I swapped the drive on the 2010 but its because she dropped it ages ago. Thats 16 years for the 2010, and 18 years for the 2008. I cant find a single Windows laptop that has lasted me this long EXCEPT the ones I installed Linux on. Something about *NIX literally saves your hardware lifespan.