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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

I can endorse the Dell XPS13 9343: small, light, great battery life, great screen/keyboard. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Some folks decided to replace the Broadcom wifi with Intel, because it's not ideal for linux. I believe that the newest XPS13 uses Intel instead.

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I'm pretty salty about Dell these days. I recommended my grandparents get a Dell so I wouldn't have to do too much tech support (I'm really rusty at Windows these days), and Dell decided that a machine manufactured and purchased in late 2012 is "too old" for them to bother making working Windows 10 drivers for. That's some real bullshit there.

Of course, Microsoft has no idea, so the machine gets updated to Windows 10 and tries to send 60hz to the 50hz built in monitor, which decided (actually sensibly) to just blink at you until you fix it.

That was a great experience...

I in-place upgraded three computers to Windows 10. All three had serious problems with the upgrade. On one the graphics became slow because it had Intel HD 3000 which apparently doesn't work well in Windows 10. On another the monitor would not turn on when resuming from sleep. On the third, the entire installation screwed up and required a wholesale reinstallation.

Those were one HP, one Lenovo, and one homegrown PC. So don't blame it on Dell.

I can certainly blame Dell for not supporting a Windows upgrade for computer that was only 2.5 year old on retail release, never mind previews and betas. It means they see their computers as disposable objects almost immediately after purchase, so why would I ever purchase one?

How is the build quality? I've had Dell laptops in the past given to me by my employer and the screen hinge has been a source of failure on two of them.

Better than the HP Elitebook I had previously, and no problems after 9 months.

The touchpad on the skylake 13 is bad (not sure if it is broken).

Macbook touchpads are still a tier above the rest, but the Skylake XPS touchpads are pretty good (and better than the previous XPS 13) based on the reviews.

I have one. Build quality is excellent! No complaints.

It's excellent IMO

What about the surface finish, isn't it prone to fingerprints etc?

It's not bad. If you get & use the touch screen, that gets smudgy. Not really sure what to do about that.

The soft-touch carbon fiber finish can hang on to a smudge, but the aluminum outer shell is very smudge-resistant. It's much better than plastic.

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