Hacker News Reader

Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal, but my XPS13 is nowhere near the quality of a mac.

The trackpad has problems jumping about occasionally, the wifi is unreliable to say the least (linux, but I think also on windows) and the fan spins up sounding like it's catching on something. The audio quality is atrocious.

Oh and really bad coil whine as well, a problem I've never had with macs.

However, it's fairly alright and significantly cheaper.

View on HN

I just bought an XPS 13 9360 and returned it due to the coil whine. I've never had that issue on my Macs before so once I get refunded I'm going to buy a MBP instead.

I've been hearing about the coil whine for ages, but I've never heard it over multiple 9550s and a 9360. I'm even in an office right now surrounded by the 9550s which were supposed to be plagued by the issue. Is it that the whine is occurring at a frequency I can't hear?

my T450s has coil whine but you have to be in a dead silent room to hear it, I assume it would be the same for the Dells

It's loud enough on my 9350 I can hear it clearly over the top of music or videos playing.

FWIW, I replaced my WiFi/Bluetooth adapter immediately upon receiving my 9343. I had been following the XPS13 developer edition forums for a while, and the adapter that shipped with most XPS13 had a Broadcom chipset with bad Linux support. An Intel card was recommended instead. I actually had my card on-hand hand ready to go the day I received the laptop shipment.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RCZ4I6S/ref=od_aui_deta...

Ironically I swapped the Intel 7260 in my XPS 13 9333 out for a Broadcom chip since every ~10 seconds the thing would flake out and I'd get a spike in latency >300ms - made normal web browsing a pain, voice calls were annoying beyond belief.

The broadcom wireless cards are garbage even on windows. My 9350 came with one, and it caused issues with the thunderbolt dock and other type c devices.

There's a large difference between XPS 13 models. The 9343 was brilliant for what it was, the 9350 was a bit of a lemon, and the 9360 is the best yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com