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Comment by speedplane | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why a ThinkPad is preferable to an XPS 15 besides nostalgia?

The keyboard is not even a different league - it's a whole different ball game.

After switching to a MacBook the keyboard is the thing I miss the most.

This is the type of stuff I want to hear (I'm replacing my 4 year old laptop in the next two months)... what's so good about thinkpad keyboards?

You can type, you feel that you're typing, and you kind of start to understand why typing might even be considered fun.

It's a bit hard to explain, the travel on the keys is just really good, comfortable size and shape, etc. See if you can borrow one for a day and type on it, it took me an hour or so to get used to but now any other laptop keyboard feels wrong.

I've had great desktop keyboards, but never a good laptop keyboard. I'll check it out.

I have been using the XPS 15inch version for more than 2 years, and I have hated the keyboard so much that I regularily carry a mechanical keyboard (+about 1kg). Also, the build quality / QA of the xps 15 is questionable... I had problems with the laptop randomly turning on during sleep mode and overheating, along with major throttling issues (mostly when running games). Most recently the battery has expanded and bulged up so the the trackpad became unclickable. (And they refused to change the battery for free because I was out of the standard 2-year warranty, which is quite disappointing because this is a potential safety issue.) Definitely going to try a Thinkpad for my next laptop after all this mess...

My current XPS 15 is almost 4 years old... so definitely looking for a replacement. I've had problems with the keyboard, but not the ones you mention. A few keys have fallen off, but a bit of super-glue have seemed to do the trick.

I did run into other problems with the keyboard (some keys would not depress), but I took apart the entire system, removed the keyboard and cleaned it off with an airgun, which solved the problem. Basically food and other gunk got caught between the keys. Not a perfect product, but given how much I use it, not totally unreasonable either.

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