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Comment by _Codemonkeyism | Hacker News Reader

My wife has a MacBook Air where the touch pad doesn't work, the screen has bright and darker spots and Wifi doesn't get any connection.

It made me buy a Dell XPS13 after 15y of Apple.

Then Dell proved they could do worse.

Sorry for the rant. I just hate myself for spending $3500 on garbage.

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I can't find out why everyone rants and raves about the XPS13. Everywhere you look people are more or less shouting their positive reviews for it. The one I bought (top of the line i7 with fingerprint reader, touchscreen, the works) broke. They sent me a replacement (after a lot of arguing, even though I was in warranty), and that one broke too. I called again, they sent me a third laptop and within a month it broke again!! All of these problems were internal problems with the hardware... For example, my first one had a heatsink (heat pipe? I don't remember. Something to do with heating) come loose and would constantly overheat. Anyone who's had a XPS knows that these things are fragile enough that dropping it would shatter the screen before dislodging a heat pipe.

It also had one of the most annoying touchpads I've ever used and the small bezel made me not want to use it for anything that took more than five minutes - for some reason programming especially was difficult. I'm not sure why, it just felt way more difficult to do on the 13.

I finally just bit the bullet and bought a surface laptop - I love everything about it. I'm on month three right now, no problems so far. Fingers crossed.

(I don't work for Dell or Microsoft)

We carry both Surface laptops and XPS 13s in our company. In my experience (n=23) both are pretty reliable workhorses.

Hahaha. I had one of the original XPS13. When I got it delivered, 4 or 5 keys on the keyboard were broken (they were attached on 2 points, when of those broken).

I got a new keyboard delivered, spend a solid 2 hours opening the whole thing (YOU HAVE TO REMOVE THE KEYBOARD FROM THE BACK OF THE LAPTOP WTF???), put the new keyboard in, only to realize a key was broken on the new keyboard.

That was my last purchase of a Dell laptop.

TBH, MBA trackpad failures are often caused by liquid damage, bright spots on the display are caused by pressure on the computer when it's closed, and the wifi again is an uncommon failure that can also be caused by liquid (the wifi/bluetooth chip is near the fan exhaust on the back of the top case, which can serve as an entrance for liquid). I'm not saying that all the issues you had were caused by user damage, but they may have been, and they aren't part of any larger trend with known failures.

I love how you assume by default it's the fault of my wife who you don't even know and not Apple quality control.

I feel the urge to defend my wife because you attacked her, although I don't know you and I should not care the least about personal attacks from people on the internet.

But we can't leave the internet to haters.

My wife is the most careful person I know. Her electronic devices always go into protection bags, are handled with the most care and look new after 10 years of usage.

Most everyone on this site needs to go through their purchase history and tally up the garbage/non-garbage and total up the amounts. (And if you can get through that smelling like a rose, good for you!)

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