Comment by aschampion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aschampion | Hacker News Reader

I split my development time between a 2015 rMBP and a Precision 5530 (pro model of the XPS 15). I still can not switch fully to the Dell because of a few issues:

- The touchpad is just garbage compared to the MBP, to the point I have an even more keyboard centric setup on it than my desktop, because I want to drop it out of a window every time I use the touchpad.

- Fans. I've accepted that most laptops will run active cooling more than any radiative chassis MBP, but the issues are that while the fans run constantly, they also change speeds constantly in both Windows and Ubuntu. They'd be far less annoying if they ran at a higher, but steady RPM by averaging response over a large time window. Manually managing fans feels like 1998. Also, for a $3.5K laptop that runs fans constantly, these are some of the jankiest, most rattling prone fans I've heard. Most colleagues with XPS 13/15 have sent them in for fan replacement at least once.

A more niche gripe is that 16:9 is the wrong aspect ratio for a professional laptop.

Pros:

- Screen quality and brightness.

- Keyboard (why I can't just get a new MBP).

- Hardware configurability.

- Many hardware issues at first, especially in linux, were quickly and effectively fixed by Dell driver and firmware updates.

Ditto on the touchpad issues. Have a 2016 XPS 13 (1st or 2nd year of the new design) that I ended up sending in 3 times for repairs due to the touchpad. Jittery, can't scroll, unreliable with right clicks / two finger clicks; ruined the experience for me. I eventually gave up sending to the factory because they were all equally dysfunctional.

-Many issues with power management, where I would close the lid and it would sleep, only to wake up later randomly. I would find it in my backpack blazing hot with fans at 100%.

-This was the 4k model, and at that point windows barely supported that resolution so the experience was awful with all but the most robust apps. Any legacy app was unusable. I expect this is better now.

-The speakers on 2/3 gave off a poppy, static sound during boot.

-Network connectivity is horrible. Sometimes the adapter would just turn off, requiring a restart. Resuming from sleep would take a full 60 seconds to connect to known networks. Insane

I also stopped sending it back in because every touchpad seemed to have the same scrolling issues. Then I tried installing Linux to see if the issues would be the same, and since then the trackpad has been working great. It's the reason I use Linux these days.

I have a rather high end Latitude, (model lower than XPS 13), and every mac user that used the touchpad on it says it feels on par with the one on MBP.

I bought (and returned) an XPS 13 9360 last year. Touchpad was trash - overly sensitive, skipped, unrecognized movements, etc. I understand part of that is software, but it's embarrassing how much better the touchpads are on Macbooks.

It seems all the trackpads got worse when they went button-less to copy Apple.

Maybe it was broken? Were you testing under Windows or Linux? I do have buttons on my touchpad though (and a trackpoint).

Windows. I don't think it was broken, it was a similar quality to the HP Spectre I bought (and also returned).

Maybe the Latitudes have a better touchpad? I don't mind the Lenovo T-series touchpads and they look similar.

I would be surprised as Latitudes are business line a bit lower than XPS, but who knows.

I also own MBP13 - and I prefer the keyboard on my Dell over it.

> A more niche gripe is that 16:9 is the wrong aspect ratio for a professional laptop.

What aspect ratio is more fitting for a professional laptop? 4:3?

Probably referring to 16:10 - which I also love. Another victim of the endless march towards cost cutting & manufacturing standardization.

16:10 is great, although I did briefly trial run a Surface Book 2 and loved the 3:2 screen, as well as the rest of the hardware. Only decided against it because of the amount of compromises and maintenance when running Linux on it.

I'm hoping more device start offering 3:2 screens now. I was interested in the surface line too but decided against it for the same reasons as you. I ordered Huawei's Matebook X pro yesterday which was the only other laptop I saw which offers a nice 3:2 display. I'm hoping everything will work out of the box (this laptop uses intel wireless unlike the marvell chip on the surface) with any recent distro.

Sidenote: I've also read about decent openbsd support for the older version of this laptop. [1]

[1] https://jcs.org/2017/07/14/matebook

Yep, or 16:10.

Anything taller than 16:9. Unless you like scrolling, or use the professional developer laptop for watching movies all day.

I wish I could even get my HP ZBook trackpad to function as nicely in Debian as it does on Windows. I probably need to dig in the Xorg settings, but the last two attempts saw me reverting to the defaults + Gnome tweaking, which seems to be insufficient regardless of how I tweak the simple options.

Tip: make sure you're using libinput and not synaptics. These days libinput seems to have the most reliable trackpad support.

Sorry for asking an unrelated question, I recently bought a XPS 15. Do you know what is the difference between Precision 5530 and XPS 15 exactly?

It is the graphics card? Or it does have better build quality or better keyboard or something? Build quality is important to me since I use my laptop all the time.

The differences should be the different GPU (Quadro vs GTX) and that you can order the Precision 5530 with an intel wifi chip and Xeon CPUs. The actual build quality for both should be very similar considering its the same chassis.

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