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Comment by aardvark291 | Hacker News Reader

If it's that vital, you should have a spare, or perhaps rent or borrow one.

Or you could just get a dell and get next day in home service :|

I talk to a lot of small business people and a question I usually ask when they bring up the subject of new laptops and such is "how long can you be without your laptop if if breaks?"

Usually the answer is that they can't be without it at all.

So I never recommend Apple laptops for business owners unless they have a spare... a spare "anything" will possibly suffice especially if everything they do is online.

I only tend to buy Dell business laptops: great build quality and a 3-year next business day onsite warranty are worth every penny imo: Not as flashy and fancy as the XPS stuff but they have/had quality issues (as the commenter below mentioned).

I have a old dell vostro from their business line, it is now maybe 6-7 years old. I dropped it many times, use it in a garage and don't care about it. It still works well. Therefore, I agree that the dell business line is really great.

Also, I could not imagine our business having spare computers.We have 600 employees maybe now, and we need more and more computers as more users need to perform work on a computer these days.

You only need a fractional reserve of spare computers, not one for each computer in use; it's as if you had a few more employees who don't actually use their computers

How many of your about 600 PCs die every year? The spares you need are much less than that number, as you can buy (or recover from repair hell) new computers over the course of a few days to recover your reserves.

If you buy a new laptop every 2 to 3 years for work, you can simply switch back to the previous one if needed. Assuming you are not reselling it.

I tend to upgrade every five years: my current laptop (MacBook Pro) is from 2016 and I see no reason to upgrade anytime soon. My 2011 laptop (MacBook Air) is still running fine. I could even work on it still, but it would not be a pleasant experience.

I have a two year old Precision 5520, which is basically a xps15 but with on site service.

Not sure if there's a precision model for the xps13.

Serious question: Have the XPS QC issues been addressed?

This isn't any kind of attack on them, it's just that when I was searching for a laptop they seemed to be having some issues and even the warranty replacements had issues. Which really sucks because the XPS lineup do look enticing for me.

I have 2017 model XPS. I honestly don't have any issues. I would buy one at costco and see for yourself, you would have 3 months to return.

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To be fair, it is a bit tougher when Macs are so expensive. When my PC breaks, I have 4 other options I can count off the top of my head. When my Mac breaks, I only can afford to have one spare, and even that is more of a matter of lucky circumstance.

Before I could afford MacBooks, I bought old ThinkPads off Craigslist and put Ubuntu on them.

I could find ways to do most things. Nowadays it's a lot easier.

Hell, a Raspberry Pi will do in a pinch... I mostly just need a terminal, I can spin up a beefy Hetzner server to work on for a few days for $1.

I think this is one of the benefits of being a programmer. Our tools and materials can be easily stored in an online-accessible way, such that a git clone can recreate your entire environment and all the code you were working on. I don't know if any non-programmers who primarily rely on their laptops do (or can do) the same, much less people who work with music or videos or photos, who often have (hundreds of) gigabytes they need to work on with no real version control, and require much more effort and financial investment to be able to backup, duplicate and restore.

Yeah, it's interesting how, when your job is making things, you manage to make things to make making other things easier, so your ability improves exponentially.

Musicians make music, so they have to rely on other people making tools for them, whereas toolmakers can just make better tools for themselves.

That is, if you can avoid reinventing the wheel, which we aren't great at.

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