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Comment by nas | Hacker News Reader

I have a 13" XPS and a 15" Macbook Pro. I wanted to like the XPS but the Mac is just much better hardware. First, there is no comparison between the quality of the touchpads. The MacBook one works great but the XPS is terrible (imprecise movement, accidental movement/clicks from palm). The XPS wifi card is unreliable, it frequently disconnects. I understand a lot of people replace it with a better one. The screen is not great. There is no way to disable the automatic brightness magic going on (terrible for doing photograph processing). There is no way to turn of the eye blinding charge light on the front, under the touchpad. For a laptop that is premium priced, I'm disappointed with the hardware quality. I prefer my Lenovo X230 over the XPS 13.

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Touchpads on Mac are stellar but have gotten too large. They often detect my palms as I type and move the mouse into the wrong spot.

While I don't currently have a link, depending on which model you have, CABC (Content Adaptive Brightness Control) can be disable officially, as well as unofficially.

I have an XPS 13 9350 with a 1080P matte display, with CABC disabled through the display firmware version hack -- I completely forget the steps though, and it appears as Dell has released a version of the FHD [0] but I don't plan on reverting to the proper firmware just to patch it out again.

0. https://www.dell.com/support/home/ca/en/cabsdt1/drivers/driv...

EDIT: https://github.com/advancingu/XPS13Linux/issues/2

Get the XPS with the top end screen, it is amazing. Better than the MBP Retina screen.

I have the opposite setup - a 13" MBP and a 15" XPS and I really loved working on the XPS. It was just so fast and the screen was fantastic.

I say WAS, because yesterday I installed a new BIOS via the Dell tooling (and updated all of the drivers at the same time) and it bricked my machine. I spent the afternoon going through an increasingly crazy set of fixes which included dismantling the PC to remove the CMOS battery.

So now my XPS 15 is a $5000 paperweight.

I really hope that this is a known issue and Dell step up to fix it.

I might be wrong but I believe on the 13" XPS (not the 2-in-1 I have) you can change the automatic brightness in the BIOS. I can't do it in mine but I think this was a recent change to the 7390 2n1 only. It's CABC if I remember correctly.

FWIW, I have a 2016 MBP (maxed out) and now a 2019 XPS 13 2in1 4k and while I haven't used it anywhere near as long I think my XPS blows my MBP out of the water. I feel like I'm working on a 2005 laptop when I switch to the MBP and it's only saving grace is OSX. I also got the 4k/i7/32gb version for $985 from the Dell outlet during Black Friday. Insane price.

Not sure if your touchpad has the Windows precision drivers like mine does but I haven't noticed any issues with my touchpad compared to my MBP. I like it but I also use no gestures. I refused to even look at laptops that didn't use the Precision drivers/touchpad.

I'd say after a month of having it 100% of my issues/annoyances are Win10. I'm getting more used to it, Win10s tablet mode is actually pretty awesome but then 20% of your apps will be UWP (native tablet mode) while the others are regular exe/msis. It's bit of a jarring experience and I feel like I'm fighting Windows constantly.

And the thing that really blows my mind, this being a convertible tablet, the on screen keyboard is absolutely horrid. It takes less time for me to write things with the pen even factoring in my horrible penmanship that I have to slow down with for it to read it correctly. Course, this is another Windows issue. Microsoft owns Swiftkey now, it'd be nice if they integrated it.

One issue with Windows laptops on WiFi that annoys me is that they aren't well-tuned to transfer from one access point to another. For example at work I will often have to disconnect from the network and reconnect to get my laptop to snap to a nearby access point. Otherwise it stays connected to a far away point but with weaker connection indicated (by the bars). This never seems to be an issue with iOS/MacOS devices.

Maybe Macs have gotten better, but on my MBP 2015 it would never switch seamlessly from one AP to another when moving around the office.

This is what keeps me from switching. PC hardware is so far behind as far as fit, finish and touchpoints. I’ve been wanting to give a Nix based mobile machine a chance but nothing comes close.

Apple gets shit on HN constantly but their mobile hardware can’t be beat.

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