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Comment by ericcholis | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched from an Air to an XPS 15 9570. I was very excited, it seemed to have all the best qualities of a MacBook, minus the shotty keyboard, and superior performance per dollar (at the time).

Things went downhill rather quickly. I've had massive cooling issues, I've removed and replaced the thermal paste. I've been forced to operate the laptop on the "Cool" thermal setting; downgrading the performance of the processor. Now, the two of the screws in palm rest, which hold the screen in place, have sheered right off. Doing some digging, this was commonplace with this particular model.

I'm not doing anything particularly intense either. Docker with a few containers running a dev website.

I can't speak for the latest XPS 15 7590 build quality however.

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I've had a company-issued XPS 9570 for the last year, and overall I haven't had any big issues.

Cooling is sub-par, but I think that's mostly due to the Intel i9-8950HK running way over the advertised TDP during Turbo. Dell has been tweaking their cooling profile in subsequent BIOS updates, at with the latest version (1.15) they're quite aggressive on ramping up the fans to keep things cool. Which is good from a performance perspective, but really annoying to sit beside all day. While I didn't experience severe thermal throttling, I did end up disabling Turbo as it made the laptop sound like a jet engine too often for my taste.

My only other complaint would be that despite Dell's claims of 100W+ power delivery from their ThunderBolt dock (above and beyond what USB-C PD can deliver), I frequently find the laptop discharging the battery under moderate load (high CPU, idle dGPU) when connected via USB-C to the dock. Using the supplied DC charger solves this, but it's still a poor user experience.

At my previous employer I had a 2017 MBP. IMHO an XPS/Precision is a better option as you can (in no particular order): upgrade the RAM, upgrade the SSD, run Linux on it, and (until the new MBP release) had a much better keyboard experience.

As others have noted, Dell's enterprise warranty support is fantastic. I was able to invoke the warranty to replace a motherboard in a Latitude I bought used on eBay; they sent a technician to my house to replace it free of charge.

I will never buy a dell again, had an XPS 9550 (£2.7k 32gb ram, top of the range) - they had a chip in to detect a valid dell power adapter and that went so they wanted over 600 to replace the motherboard.

I bought a macbook and use the dell charger (udb-c) to charge my macbook.

My step-daughter spilled water on her MBA. It would no longer charge. It would run connected to AC, and the battery health was fine, but the "charging circuit" needed replaced, according to diagnostics.

Okay, I thought. $200, maybe $300, including parts and labor.

Not quite. They wanted $879. "Maybe we should look at getting you into a new Macbook instead?"

No thanks. It was almost never used unplugged anyway.

Sounds like they needed to replace the whole motherboard.

My 9370 is definitely just plain USB-PD, doesnt require a Dell charger. I can charge it with a inexpensive Anker charger.

600 is pricey for a mainboard replacement, but none of the other vendors are much better, including Apple. I previously had a Thinkpad that died shortly out of warranty, and they actually wanted more to fix it than I paid for it new.

I've had nothing but problems with 9570. Constantly overheating. It's a good day when I can get even 3 hours of battery life.

that was my experience as well before returning xps and getting a new macbook.

on any intensive work it would get so hot that i could not rest my hands on it.

I had an old XPS13, and eagerly ordered the XPS15 9570 fully loaded the moment it was available in the UK.

What followed was a year of fan noise, thermal throttling, GPU switching problems and many hours lost trying to get the right combination of Ubutunu + Nvida drivers working.

So when my house was burgled and that machine got stolen, I went back to the XPS13 form factor. Smaller, lighter, longer battery life, quieter. Only disadvantage being the max of 16GB RAM.

Once the XPS13 finally arrives with 32GB RAM I may well upgrade again.

The new MacBook Pro may tempt me, but I am certainly not giving up proper function keys.

I have a 9570 as well. I ordered the bare minimum memory and storage so I could swap in my own 16GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD. I also applied thermal pads to the VRMs and (less importantly) heatpipes so they conduct to the chassis. Lastly, I undervolted the CPU with Intel XTU. I have had no throttling issues and it has been a steadfast partner. I've never had a laptop I liked more. It took some upfront work, and that's not everyone's bag, but I honestly could not find a decent laptop that met my specs for under $3000. This one did it for $1600.

I had similar experience with 9360. The notebook freezes under heavy load and I have to restart (it happens once a day when working on rather large Android project). The webcam on the bottom left of the screen is a bad joke (I think they moved it elsewhere later?).

From what I can see, Dell has significant problems with quality control. That's why the feedback is so varied.

If you live in a city with good Dell support, you could probably have managed to replace it. Sounds like a hardware problem.

> it seemed to have all the best qualities of a MacBook

Except MacOS.

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