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I was very interested because of the 16/10 display and the general design but besides the Intel CPU being apparently not that great compared to current AMD chips (including thermals and battery life) and the 32GB not available in my country (and not upgradable) it seems there is currently a great lack of QA at Dell that is really off-putting.

We have bought 7 or 8 for my startup in the past 4 years. Only one failure that happened at like month 3. Seems at least average reliability?

In the same time we have had 2 of 4 appple laptops need a new motherboard / some drastic problem

> need a new motherboard / some drastic problem

Only because apple won’t do simple repairs. Eg, blwn capacitor worth 40 cent? New motherboard worth hundreds! [1] Of course, to the end user, the effect is the same...

[1] https://youtu.be/o2_SZ4tfLns and https://youtu.be/K1A9y4S60kg for just two examples

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I find it highly unlikely that there are repair contractors with people sitting behind magnifying glasses and soldering irons.

I would suspect that toss and replace is the norm across the whole spectrum of hardware sellers.

You could debate Apple's design choices like... say... riveted keyboards, and they'd argue durability as a retort, but I don't think they're any better or worse than others in terms of warranty work.

Maybe not (although Louis Rossmann does say that he checks and has many videos where he does), but they do typically at least check the connectors and the main components.

My brother has had a water-damaged macbook pro repaired by a third party repair shop when apple said the only thing that can be done is a logic board replacement and they fixed it without replacing it.

From my knowledge of working as an ACMT, Apple processes every part it takes out of a computer during repair service. I couldn't say how many are fixed in the manner you're talking about, but I can say that a significant proportion of parts we received for warranty service were clearly 'remanufactured' parts. So that kind of toss-and-replace doesn't even really happen at Apple itself.

If your choices are:

$20 mother board and 15 minute of $50 / hr tech

vs

$0.40 cap and 45 minutes of a $50 / hr tech

Replacing the cap might not actually be a win. Would need to know more about the actual hardware costs, as well as how often swapping 1 cap really fixes the problem (like, why did it blow to begin with? Will it just blow again in 3 days?)

Right, but apple don’t charge $20 for a motherboard, its more like $900, vs a third party repair shop charging $100 for labour + $0.40 for the cap. The third party is still a lot cheaper because apple don’t want to repair those parts.

I bought a Dell XPS 13 (same model in article, 9300) a couple of months ago, and installed Ubuntu 20.04 on it myself.

It works great. No coil whine, and I haven't heard anyone complaining about coil whine with this year's model.

For Dell XPS, if you are in the US, Costco is a great place to get them. They often have really great deals. You can return your laptop within 90 days of purchase no questions asked. If you buy using their branded credit card, you automatically get another year of warranty free. Costco customer service is great, and I trust them more than any manufacturer.

Agree with this but Costco doesn't sell the Ubuntu system AFAIK. I bought my XPS at Costco, wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu manually. Still saved money over buying the Ubuntu version elsewhere.

You decided against Win 10 Pro and WLS? Why?

If you don't care about windows then you sacrifice about 20% of performance vs linux on baremetal according to benchmarks on phoronix of ubuntu bare vs ubuntu wsl.

Is that WSL 1 or 2? I'm not sure which I'd expect to have better perf (virtualization vs extra NT ABI), but I'd expect some difference.

Not OP, but Windows 10 is a spy device that happens to let you do some useful things with it. Also, I think it's great to support FOSS when able and not be apart of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Not parent, but I would have done the same. I transitioned to MacOS from Windows 7 in 2011. When I opened my 2019 XPS with Windows, I got immediate anxiety due to how much Windows has devolved in the last 8 years.

On a brand new system, opening new windows lagged. Multiple popups constantly required my attention and kept getting in my way. I couldn't imagine using the Home version, where you have to deal with Ads on the Start menu on top of all that.

Today I live happily with Kubuntu.

I actually spent a couple of days trying to preserve the Win install so I could dual-boot in case I wanted to test my code under Windows or play games, but I finally got tired of f&cking around and gave up.

I have no interest in running Windows day to day. I live in Emacs, the CLI, and Common Lisp, all of which work best in a Unix-based OS. So it's MacOS or Linux. Plus I'd heard too many horror stories of how difficult it was to turn off all the Microsoft spyware, advertising, and no-choice updates to ever consider Windows seriously.

This was a couple of years ago before WLS was production quality. I might try again if I was doing it today, but only if I could turn off all the Microsoft daemons. Even so, I still find it philosophically distasteful to have to engage in technological warfare against my operating system just to stop it spying on me.

The Ubuntu version is released soo many months after the main version. It really sucks having to wait that long. And to be limited to the XPS 13.

It takes some time to get full support for the very newest hardware in Linux. This is nothing new. And it's why buying a previous-gen model at a discount can be a better deal overall.

I just run whatever the latest Ubuntu version is at the time of release for my XPS machines, and it works fine. Or at least no worse than Ubuntu normally works.

My sample size is much smaller but with two xps13 in one year, one refurb was basically DOA. The brand new one had major power issues and even with extended care it took them a month to get it straightened out. Finally got a new one and it's been working great. They will comp you by addidng additional onsite warranty though. Great machine but the QA sucks on dells

well it's not only that the developer editions most often have coil wine or deformed cases. no the xps 15" with windows are more often broken as well, deformed cases broken cooling, etc.

Which model(s) of the XPS line? Can you share that?