(on mobile and list formatting seems to have single lined, sorry if hard to read)
- Coil whine when connected to AC and IO happens
- Shipped with only S2 (connected standby) support. Battery in sleep would not last more than a day.
- Battery discharge even when fully powered off, do not expect to leave it unplugged for a weekend and it be usable
- Ill thought out microSD card slot, I ended up getting a card wedged between the chassis and bottom of the card reader, scratched the card pins and made the card inoperable
- Buggy Killer WiFi drivers, requiring toggling the adapter off and on
- Poor thermal performance, after seconds of my i7 running turbo(ing), base clocks reduce to 1.3GHz resulting in compilation or any heavy workload taking 3x as long to complete as my 2014 MBP with and i5
- Fan noise, it is almost always on and very audible, even in office conditions
- Lack of care from Dell around their Windows precision pad, e.g. small scroll movements do not scroll in non-"modern" apps such as task manager, or just about anything that is not Edge
Those are just a few points I've picked. I previously had an XPS 13 (standard) in 2015 and issues such as coil whine still existed then.
Additionally, the configuration options are unnecessarily restrictive, at least in the UK. I wanted 32GB memory so had to get the i7 model which is only available with the 4K panel option. Battery life is less than 4 hours.
My specification cost £2200 which is MBP territory but it doesn't feel on the same premium level as a MBP (or now, the incredibly attractively priced M1 MacBook Air).
On the positive side, I mainly run Ubuntu and aside from non functional camera and fingerprint reader that works pretty well, including thunderbolt docking. Although it took about a year for the Ice Lake GPU drivers to become stable and S3 eventually found support, although closing the lid does not always put the system to sleep.
HN doesn't have list formatting; there's very basic links, italics, non-fenced code blocks and that’s it.
Are we expected to only use MacBooks if we want a *nix laptop?
Thermals aren't great. The area above the touchbar frequently hits around 125F and the fans spin up at a moments notice. It likely needs cleaned but the design isn't condusive of maintenance where some other professional laptops have toolless access doors (I remember the older HP Elitebooks having toolless access to the entire underside)
Maybe things are better when comparing the 15" XPS vs 16" MBP but I believe the WiFi chip and precision touchpad hardware/drivers are the same. The shipping of "incomplete" BIOS(es) and coil whine are also applicable AFAIK.
Let's compare apples to apples.
Pick up a recent top of the line desktop processor, possibly an AMD Ryzen 9 or a Threadripper, pair it with an excellent motherboard, power delivery, memory, and storage. Put it in a huge, high airflow case, connect it to a switch (ideally with two Intel based wired Network interfaces) and leave it in the basement. Use key-based authentication to ssh (mosh?) into the desktop. Now your Dell XPS or Thinkpad T series or whatever will run cool and quiet.
...if you can stand using macOS and if you optimize for working in planes, trains, hotels or in meetings. If you only need 16gb of RAM and one external display. If you like touchpads and if all of your preferred hardware works with it. If all of that, then sure.
I like hardware and software that just works without getting in my way and let's me do what I want and Apple has never been able to provide that. Heck, you can't even change the mouse pointer color in macOS without buying a third party app (which might stop working next year). No thanks- give me a PC tower, 2-3 displays, an ergonomic keyboard and a 5 button vertical mouse in a quiet room. I'll have Manjaro/XFCE setup and running circles around an M1 with real containers while you're waiting on virtualized containers or investigating which libs won't compile because they're not ready for the M1 yet.
When I came back into the office from the pandemic they told me that some guy with an M1 started working with one of our teams and he got laughed out of the office because nothing worked on it. That's head and shoulders?
> optimize for working in planes, trains, hotels or in meetings
Yes, one of the criteria here is indeed portability.
> you can't even change the mouse pointer color in macOS without buying a third party app
I have not in 20 years of software development felt the need to change the cursor colour. Is this an accessibility thing?
> 2-3 displays, an ergonomic keyboard and a 5 button vertical mouse in a quiet room
Other than the extra screens, nothing is stopping you use your own keyboard/mouse with the laptop and choosing your own room.
> I'll have Manjaro/XFCE setup and running circles around an M1 with real containers while you're waiting on virtualized containers or investigating which libs won't compile because they're not ready for the M1 yet.
There are indeed some teething issues with M1, but those will be solved eventually. Containers being virtualised hasn't caused too many issues.
I fail to understand, if you're using arch, why you'd use XFCE over a tiling wm like i3.
This is super ridiculous. Macs were being smashed to bits by PCs before they switched to Intel, and they were rightfully blasted by techies and the tech press.
We don't get to claim that we're not comparing apples to apples because Apple stuff is now more powerful than PCs, for the same form factor.
And I say this as a PC guy that will never buy a Mac as long as both Windows and Linux don't run on it 100% reliably (at the same level Windows would run on a Lenovo).
Apples to apples:
Can you change the SSD when it wears out or want an upgrade in a few years?, can it run games?, can it do ML efficiently?, can I use Linux?, how about an eGPU?, how about an OLED or quantum dot display?
Sure, most laptops have 10 hour battery life instead of 20, some with vapor chambers have proper cooling and make no noise unless you really push it, CPU performance is probably 10-20% less, but you get so much more for the trade off.
People have different needs, if M1 is the best laptop for you, great, but it's not for everyone.
Size and weight wise they are in a similar category.
“make barely no noise when compiling hundred of thousand LoCs” - I haven’t got XPS15 but got MacBook Pro 16 with Intel Chip(2020 model) but whenever my browser is open and I do code compilation my MacBook absolutely makes noise. I don’t have thousand tabs open, use adblocker, privacy DNS to make it easier for my machine to browse internet.
Performance: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/dxf0qp/a_comparison_ma...
Would you say this is a fair comparison?
Apple themselves don't rate it at 20h even for web browsing, and when you use a real workload like compiling 100ksloc the XPS 15 will handily beat it in battery life. Not to mention you cap out at 16GB of memory.
I should have been clear it was M1 Mac against similar segment competitors. Not the Pro / Gaming segment.
Most of those are comparing hardware spec on paper. As much as I like to shit on Apple's pathetic 1mm key travel keyboard, USB-C charging that fried the CPU, Touch Bar or ridiculously sized trackpad. Build quality of MacBook is still better than Dell XPS. Both external and internally down to component layout. From Trackpad to Speakers. I actually think the closest competitor is the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4.
Touch ID, M1 that has NPU for many ML task. Speech Recognition that is far better than on Windows. ( Both Apple and Google gets the benefits of their Smartphone scale ). Much better thermal with 5nm SoC. On a 25W max CPU+GPU system there are simply no competition. WiFi and Bluetooth that gets the benefits of being tested by the 1 billion+ of iPhone and iPad Devices. Generally faster SSD because not all NVMe SSD are made equal. Then there is the macOS and its ecosystem where its UI and UX are better designed. ( Control Panel vs System Preferences ? ) While macOS is now in its 3rd if not 4th facelift. Windows still have screens that are coming from its 2000 era. And there are possibly hundreds if not thousands of little things. ( Font Rendering, App latency, etc )
Most of the suggestions are 32 / 64GB Windows system which the M1 Mac currently does not offer (yet). And Gaming. If you Game you will need a Windows PC.
None of these includes the benefits if you already own an iPad or iPhone. Unless Windows 11 offer some massive leap forward. I dont see any thing on the roadmap in PC industry that could compete with the onslaught of ARM Mac. For the first time ever in Apple history the Mac has an BOM cost advantage compare to PC. ( Apple has higher margin so RSP would be about the same as PC )
Sometimes all I ask is the other manufacture just to copy Apple MacBook to the atomic level. There should be a lot of learning in doing so for them. The only notebook I see that is taking a lot of MBP design learning is actually Microsoft Surface Laptop. Still let down by its software though. And my god the leaked Windows 11 is still awful.