Hacker News Reader

Comment by evilduck | Hacker News Reader

Name them please, because I've looked and there seems to be a slew of compromises in every option that make them worse than a MBP.

View on HN

Loving my XPS 13 running ubuntu since 2018. Trackpad is great and I still get enough battery life to use for browsing at work all day

edit: sorry, I just remembered -- I did have to replace the SSD on this thing when it conked out in 2019! fortunately I bought it refurbished with a warranty of some sort and they shipped a new one fast.

I have an XPS 15 of a similar age, and the battery has swollen to the point that it's pushing the trackpad out of the case.

Thank you for replying. I don't mean this as a dig at you or your choices but from a cursory glance that model has a significantly worse screen, a weird nose-and-finger webcam on the bottom of the screen, negligible price and spec differences (or probably a much worse value proposition compared to an M1 if you're ok with macOS and ARM), a touchpad which is pretty certain to be worse than Apple's, and a plastic body it looks like.

I think it wins on port options, the aesthetics you could argue as personal preferences, and optioned up it has the potential for maybe a better screen and a digitizer but at that point it loses badly on price. It's not a bad computer, but it's clearly a compromise on several issues and not really beating Apple enough at the stuff it does better that would compel a switch from purely a hardware or value standpoint. I think it's fine if you wanted to avoid Apple or macOS for software reasons, but that's about it. I've also had a pretty good track record with Apple hardware lasting ages while I watch peers with PCs that drop like flies every few years.

This is the point that many of us feel stuck with Apple. Every time I research Apple's alternatives I feel like I've wasted my time.

> nose-and-finger webcam on the bottom of the screen

FWIW, I believe they've fixed this in recent revisions, as well as added a 16:10 ratio screen.

This is one of the very few laptops I'd consider vs a macbook at this point, especially given the preinstalled linux option.

The display seems to be fixed as well, with the new OLED XPSes having a wider gamut than the Macs.

For what it's worth, it's the touchpads and displays that keep pushing me away from the 13-inch MBP. I much prefer the feel of most PC precision touchpads to the grainy texture of the MBP touchpad. As for the display, I like to set high-DPI displays to 2x scaling, since it tends to look and work better, but the 13-inch MBP's 2560x1600px only has 1280x800dp of real estate at 2x scaling, which feels very cramped in comparison to the 1920x1080dp of real estate on my XPS 13's 3840x2160px display.

I just got a brand new precision (XPS but with a Quadro card) and it’s unusable. Trackpad straight up broken, maybe due to battery swelling. Had to update firmware to get the headphone jack to function. Camera has strange flickers. Cleary I got a lemon but that’s terrible quality control.

We used XPS 13s as lab computers at a previous job and they would just stop powering on eventually. Sometimes removing and reinserting the battery would bring them back, usually not.

I switched from a MBP to a Razor Blade 14, with their 4k screen option. I forget what I paid but it was on par with a similarly specced MBP.

The only real compromise that I've noticed is that the battery life isn't as good. But part of the reason for that is that it has an actual graphics card (albeit not a great one). So it's more of a trade-off than a compromise, the ability to do light gaming is worth it for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com