But I'm also a "weirdo" who doesn't like Apple-made hardware (the trackpad, touchbar, keyboard, mouse, etc. are all inferior IMO), so maybe you're looking for something different there.
I know I haven't exactly babied it, what with it having been plugged in in my home office for basically two straight years during the pandemic, but the battery is shot at this point— getting barely an hour of life. Often it'll be supposedly sleeping in lid-shut mode but be cooking itself for no reason. Then it'll wake up and immediately go into a power-panic shutdown, only to assert that the battery is full after all when it reboots connected to juice. And now the HDMI port is also toast (verified under multiple OSes to be a hardware issue).
Maybe I just got a bad year, but this is supposed to be Dell's premium machine and I don't think I can justify giving them another chance after this. It's just nowhere near reliable enough to be used on the road, and not performant enough to be a true desktop replacement. So I don't know who is using this machine and for what.
Its a shame because otherwise I really liked the laptop. Gorgeous screen, good trackpad and keyboard, and a perfect size imo.
Yeah, my second seems to have succumbed to that as well. There's a setting in the BIOS that says "I plan on keeping this plugged in all the time" and it'll do better battery management that way.
I don't want to go back to OS X, but its hard to find good build quality and a high res screen.
Also, my battery was terrible after a couple of years. I had it plugged in as well. I bought a replacement this year and it was easy enough to switch out. Hopefully I can just keep this going and use it as an RDP machine.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/onvh42/xps_9560_tpm_d...
https://superuser.com/questions/1668861/alert-tpm-device-is-...
My guess is that Dell didn't update the TPM firware, my guess is this breaks some keys so can't be done automatically and a BIOS update at some point then screws up the handshake with the older TPM firmware unless the laptop is fully powered off.
But I'm not a huge fan of dell hardware.
The other thing that has driven me crazy is the wide-gamut 4K screen. The text is nice and crisp, but good luck with sRGB content. Basically all content for non Adobe professionals is fubar'd. I eventually made the situation tolerable by finding an old version of Dell PremierColor and using its sRGB profile (newer versions of the software on Microsoft Store quit working on the 9570 and the color profiles do nothing - imagine that). Still get terrible color banding and crushed blacks, and I'm not even sure investing in a colorimeter would fix it.
Overall I've come to the same conclusion as you. In 2018 this was a $2000 machine (Costco price below retail), and I also can't justify giving Dell another chance.
Same. It fires up full fans and all in the middle of the night.
It’s a nice form factor, but much like me growing tired of stuff like “android slowdown syndrome” and me getting an iPhone last fall … I feel like I’m being pushed to try a Mac laptop for a cycle….
I just don’t want to deal with this stuff anymore.
Can't speak for wake behaviour cause I have never encountered issues on my 15" 9570 but you can actually make it much, much better with a bit of work.
You need to work around plundervolt flags and enable undervolting(there's a tutorial in some reddit threat on how to do this), then undervolt CPU a bit, this way it almost never throttles. As for thermals, just changing paste to Kryonaut and adding few stacked thermal pads so they connect to the chassis in few places according to some tutorials I found made insane improvements. I play Valorant on mine and I went from almost constant throttling, to no issues at all, even during longer sessions. It's also almost never running fans on higher speeds during normal work.
But I agree, my next machine will be a MBP with Mx chip, I don't want to put in so much work into something that costs a small fortune just so it works properly.
NOPE! It wakes itself from lid-shut sleep and cooks itself whenever I put it in a bag, it will crash and reboot if the Thunderbolt cable gets jostled, and I get maybe 90 minutes on battery life after weeks of optimization script fiddling. I wanted to like it so badly because at the time, the processor was a steal. Matching the old 7820-HQ's performance with a bottom-tier i5 8300H felt like magic, but nothing else lived up to the hype.
Please, it’s not that weird of an opinion.
> (the trackpad […] are all inferior IMO)
Oh.
But I think I agree when it comes to anything like drag-and-drop.
I really like the laptop otherwise, but battery/power management is utter crap on it, both on Windows and on Linux.
See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521995
I also liked the matte texture of the ThinkPad, but I think that era is over (the XPS isn't glassy like Apple's at least, but still lacks texture).
FWIW, I have animation time set to 0 on my Android phone to avoid these kinds of behaviors but given that the primary interaction was through them on Apple, it was unavoidable.
I think most issues people have with using the trackpad are due to the fact that the default is that you have to click the trackpad like a mouse button in order to perform a "click." Most people coming from Windows want to use tap to click and I think that is what leads to confusing results.
This used to be a regular (non-accessibility) setting, not sure why they hid it away a few versions ago.
Of course an m1's battery life is better. Everything else sucks in comparison imo but I admit this is very subjective.