Hacker News Reader

Comment by Beltalowda | Hacker News Reader

Friend of mine had an XPS; I don't remember exactly how much it cost, but it was certainly not the cheapest, so ~$1000 USD at least.

After about 1.5 to 2 years the battery started swelling up, and became essentially unusable. Turns out they even had a recall for this model, but who keeps track of that so he never knew. Tried to order a new battery from Dell: they don't deliver them any more, no way to buy it from Dell. Tried to order one from 3rd party: that one won't work because "not a genuine battery detected kthxfuckyoulol".

I don't care if it's "consumer" or "low end" or whatever, this is just ridiculous and in my opinion should quite literally be illegal (and perhaps it already is). If Dell doesn't want to manufacture batteries: fine. But let someone else do it so we don't have to throw away our laptops after 2 years.

View on HN

The XPS was their higher end answer to the unibody Macbooks a few years back, and peer with Lenovo's Thinkpad X-series.

The Inspiron line is a "cheap is expensive" trap for consumers, you can't blame people if they judge the whole company for their mass-consumption offering when its cheap build breaks at the hinges for everybody.

Frankly, if they're cutting corners on one product to the point it affects their brand image, they're probably cutting corners on all of them. This is one thing Apple gets right, their products are solid all the way down to the low end (iPhone SE et al).

(After reading further I see others have made the same point. Oops.)

Apple SE is of course not really "low end".

But I do agree with your overall point; back when I worked at a computer store people would come in to buy a laptop, and they wouldn't want a HP – even when that was actually a good model and a good fit for their needs – because they had a bad experience with a HP printer. I think that's actually pretty fair too, although I usually explained that the people who design the HP printers most likely never even talked to the people who design the HP laptops, and that even within $brand laptops there are are huge fundamental differences.

I suppose that overall, on balance, the brand recognition of "Dell" or "HP" outweighs the negative associations people have across the product range.

> I usually explained that the people who design the HP printers most likely never even talked to the people who design the HP laptops

While that is certainly true, the overall priorities of the company (is customer service important, which customers matter, how important is initial quality vs ongoing support, etc) are set at higher levels; many ties one that both those teams report up to.

It's a weak signal, but it's often highly variable what kind and quality of support vendors give for which products.

Between the 27 engineers that make up my teams, we have had to do nearly 50 battery replacements due to swollen batteries in the the last 3 years. All on the business class precision line.

I've got a small XPS, it's just horrible. Mine's 11 months old, my "j" key is already coming off (thanks vim !), the speakers are so small my iphone's louder, the battery life is terrible and I've already had fan problems. It's just a awful awful piece of hardware.

Too bad because the size is great !

EU Law is coming in in the next couple of years to make batteries in all electronic devices consumer replaceable. There must be reasonable availability of the batteries and only a fairly reasonable range of tools must be needed to do it.

For smaller electronic devices (e.g. my wireless headphones for my PC) that means that device manufacturer will have to make design changes to enable this sort of changing (I have actually changed the headphone battery, but I'm an electronic engineer and needed the soldering station at work). For larger devices like laptops, its going to affect battery supply chains.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com