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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

I bought a Dell XPS about 4 years ago, and having used them for work I was excited to get one for myself.

A few years later (I think 2 years), the battery failed to hold any charge whatsoever. When I called support to _buy_ (with money!) a new battery pack, they told me that it was impossible, that they no longer held them in stock.

I will never buy another Dell Laptop again. Have been more than pleased with my Thinkpad T495, and will be buying a Framework laptop after this one dies.

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Friend of mine had exactly the same problem, after just a year and a half. The battery did the swelling thing. There was even a recall for the battery but he was too late and they didn't sell them any more(!!) He got some 3rd-party battery from eBay or whatnot and the laptop refused to work with it because it's "non-genuine". You could make a safety argument with batteries, but 1) it's my safety and my choice, and 2) I'd be somewhat okay with if you actually gave me an option to buy a genuine battery.

It's not even my laptop and I'm still angry about it. I tried to find a solution for him, but all I found were other people in the same situation.

Selling broken $1500 products, saying it's not your problem when people report their product is broken, and actively preventing the customer from fixing it? As far as I'm concerned it's a "business" in the same sense that Michael Corleone was running a "business".

The problem isn't Dell, but which Dell. An IdeaPad from Lenovo will be even worse.

The consumerific lines, including high-end ones, aren't meant to be serviced. They're designed to skim off every ounce and mm. So many computers have SSDs and RAM soldered onto the motherboard now, and are held together with increasing amounts of snaps and glue.

For Dell, the equivalent of ThinkPad is the Precision series, as well as some of the higher-end Latitude laptops. I've been servicing my ancient Precision for years until it completely died. Everything was replaceable.

Good to know. Thankfully the laptop market has broadened and I now know to avoid both vendors.

Overall, quality has been continuing to drop, not improve, across the board.

It's not clear who is better. Dell / Lenovo / Apple are still sort of the go-to for good reason.

That has generally been my experience as well. Not that HP or Fujitsu or whatever won't get the job done but most of the work laptops I've used are Dells, and I've used Apple and Thinkpads at home.

If I needed a new laptop now I'd probably lean on a Thinkpad T series and put Ubuntu or Fedora on it.

I'll be patronising framework for my next laptop.

I won't be. My next laptop will be a ThinkPad.

I need a 4k display. I'd also like (but don't need) an NVidia GPU capable of accelerating ML models. The display is the showstopper. I'd also like a mechanical keyboard.

... but boy is it close.

Hopefully, two laptops from now.

Yeah, Dell XPS laptops used to be standouts, but they've been making some crappy design decisions for a while now. We're a Lenovo Thinkpad T-series household right now, and I suspect that my next laptop will be a Framework 16+ laptop with a swappable GPU -- pending reviews from folks I know who have preorders for them.

The trick that worked for me was to directly call Dell's parts ordering phone number and ask for the specific part number for the battery; ditto for when the fan started whining. I was able to get a replacement for my old XPS 13 (4+ years old at that point) for a fairly reasonable price.

I don't have an XPS 13 anymore though; the backlight controller on the motherboard failed, and because it's an OLED, I couldn't see anything on screen anymore.

Funny, I had nothing but problems with high end Lenovo's for years. They all went away when I switched to Dell!

It goes both ways I guess :/

I've had problems with ThinkPads as well, but I've also always been able to fix it: either under warranty or myself.

Dell on the other hand...

I doubt I'd have much better luck with Lenovo Customer service tbh.

But I have a strong rule of not patronizing companies that have previously screwed me.

Definitely eyeing Framework as they seem to value right to repair.

I was given an XPS 13 cat work a few years ago. The machine was solid: I even managed to drop it twice on a pavement and spill it with soup and some tomato juice. It still worked. However,over a 4 year period I changed 3 batteries. The last one swelled so much that it made the keyboard bulge. I now have a Dell Precision,which is amazing and hopefully the battery will hold a bit better.

Did you get ProSupport? (I think they call it different nowadays) They came by and replaced mine, no questions asked. Same for the Wi-Fi chip, GPU, motherboard and heat dissipator. They even do it worldwide, which is nice when travelling like I often am.

Yup. They came, by popped the backplate of the laptop, and confirmed they wouldn't replace the battery, nor could I buy another.

The same thing happened to me! Except they gaslit me for a while, telling me it was possible, then ignoring every communication. Never again.

I just changed my XPS battery with a spare from iFixIt.

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