Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>Dell is planning to refresh its XPS 13 Plus from 2022, with a touch bar on the top row of the keyboard and only two USB-C ports for I/O.

If I wanted a Macbook I would get a Macbook instead of some frankenstein knockoff that can't run neither Win32 nor Mac.

View on HN

The XPS line has for a long time been Dells thin + performance laptops. If that's not what you want... I don't know why you'd be considering that line.

What part of thin and performance demands only 2 USB ports?

I have an M2 Macbook Air. The damn thing can fit a dozen USB ports on both sides, as far as physical space is concerned. I like its speakers and battery life, but I hate the lack of connectivity.

I really don't care about "demands". You could ask someone who knows more about the physical laptop design. That's not me.

It seems strange to take issue with Dell's showboat ultrabook, for being an ultrabook, when for years (maybe longer) it has been an ultrabook with all the trade offs that come with it. Pick a different line of laptops.

Carrying around hubs and dongles defeats the very point of using a thin (read: portable) laptop. Most Windows "ultrabook" laptops have more than the Apple Certified Standard(tm) complement of connectivity. I'm using one right now, a 14" ASUS Vivobook, which has four USB ports (I wish it had more) and an HDMI port.

Adding more USB ports does not compromise the ultrabookness of a laptop. Ever. Ultrabooking is about portability, not about no motherfucking connections without motherfucking dongles.

So why would you even look at the XPS line?

So buy the computer you want. There's a glut of different options out there. No point in getting upset when a company makes something that isn't for you.

Maybe one of those projects that get delayed so much that, when it finally ships, the industry (Apple) has moved to another direction.

And it’s not like Apple is a fast moving target is that regard. It took them a long time to fix the MacBook Pro and they did a number of years ago.

Mac and Win32 aren't operating systems.

Of course not, they are APIs. And this Arm-based Dell will not be able to run many binaries compiled for 64 bit Windows or any for Mac. 32 bit Windows Apps will mostly work.

Which might be pretty limiting, depending on what kind of software you run.

Windows for ARM has inbuilt x86 emulation. Having experimented with it in a VM on my Mac, I found it worked quite well in terms of both reliability and performance. Granted, I was running smaller Win32 applications - for large and/or performance sensitive applications, I imagine I might have run into issues.

>32 bit Windows Apps will mostly work

... Which is Win32

Lots of x64 apps making Win32 system calls. Those tend to have more problems on Arm than the x86 apps making those calls.

>Windows 10 enables existing unmodified x86 apps to run on Arm devices. Windows 11 adds the ability to run unmodified x64 Windows apps on Arm devices! This ability to run x86 & x64 apps on Arm devices gives end-users confidence that the majority of their existing apps & tools will run well even on new Arm-powered devices.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/overview

It works well enough that I have Visual Studio running without issue. However, no one has been able to get SQL Server running.

Yeah I find this very strange as well. Isn't this more or less exactly what Apple did 6-7 years ago which was almost universally hated?

I wonder if maybe they have implemented the touch bar in a much more useful way? The mac one was pointless and only served to reduce utility but with the right software it could have been fantastic. Some 3rd party software hacks even gave it haptic feedback (by activating the trackpads haptics) and that alone made it a million times better. Interested to see what Dell have done with it.

Apple had the best chance of it due to making their own web browser, OS, media player, mail app, photo gallery app, etc and having close relationships with big apps like Final Cut Pro, Adobe. What chance does Dell have?

I have an XPS 13 (the current Intel version, not the ARM version obviously) and they definitely have not. In fact, I've had the touchbar replaced 3 times and the whole computer replaced once because when the touchbar gets too hot, it starts "phantom pressing" the keys on it.

The replacement machine still has the issue, but it has a newer generation CPU which generally runs a bit less hot, so it's not as big an issue as it was on the previous machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com