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Comment by m348e912 | Hacker News Reader

Protip, if you are considering a dell xps laptop, consider the dell precision laptop workstation instead which is the business version of the consumer level xps.

It also looks like names are being changed, and the business laptops are going with a dell pro (essential/premium/plus/max) naming convention.

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I have the precision 5690 (the 16inch model) with a ultra 7 processor and 4k touchscreen (2025 model). It is very heavy, but its very powerful. My main gripe is that the battery life is very bad, and it has a 165 watt charger, which wont work on most planes. So if you fly a lot for work, this laptop will die on you unless you bring a lower wattage charger. It also doesn't sleep properly. I often find it in my bag hours after closing it and the fans are going at full blast. It should have a 4th usb port (like the smaller version!). Otherwise I have no complaints (other than about windows 11!).

After using several Precisions at work, I now firmly believe that Dell does not know how to cool their workstations properly. They are all heavy, pretty bad at energy efficiency and run extremely hot (I use my work machine laid belly up in summer since fans are always on). I’d take a ThinkPad or Mac any day over any Dell.

Power hungry intel chips and graphics cards are inconvenient in laptops when it comes to battery life and cooling. It is especially noticeable if you spend any time using an M-series macbook pro, where performance is the same or better, but you get 16 hours of battery life. I prefer to use thinkpads, but apple just has a big technological advantage here that stands out in the UX department. I really hope advances are made quickly by competitors to get similar UX in a more affordable package.

While I appreciate the build quality and ruggedness of the thinkpads, I’d take the bigger trackpad and better screen of the XPS/precision any day. Or, maybe my employer screwed me by giving a shitty thinkpad SKU (it has a 1080p TN panel ffs)..

I just want a solid laptop that can be used with the lid closed. I want to set it up and never open the lid again. I'll guess I'll keep dreaming.

Yeah they should make a laptop where you can choose what display you want to use, and which keyboard and mouse for that matter. It could be made cheaper by ditching the screen and keyboard, and heck I wouldn’t even mind if it were a bit bigger or heavier since it’ll just sit on or under my desk. That sort of laptop would be amazing.

They have computers that are built into keyboards now. Maybe that will do the trick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yl2twJswM

No, my ideal laptop doesn’t have a keyboard. I’m imagining like a laptop where everything other than the cpu/gpu/ram/basic storage/nic are addressed by peripherals and I can just have one that sits in my office and I plug stuff into it.

Now that I think of it, I’d also like laptops that come in standardized sizes so I could stack them on shelves and mostly just interact with them through ssh/terminal. I could imagine those laptops being super popular for compute/storage

Sounds like you want a NUC PC or something similar with a built in battery.

We used to call those 'desktops'...

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