A new, thinner XPS 13 is also coming later this year.
I probably got a lemon but regardless my XPS (~3 years old) is the worst computer I’ve ever owned. Touchy WiFi, battery that goes from 30 to 3℅ in a matter of seconds, randomly doesn’t detect the keyboard, randomly freezes, randomly doesn’t acknowledge it’s plugged in. Some days I just put it in timeout and use my 10yo netbook instead.
You never contacted dell for a warranty? That definitely sounds like a lemon to me
Why would you put up with that? Why wouldn’t you demand a replacement.
Looks promising. If I can buy it with Linux, that’s a plus. And turn off the touchscreen.
or you could buy the non-touch version
The touch version is higher res and OLED.
Yes
As long as Micro$oft doesn’t get any of my money.
I got my XPS 9360 because it came with Linux preinstalled.
Dell is pretty friendly to Linux and even uses LVFS. I would assume theyre maintaining that in the new models but hey techs been doing stupid things since covid so who knows.
I owned several xps in a row, then got one with that touch bar. I returned it and stayed away since. Smart move to ditch it
These fuckers have no USB-A ports but has a headphone jack?
The correct way, really
Buy a Framework, I have 4 slots that can be everything from USB-A to C to RJ45 to card readers when I need it, and I can charge the thing from any port.
Ha, I thought a 1Hz display was a typo until I read the article - that’s the minimum display update, not the maximum: for situations when nothing’s changing on the screen to save battery life.
On phones and tablets, variable refresh rates make an “always on” display feasible in terms of battery budget, where you can have something like a lock screen turned on at all times without burning through too much power.
On laptops, this might open up some possibilities of the lock screen or some kind of static or slideshow screensaver staying on longer while idle, before turning off the display.
With enough pitch black on the lock screen background, you should be able to keep it going for quite a bit longer, since this apparently has OLED. I think for phones, always on is usually a black background with text and stuff on it, isn’t it?
Most Android phones with always on have a grayscale screen that is mostly black. But iPhones introduced always on with 1Hz screens and still show a less saturated, less bright version of the color wallpaper on the lock screen.
Just shows how well the rebranding was thought through.
I miss my clitmouse XD
Build quality for Dell is down over the past few years
That’s why I got a thinkpad. Built like a tank.
Hijacking top comment to report that: This is true across the industry for (most) OEMs
The Secret is to buy “Enterprise level”
Check out the LATITUDE line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Latitude
Those are enterprise fleet laptops … the ones they have to support for 5-10 years.
You know which line they don’t discontinue parts for? You know which line has repair manuals and driver updates available? wanna take a wild guess which line is usually more modular and powerful at the expense of being less sleek looking and thin?
And the best part is that you can usually buy them fairly cheap if you find them used.
I prefer Dell Latitude to HP Elitebook, Thinkpads are OK too but they’ve gone down in quality a lot since they got bought by Lenovo
TL;DR = Buy an enterprise level laptop, consumer line laptops are all trash,
Lenovo has been making thinkpads for 20 years. The complaint that their quality is still less than how laptops were manufactured 2 decades ago feels rather dated.
Oh my god this post made me feel ancient, I was still thinking that was like 10 years tops. 💀
The Latitudes are balls in the worst way. Including the new “Pro” models. I’ve had i7 and i9 Latitudes that are slower than my i5 XPS 13, and yeah that thing sucks too but at least it sucks predictably.
Top tip, buy a used enterprise laptop. You can get one hell of a deal when big companies throw their entire lineup out after a few years and flood the market. Some have a few scuffs here and there, but others are mint after sitting plugged to a dock for the last three years in a row.
Might need a new battery though, so research how easy it’s to swap and calculate that in the cost just in case.Replying to my own comment to give yall one more tidbit.
The latitude product nomenclature is still standard
- 2 first digits of the model number are the “class” the higher the laptop the more high end
- last 2 digits of the model number are the generation (we are current in 60)
So for example the Latitude 9460 is the very high end laptop that came out at the beginning of this year while the 3540 was the entry level economy latitude that came out in 2023
My 6430 is chugging along as a nas on its 8 th year+ after being discontinued as daily workhorse. Running 24/7.
I got a couple of latitudes and found they had soldered ram so I couldn’t upgrade them later 😭
Unfortunately soldered ram and non replaceable batteries are becoming more common on the ultralights … Thanks Apple
Not the capacitive touch bar!
Good Lord, they’re copying that hideous notch design from the macbooks.
On one hand, its not that bad on a Mac… but that’s because the OS is designed in such a way where there’s nothing there and it sorta gets lost. Windows isn’t like that at all.
On the other hand, At least its not right above the keyboard like some of the ones we have at work… the “up the nose” cam is not flattering.
but that’s because the OS is designed in such a way where there’s nothing there
Ehh OSX uses the top of the screen as a menu bar so for apps which have a lot of menu bar options, those are gone. A lot of third party apps also let you place helpful widgets on the menu bar so that’s kinda not a thing anymore either.
You don’t use macOS do you? Any apps that have that many items on the menu bar are simply pushed to the right of the notch. There is 2” of blank menu bar in 99% of all use cases.
And if you still don’t like it, you bump the uninterrupted menu bar under the notch fully and everything above it (to the left and right of the notch) black as if there’s a bezel.
If the app menu spills over to the other side of the notch it hides all your utility icons with no good way to access them. Even Windows XP handled that situation better, I don’t understand why MacOS still sucks at it.
but that’s because the OS is designed in such a way where there’s nothing there
This is not true. There are multiple third party apps that help you get that space back so menu icons don’t just disappear behind the notch. I don’t use those though, and instead blindly drag my menu icons behind the notch repeatedly until the one I want pops out from behind it.
Yikes, just apple things I guess
Just give me a bezel, I want a machine not a fashion accessory.
I hate the notch, and I used to say I’d rather have a bezel, but after going back to one of my pre-notch laptops, not having a bezel is nice. I still hate the notch though. I wish I could opt for just not having a built in webcam. It’s not like they use it for faceid, and I use an external webcam for work meetings anyway. Plus the iPhone seamlessly works as a webcam.
The pessimist sees the notch as wasted space, the optimist sees it as extra screen.
For xps price, they need to stick it under the screen. I hard pass on needless bezel and always on notch.
They literally had the small bezel and the camers on top in a previous XPS model.
Yeah, but no notch, so the bezel wasn’t excessive or needless. I still passed on it, though. But that’s a personal choice.
I realize my tone could be misinterpreted, my intention was to support your comment on the new model and how it can look like a step backward compared to previous models.
My intention was not to refute your comment. :)
It doesn’t look like a notch. The picture with the lock screen doesn’t show the image going up around the camera.
what the fuck is a 1 HZ display option
It dynamically regulates the refresh rate down to 1hz to save energy, it’s like an LTPO panel on a phone
It says in the article: Energy saving and for static images
it does WHAT
Guessing: when the image is not being updated (you’re reading an article and not scrolling, you’re looking at a photo, etc), the display will change the referral refresh rate to 1 frame per second, which will drastically reduce power consumption.
That’s how it works on other devices that have this feature, at least.
it Hertzes
Ouch my bones!
Replacing the function keys with a capacitive bar was the stupidest thing they have ever done. So silly that even Apple walked back on that design choice.
Any serious laptop buyer would rule out a laptop just for that. And any casual buyer looking to spend XPS money on a laptop is going to buy a MacBook.
My work gave me a Mac with this. I absolutely hated it - constantly triggering random things I didn’t want or need and apparently something about the wiring caused the physical keyboard to fail prematurely.
Fortunately we’ve moved on from those dark days. I still have to use a Mac, but at least there’s no touch bar.
I’m a fan of unusual control surfaces and this thing has had me salivating for years. Sadly they’re pretty difficult to procure so I haven’t had the chance of owning one (and probably realizing they’re not all that great irl)
The touch bar is pretty good if a) most everyday shortcuts you use are on the modifiers and the alphanumeric keyboard instead of the f-keys, and b) you can put custom controls in the touch bar. Both of these are true with Macbook: there’s a third-party app for controlling the touch bar. E.g. I’ve put in it a button to handoff the Bluetooth headphones from the laptop to the phone or the other way around.
Also helps if you’re using an external keyboard, while the laptop is sitting on a stand. This way the touch bar is just an additional control surface.
And the worst part is, Apple has a lot more influence over software on MacOS than Dell does over software on Windows. Meaning Apple was able to influence at least some (though not most by any measure) 3rd party developers to make the touchbar context aware. I somehow doubt Dell had any such luck, so it would’ve been even worse than the Apple touchbar which was already shit.
In fact, had Apple included it in their whole lineup for a few years, it could’ve actually been useful. But Airs and 2 TBT3 13" Pros never got it, neither did the ubercrappy 12". A huge issue was the lack of adoption by developers (because to make it truly useful, they’d have to customize the touchbar for their application), but why would the developers have been motivated to do it if the thing wasn’t even on every new device sold.
It was dumb. Forced you to always look at your keyboard.
The touch bar worked well for me on a Macbook. Most of the hotkeys there use cmd+something instead of the f-keys, so I needed the f-keys with only a couple apps, namely Double Commander. But what’s better, there are apps to put custom controls into the touch bar. The most useful one for me was the button to hand off the Bluetooth headphones from the laptop to the phone or vice versa (via a bash script of mine). Plus I could also have app-specific custom buttons.
I feel like it doesn’t have to be either or? I’d like a touch bar in addition to fn keys. Too bad nobody is making that option.
I don’t see anything wrong with touch bar+proper control keys either. There isn’t anything inherently bad about a touch bar in itself.
But replacing your function keys with a touch bar is a bad idea. It’s not standard.
Sticking to standards plus giving other alternative control methods are fine. Kind of like how Asus implements a numpad into the toucpad. I think it’s a gimmick but it doesn’t hurt anyone.
Also Lenovo, who were the first ones to give than nonsense a whirl (X1 Carbon Gen 2, 2014).
Lenovo’s was present for just that single generation. Apple kept it for 6 generations over 7 years. Dell 4 generations, 3 years.
Can’t say I’ll miss any of them.
1 Hz display option: like an e-Ink display?
(it says 120Hz in the article)
It says 1-120 Hz in the article (for battery saving and e.g. ehen there’s static images on the display).
They might mean down to 1hz like some smart phones do, to save battery.
There’s a 1920 x 1200 non-touch display option, which will surely get you better battery life than OLED. But what’s most interesting about it is the 1-120 Hz variable refresh rate, which Dell says is a first to for this model. That extremely low refresh should help save power when static images or text is on the screen.
Ah yeah, I should have read the rest of the article. I didn’t know about that feature though, that’s cool
That’s slower than a car blinker.
No, I meant what I said. The article says “hz” and so do other phone manufacturers offering the same feature. It may be marketing wank or technically incorrect but that’s what it’s referred to as.
But, hz of a monitor is not like a car blinker or CRT televisions where it’s off in between the updates. It is on in between the updates, it’s just not the new image. In which case it doesn’t matter how slow your performing the updates because the pixels are just on with a static picture in between the updates.
1 Hz is 1 fps. Hertz = cycles per second
I know what hertz is, I’m en electrotechnician. The display’s refresh rate is measured in hertz, and has to be at least 40 Hz or you suffer from headaches and some from photosensitive epilepsy. Ideally 100 Hz or more. But the image (frames per second) does not have to change that often. For example, movies are 24 fps but 35mm film projectors are 72 Hz: they flash each frame 3x before advancing (using a three-blade shutter) because 24 Hz is seizure-inducing but using a unique picture for each refresh (72 fps) is expensive. Similarly, your OLED TV is 144 Hz when gaming at 144 fps (if you can afford that), when watching a 60fps gaming video or 24fps movie: the screen controller works the same all the time but the picture it’s fed changes more or less frequently.
If an OLED screen refreshed at 1 Hz, you’d see a line going down the display. So it never goes below 60 Hz. However, the phone can reduce animation fps when the CPU can’t keep up or to save battery. 1 fps is extremely choppy though, I don’t know where OP got that. I did once use a phone capped to that framerate (via adbcontrol pre-Lollipop where the screenshot is transmitted over USB) and it was awfully non-responsive.
That’s some pretty confidently incorrect posting. Most gaming displays these days have some flavor of adaptive sync available that adjusts the refresh rate to the content being displayed, and even before that there were film modes that set the refresh rate to the ~24 fps(or a multiple if it) that film content is at to avoid stuttering/tearing.
This is likely the bottom of the adaptive sync window and will only be used if the machine is idle
I edited it, I thought all OLEDs worked like this little one where the pixels turn off between refreshes (in fact, in this passive matrix, only 1 line is on at a time, even the high-speed camera has an overly long shutter). Turns out there are TFTs that keep them on. Thanks for teaching me this.
What you’re describing is AMOLED. Nobody calls them TFT OLEDs.
It’s pretty silly to through around credentials.
Here’s a video of an OLED TV updating in slow motion. The pixels are on in between updates so it really doesn’t matter how fast it’s updating it’s not going to cause headaches or any of the problems that we used to associate with strobing style displays. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54E3uUEryZM
Well, on some they aren’t.
But yes, TIL that some OLEDs do in fact work continuously thanks to TFTs
That display is using BFI (black frame insertion) which is usually optional to reduce blur.
It’s pretty silly to through around credentials.
What’s the deal with Lemmy being so abrasive all the time. Sometimes I think some of us should be put in time out with just hacker news for a month to teach us some manners…
Do you disagree with me thinking it’s silly to through around credentials on the internet or just how I communicated it?
I did edit after posting to tone it down some but perhaps not enough?
Oh boy, always on oled displays are so in now.
Feel the burn-in
Probably not as bad as you might think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbEgQrigiLc
but yeah not sure how much worse it would be if always on…
There’s a lighter band at the top of the screen on my phone, corresponding to the darker header area in the RedReader app for Reddit. Just from using that app every day. Though that seems to be kinda reverse burn-in, in that the rest of the screen became darker since I use the light colorscheme.
On the desktop, the taskbar alone would definitely burn in with my usage patterns. And probably also the tabs and the status bar in the editor.
Might also depend on the model and if it does any sort of burn in protection processes such as pixel orbiting. My partner has been using a Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED for productivity about 4hrs a day for about the past 3 years and it doesn’t have any noticeable burn in yet(lots of other really annoying software UI issues though, because Samsung… 😅)
They never stopped selling xps, what drug is Tom using?
They were rebranded something generic like “Dell Pro” or something for a while.
Dell Pro is formerly Precision, I think XPS was renamed to “Max”, or was it “Premium”? I actually can’t remember
No clit-mouse, no deal.
(There are dozens of us. Dozens!)
that limits you to power books, no?
Lenovo Thinkpads are the only reliable choice pretty much and even then it’s a bit of a crapshoot whether they include them or not. HP Elitebooks used to have them too but it seems like they also stopped in 2021. Apple’s never had them as far as I know. There’s a few other one-off small-run options here and there too but they’re few and far between.
I realize I’m in a very significant minority, but personally, having access to the mouse pointer for short jogs here and clicks there without my hands leaving the keyboard home row is a gamechanger and a non-negotiable feature to me. I’d never claim it’s a great way to move the mouse, but it has extremely high utility due to its convenient positioning, it’s always available even in tight quarters, and anytime space permits it pairs well with a secondary, traditional mouse for movements that are more numerous or complex or need more precision, it works very well with a text-heavy workflow.
It’s a mouse for people who would rather minimize their mouse usage, and I guess that’s me, or at least that’s the workflow I’ve gravitated to all my life. It’s not an ideology thing, it’s simply the fact that it’s deep muscle memory now, and whenever I try to use any computer without one I struggle so much, and I’ve actively tried more than once to wean myself off it, I can’t, it becomes a constant irritation that any other mouse feels so disconnected from my typing.
Touchpads are just insanely frustrating to use, I have no idea how some people tolerate using them daily unless it’s all they’ve ever known, and touchscreens are even worse in some ways since your fingers block the screen exactly where you’re trying to press, not to mention getting fingerprint smudges all over it even with the best techno-magic coatings. I loathe them both.
