Dell XPS 13 Plus

I have 3 brand new XPS 13 Plus machines sitting right in front of me, the trackpads are unusable. You have no idea where it starts and ends, the click is super finnicky etc.

You should know that I have two XPS13 in my possession, both with Ubuntu pre-installed, so I know the economics of it. I was questioning your logic. Are you concerned with it's purchase price or it's resale value? You can't have both, can you? I don't understand why you use dual boot, if you only care for Linux? Or maybe you don't? Then why complain? The capacitive top row renders it a clear "management" option anyway, I don't understand the appeal of it for development. I think you don't have your priorities sorted out.

I used to have one of these machines, quite frankly one of the worst machines i have ever owned. Continuous hardware problems with the keyboard and trackpad. Do NOT recommend.

Mine wouldn't "wake up" from hibernation and having experiencing it wake up from sleep while in my backpack, I learned the hard way, that only safe way was to shut it down.

I must say, I'm surprised that it takes that much memory. I've got a 16GB macbook pro, and it sits at a comfortable 9GB "app memory". I've got one config project open, one pretty large Vue/TS/HTML/CSS project, and two Go projects opened in VSCode, plus Chrome and Firefox, plus Outlook and Teams. And Emacs. I regularly run a Django docker project too, together with DBeaver and PyCharm, and still it doesn't eat up all my memory (although I do close VSCode in that case). Everything is memory hungry, yes, but it doesn't look like I need 32GB. Pricey machine, BTW.

So sad, what used to be a groundbreaking laptop (an ultraportable that you'd actually buy with official Linux support!) is now copying the worst from Apple, while degrading in almost all aspects from the predecessors. No headphone jack, no USB-A? 13" 4K screen which sucks the not-so-small battery as fast as the first version did ~10 years ago? Touchbar? Glass screen? A charger that can't actually charge the device while you are compiling your code? And this is a "developer" machine? I'm so disappointed.

> I don't want laptops that look like glass. As a MacBook user, neither do I. It looks like Dell took all the mistakes Apple made in recent years and turned them up to 11 in a single package. That keyboard will be a nightmare to touchtype on. The arrow keys will require looking down to use every single time. The trackpad without clear borders will be a usability nightmare. Or perhaps they mean it spans the entire width of the laptop, which is probably much worse. Capacitive things have no place in a developer's computer.

Dell will learn the hard way and backtrack, or will abandon Dev edition XPSs due to low demand (due to idiotic keyboard). And no, remapping keys to Esc or whatever isn't acceptable, just as it wasn't on Apple's touch bar notebooks (RIP).

> I really wish thermal throttling was the first major point of discussion for ALL laptop CPU's. Exactly. Intel claims performance leadership based on their P series chips, which are always going to be throttled in a slim and light laptop. For instance, Lenovo's thin and light ThinkPad X1 Yoga has two fans but still throttles: >Unfortunately, the laptop got uncomfortably hot in its Best performance mode during testing, even with light workloads. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/review-lenovos-think... Or the Dell XPS 13 Plus: >the XPS 13 Plus’ fan was really struggling here because, boy oh boy, did this thing get hot. After a few hours of regular use (which, in my case, is a dozen or so Chrome tabs with Slack running over top), this laptop was boiling. I was getting uncomfortable keeping my hands on the palm rests and typing on the keyboard. Putting it on my lap was off the table. https://www.theverge.com/23284276/dell-xps-13-plus-intel-202...

The memory is still soldered on I guess, even after the framework laptop proved that you can have a compact laptop and memory slots (and other stuff), something we were told wasn't possible.

The whole keyboard looks like form over function. I have never touched them, so I’m curious about other people’s experience.

It is a developer laptop, though. Who wants to get pinky arthritis when ^[ is right there?

Is this a joke? I mean what's the use of this laptop for a developer if it has a typical consumer keyboard not designed for typing code? Also having been a user of couple of generations of XPS, I wouldn't wish this laptop upon an enemy. These laptops were the most unreliable I have a ever had. I also never heard fans so loud in any other laptop like in my XPS 15. They were louder than a hairdryer. Imagine this during a meeting. Plus typical issues like coil whine or if you power it off, pray that it will turn on... When my XPS 15 died, while not being a fan of Apple I bought M1 MBPRO. Now I am not sure why other manufacturers like Dell even bother making their laptops. Do yourself a favour and don't bother with Dell. You can run Linux on Mac just fine (through virtualisation).

> Especially when unplugged which will cause Alder Lake to significantly drop in performance. At least in a laptop, it's not just when you unplug the laptop that performance drops. You've also got to have enough volume in the laptop to shoehorn in a major cooling system if you're going to keep the P series processors from throttling. For instance, Lenovo's thin and light ThinkPad X1 Yoga has two fans but still throttles: >Unfortunately, the laptop got uncomfortably hot in its Best performance mode during testing, even with light workloads. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/review-lenovos-think... Or the Dell XPS 13 Plus: >the XPS 13 Plus’ fan was really struggling here because, boy oh boy, did this thing get hot. After a few hours of regular use (which, in my case, is a dozen or so Chrome tabs with Slack running over top), this laptop was boiling. I was getting uncomfortable keeping my hands on the palm rests and typing on the keyboard. Putting it on my lap was off the table. https://www.theverge.com/23284276/dell-xps-13-plus-intel-202... Intel's P series chips in a device without a massive heat sink and fans can't hit those high clocks that their performance benchmarks rely on.

It starts at $1,449.00 for 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD. Why would the average user buy this over the M2 Air? Average user = Not doing anything that requires Windows or Linux. M2 Air has a better screen, faster CPU (plugged or unplugged), faster GPU, more battery life, fanless, runs cooler, better speakers, thinner, and it's cheaper. Also, I think not having function keys is a mistake. Touch keys are just awful on a keyboard. In addition, if you want to do even light gaming, you'd want function keys

> I can think of a few things, such as official Ubuntu support, better support for multiple displays, ability to run x86 apps including windows and games. Hence, the "average user". Also, I wouldn't try to play games on the Dell as it has a weaker GPU and no function keys. > And also not overheating like the m2 does, but honestly at this point who knows if the dell doesn't have the same problem... M2 does not "overheat". It throttles like any CPU. It should still run cooler, faster, quieter than the Dell.

Maybe M2 Air will be slower, but good enough and XPS 13 Plus will probably wake up your neighbours with its fans spinning like crazy.

People tend to focus on raw performance and then pretend the Dell has no fans. I'd take a bit slower laptop but dead silent over a minute faster one whirring like a jet engine.

> not having function keys Makes sure I won't buy it never. Also no ContextMenu key and no way to hold it with one hand (because the keyboard takes all width and doesn't have a border). Now imagine you are standing, holding it on the palm of one hand and... now you need to press Fn (leftmost part of the keyboard), RCtrl (rightmost part) and touchable F10 . All with one hand.

I have XPS 9570 and using Linux. I can say this is the most rubbish piece of hardware I had. I only bought XPS because I couldn't really find anything better that is non Apple. I see that Dell has not learned anything by the looks of XPS 13 Plus. Given that this laptop is aimed at professionals, why does it have such an atrocious keyboard? Just by looking at it, I know it would make me want to drop this laptop in the bin. Small cursor keys, no dedicated PgUp / PgDown etc. And it's not fanless. With my XPS you can't have a Teams meeting without someone pointing out "what's that noise?" and then you have to say "oh sorry that's my laptop". I am in the market for a new laptop, and on the issue of fans alone I am going to go with M2 Air. If I could run a linux on a VM at reasonable speed, I'll be happy.

What a load of... The article's arguments against the Macbook Air are "they don’t look great" and "the design is outright archaic." The XPS13+'s capacitive touch strip seems to be a badly designed copy of the infamous Macbook Pro touch bar, which at least had some additional functionality compared to regular function keys. The XPS13+ only replaces physical keys by capacitive sensors which are hard to use and find and don't add any useful functionality. The borderless touchpad looks nice, but it probably makes it harder to figure out where the touch sensitive area starts. If you also remember the well-known overheating problems with previous XPS13 models (see e.g. https://www.techadvisor.com/review/dell-xps-13-9300-2020-378... ) you start to wonder what the point of the XPS13+ is, especially considering that the price will probably be in the range of similar Macbook Pro configuration. Even Apple has learned (again) that form over function doesn't always provide benefits for the user...

I had an HP with similar touch controls (but with function keys) and I was always hitting the volume bar by accident. This has all the problems of the first-gen Apple Touchbar and none of the benefits (being, essentially, an "iPad Nano" under the screen) of the original. It's baffling that something like this can reach the market.

It seems to have all the disadvantages of the touchbar without any of the advantages (like the handy emoji keyboard and being fully redefinable). Oh well...

That is quite the landing strip of a trackpad. It seems they looked at what Apple did (touchbar + big trackpads) and tried to copy it without being obvious. I don't think I'd personally buy one of these, but I am interested to see if the target market of Gen Z'ers likes it as much as Dell seems to imply.

They learned something according to Tom's Hardware [0]; took a page out of Apple's book and removed the headphone jack! [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dell-xps-13-specs-price-re...