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by cainxinth·6y ago·view on hn ↗
Apple isn’t alone with that strategy. I bought a fairly expensive Dell XPS 15 that was overheating. They literally replaced the mobo (which had an i7 and a GTX 1050 attached to it) four different times... and the entire process was a year long nightmare.

Between express shipping, in home techs, and parts, they spent way more than it would have cost to replace the unit. And, it never solved the problem. I have to underclock it before doing anything very CPU intensive.

3 comments
Unless you're talking about overheating to the point of shutting down, the CPU/GPU getting to 100+ degrees and throttling is quite common and expected in thin laptops - it's a design choice to prefer light weight and thin over decent cooling and/or underclocking/undervolting and to only throttle near the limit rather than at lower temperatures.
I am very much talking about the unit shutting down from heat. If I plan on rendering video overnight or anything like that, I change the maximum CPU utilization to 97%. If I want to play a modern game with heavy requirements, I set it to 80% or even less.
The XPS 15 throttles horribly at reasonable temperatures. Many people re-seat the heatsink on the CPU and GPU and it fixes this issue.
Same here, just with an XPS13 - the laptop had insane(and I'm not exaggerating) coil whine, and also would randomly not go to sleep just stay on and slowly cook itself in a whatever case you put it in. Dell replaced the mobo 3(!!!) times, then finally replied that it was the last time they will repair that machine due to these issues for me and that was that.
> and also would randomly not go to sleep just stay on and slowly cook itself in a whatever case you put it in

This happens to my MBP every other month. With a classic Windows laptop you always have some sort of LEDs that indicate the state of power/charging when it is closed - with a MBP, nothing.

That sounds unusable, it's probably a problem with the design. Why ever buy a Dell again?
Because every manufacturer makes lemons.
Shitty customer service is not lemons unless you mean an entire branch of company a lemon.