Dell admits it made a mistake when it abandoned XPS

Dell needs to admit they're in deep shit.

I just bought our entire G&A team M4 Macbook Air 15" for the same price as our Dell Pro laptops.

They are 20% faster, have 2x the battery life, and 8 more gb of RAM. Also standby actually works.

We had done an initial batch of Dell Pro 16 laptops and with 16gb of ram + the 255h (now 258v) it's over $1100 a laptop. Only problem is... they need 32gb of RAM on Windows 11 because the performance was terrible. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team at 16gb. The upgrade to 32gb of RAM moves the price to $1500+ each, they also recently swapped to soldered RAM for both Intel and AMD, so we are forced to the $1500+ option with a faster CPU.

Initial reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, about 50% of them are new to Macs and have figured it out, additionally they all love the battery life and performance (most are switching from 11th and 12th gen Intel).

Our more tech savvy members have mentioned the better screen, webcam and audio as positives.

I am considering switching our call center (~200 members) to Mac mini's, the same price as our Lenovo mini PCs and will last a long time, the Core Ultra 210 is not great. My only fear is people stealing them really.

Why would I pay $2000 for Dells mid line series of business laptops? How much is this XPS going to cost vs a Mac book Pro?

My top of the line XPS battery swole so much it broke the keyboard.

Repaired under warranty.

Less than a year later that battery was swollen.

No warranty replacement. No OEM batteries available through Dell.

I buy 4 replacements from Amazon and none work. The XPS line has battery DRM.

I have an i7 with a discrete card, 64gb of ram, and a 4k screen that’s worthless.

I used XPS laptops with Ubuntu for years and thought they were great. The last one I got, though, at the last place I worked, had that weird, 'seamless trackpad' or whatever they call it. I couldn't stand the thing. I much prefer the basic trackpad on the $250 Chromebook I use for personal email/browsing these days.

We dropped Dell after almost 30 years of exclusive use for our desktops, laptops, and server/storage infrastructure.

They can never seems to get their shit together.

Going public and then back to private. We stuck with them through that, even though it was a shitshow trying to get a hold of anyone. They blur together, but this might have also been the time when they offered everyone the opportunity to leave and it was a ghost town at Dell.

We stuck with them when they outsourced their support, which we later realized was the best years of support. More on that in a sec.

Outsourced support turned out to be better because we could triage everything ourselves, then tell them which piece of hardware was broken and they would send a tech or replacement part. Basically exactly what we expected for when we purchased premium support.

We stuck with them when they brought their support back to the US. Each tech person wanted to make a career out of each ticket. We couldn't get broken hardware fixed without screaming and begging.

Keep in mind, we always bought the best hardware with the most expensive support level. Precision laptops. Precision desktops. Best servers and storage.

We tried to stick with them when their sales teams basically wanted to remind us every time they don't really want to talk to anyone anymore. Everything is done online and they prefer not to talk to anyone.

We tried to place an order for a laptop refresh, which was going to be followed by desktop refresh, and then a complete server/storage refresh. The sales teams made it seem like they were doing us a favor by even quoting us anything. More reminders to use the customer portal and don't call or e-mail us. That was the final straw and we did the complete refresh with a different brand.

That "seamless" touchpad is the ugliest thing I have seen this year. How do you guys touchtype on it if you never know when to get out the hands? Proprietary software which supposedly allows to not bother about it works not on all OS and probably not always.

I had the 17" XPS, which was lovely. A nice 16:10 screen, which was the main thing I was looking for. Battery was easy to replace. Easy memory and M2 drive replacement. It was a pretty good laptop for x86. Main issue was heat/sound. Linux was pretty easy to get going on that hardware. You could get at the internals - so cleaning out the fan was doable. (order new screws, as they ship with silly soft metal on the orignals)

https://i.imgur.com/4SdAQu9.jpeg

When they released the 16" series, most of the updgrade features were gone. Memory was tied to the CPU, which puts you in the same position that Apples does. Not a fan. I swapped out the 17" for a 16" macbook. I doubt I'll look at an XPS again.

  Dell XPS 14 starts at $2,050, while the 16-inch model will demand $2,200 starting Jan. 6. If you think that’s high, that’s because Dell revised its price point from $1,650 and $1,850, respectively. 

25% / ~$400 laptop price increase due to market price increases for 16GB RAM?

Well I could've told them that for free.

The only thing I didn’t like about my XPS-15 was when the battery got pregnant and made the trackpad stop working.

It is so hard to find Windows laptops with working keyboards, trackpads, displays and speakers!

My Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 laptop has working keyboard and display but speaker has driver issues (one speaker turns off after a while until I reboot), and the right-clicking on the trackpad does not work in some places.

Surface laptops have good keyboard and trackpad but the display uses 150% scaling, and that has artifacts (such as 1px lines map to 1.5 device pixels, but use 1 device pixel, so are out of proportion).

The older Dell XPS line was reasonable. It had 200% scaling display, normal keyboard and good trackpad, but the new version has weird keyboard and trackpad.

Windows PCs are made by multiple manufacturers which in theory should have produced great choice and quality, instead they all suck. Mac laptops are made by a single company, so no choice, and yet it is excellent.

I had an XPS laptop purchased around 2020. It was a very well spec-ed machine on paper and worked reasonably well. It just did not hold up. 1. Bulging battery - replaced 2. USB-C charging blew up the charge controller - laptop completely unable to charge - replaced motherboard 3. USB-C charging blew up the charge controller again (~6 months later)

#3 was out of warranty and I had just changed companies so it went into the trash. It lasted 3 years tops.

I also have a dell ultrasharp 4K monitor that had to be replaced under warrant within ~1 year of purchase and I am just waiting for it to go again now that it is out of warranty.

Dell seems to have had reasonable service(in-warranty) but their stuff is always breaking down.

I have had several macbooks. Each lasted ~10 years+.

I had an XPS 9560 / 9570 or something like that. Top of the line spec, mind you.

It had a Killer WLAN network card that would frequently disconnect from wifi on any OS - so much that I had to switch it out to a different one. The speakers blew up within the first year and the cooling system had to be replaced too - thankfully warranty covered that.

I bought the XPS only because I couldn't justify the cost of a Macbook Pro back then (easily 30% more expensive and the XPS was already a stretch), but I regretted that since the first day I've had it. Bulky, unpleasant to use, frequent hardware issues. Never again.

I used to manage a small fleet of about 6 XPS laptops at my old job. 3 of them needed motherboard replacements under warranty within a year. People would put them on standby and put them in their bag, then get home and find the laptop had decided to start up of its own volition and overheat to the point it would be searing hot to the touch. The charging would randomly fail or the laptop would go into a boot loop. Not to mention problems with Windows deciding to update 2 minutes before an important meeting (and then naturally the progress bar would get stuck).

I recently switched from a XPS 13 with tons of issues, replaced twice, to a Surface Laptop 7 on ARM64. Absolutely no regrets, it's so much better. They really need to focus on quality control.

I'm still using my decade-old Precision 5510 (the XPS 15 at the time was a variant of it), and I've rarely felt the need to replace it, beyond Nvidia no longer supporting the discrete graphics as of last year.

There was a period around Project Sputnik where they were making really good machines. Years of abuse, and it's still in good condition, though the battery has been showing its age lately.

It's rather sad that things have gone downhill since then, as there was a period there that Dell were really good.

Windows PC market is truly gone down the toilet. Its nearly impossible to find a windows laptop >15 inch, with decent battery life, with centered keyboard. Apparently I need to buy 14 inch laptop for centered keyboard, hey you know what I need 15 inch or more of real estate. Thinkpads used to be a solid bet but those too have weird lineup these days. Its just so simple to get a Macbook these days and not worry about performance or battery life for fairly decent price.

There was a time that XPS meant something. I’m still holding on to my XPS 13 9360. It’s (even for today’s standards) lightweight and Linux compatibility has been perfect from day one.

Radical idea many won't like, but if I were CEO of Dell I'd consider it: buy Framework.

Then don't ruin it. Put real resources behind it. Think of it as almost a reverse merger, not financially but spiritually.

It would make them unique and relevant again.

While we're doing anecdotes, I don't actually hate my 2025 Dell 16 Premium at all, and it looks like they fixed most of my quibbles with the new XPS 16.

Figuring out which laptop to get was horrible because of their completely inexplicable branding, which I'm glad to see them roll back, but the computer is fine. I'm not sure I can agree with all of the "Dell computers are bad/dying" arguments.

I think they went through a huge quality slump from ~2020-2023, as did most things, but so far my experience has been that they're quite good now. I haven't had any standby issues (or issues of any kind, really) using Windows. Windows 11 is Windows 11 but Tahoe is also Tahoe so that's a net medium. A little bit of Group Policy tweaking to remove the junkware and a little wince when hit with new-Notepad aside, it's good enough. I also tried running Linux on it and everything was straightforward except for the webcam (most modern Intel laptops use a new Intel thing where the CPU has the ISP on it and the camera is attached over CSI, and the kernel support is quite bleeding-edge) and the usual Nvidia graphics switching and arcane Linux power management problems, but I really got it for Windows anyway.

My only beefs are the terrible virtual function bar (this was stupid the first time vendors tried it, and trying it again in 2025 is a really incredible choice, I'm glad they backed down on this ludicrous idea) and that the OLED model only comes in touchscreen form and the digitizer is ever-so-slightly visible. Otherwise I like it as well as my M2 MacBook Pro; the screen is square and notchless, the performance-to-dollar ratio was far superior, and the physical build quality is quite good. The "infinity" touchpad that's not really infinite is a stupid gimmick on paper but overall I don't notice it at all - it works just as well as any non-Apple touchpad I've used, which is to say about 85% as well as an Apple one.

I have a 2020 XPS 13, and love it. I was disappointed when the keyboards in the batch of 2020 XPS 13 laptops after mine, had rattly key caps. My XPS 13 is still doing well after the last nearly 6 years, and I look forward to trying the new XPS laptops if I can get one with the specs I want.

loved my xps but the built quality is BS. mine fell apart after a year (even with light use), and was pretty much dumped for parts when i upgraded.

my macbook pro on the other hand is still going after 10 years, and even tho i upgraded i kept it as it was too solid to throw away.

IMO XPS had a terrible reputation and needed sunsetting. I highly doubt these will be much better