31–40 of 112 posts
Looks like they come with Ubuntu...is that bog-standard Ubuntu, or does it have custom drivers for things like the touch screen? (Basically, I would be curious whether it's easily replaced by another distribution.)
Yes, I've been using a Retina MacBook Pro 13" (early 15) and 15" (mid 15) and just picked up the xps 13 9350 with iris pro. There are definitely some quality control issues but once you get a working model with no faults (I had one that wouldn't reboot and had terrible coil whine, one that had loose trackpad and yellow tint on screen but this could also be because of Amazon's shitty packaging where the laptop was in…
Do you mean Iris Graphics 540? I think Iris Pro Graphics 550 included on-chip eDRAM and isn't available on any of their 15W Skylake CPUs, it's a 28W only part.
https://medium.com/@securitystreak/buying-a-professional-pen...
Granted I owned the older 9343 model but despite the many BIOS updates (and several Linux distros) my laptop kept up phantom right clicks and cursor jumps - very annoying! No issue with Windows 10 though.
I sold it onward and happy with the real-estate 15" provides me once more.
I suppose that the thing will only improve with future Ubuntu Hardware Enablement Stacks that include new kernels and so...
The warranty just ended, so unless they finally fixed it for good, the machine may have been a waste of a thousand dollars. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping it keeps working.
One gem I found when I was shopping for a laptop is the Dell Inspiron 7559 (part of their "gaming" series). I bought the most expensive $1300 version last winter and it's been great. - 4k touchscreen - i7 Skylake processor w/ identical stats to that on the $2400 15" macbook pro - 16 GB RAM - 128 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD (I replaced the HDD with a 500 GB SSD from Amazon) - NVIDIA GTX 960m w/ 4 GB GDDR5 RAM It's sturdily made…
Wow, those are great specs for 1300. what's battery life like?
- cranked the screen to 80% brightness
- have two browsers open with multiple tabs (plus YouTube playing in the background)
- doing development
I'd say it's about average. If you play games the graphics card is going to soak up energy within a couple hours, but for heavy gameplay you'd want to plug it in anyway. I always want more battery life, but it does well enough and has such good specs otherwise that I can't complain.
I ultimately went with a retina MBP (early 2015). My next laptop is likely to be either a Lenovo T460 or a Dell P50 (or their successors).
I have a new XPS 13. It's impeccably built, you can use it comfortably on an airplane, and it runs Linux with no issues. But I wouldn't use it for daily development. The 13 inch screen just doesn't have enough real estate, and it often feels like it's struggling to drive the 4k screen whenever I try to switch applications. If you don't mind something heavy, check out the new Thinkpad P50 or P70. They have actual desk…