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New XPS 15 Laptop

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Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#171

Post by deong »

bronz wrote: post #160
ohyoutravel wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of battery, I picked up an XPS 13 recently and am very happy with it. The battery seems to last forever, the 2016 model increases the battery size from 56(?) to 60w. The only reason I didn't go with the XPS 15 was that the battery life is supposed to be terrible, and it appears that even this newly announced model only has a 56w battery, which is surprising.

out of all the laptops that are around right now, the xps series seems to be the closest to my fantasy -- this is due largely to their developer models which come with linux and linux supported hardware. when you say w do you mean Wh? ive heard murmurs of the legal limit for battery capacity in a laptop being 100Wh so that is very disappointing that the new xps would not even approach that anemic cap. i was in a mall…

The whole 100W thing was, as far as I can tell, an almost completely unsupported theory advanced by a Mac blogger about why Apple doesn't put bigger batteries in their laptops. There is apparently some FAA document saying something to that effect, but of course there are lots of regulations on various books that are unenforced or unenforceable, and there have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of laptops made over the years with larger batteries, and none have ever been, to my knowledge, barred from flying.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#172

Post by slantyyz »

bronz wrote: post #139

i feel like a new trend is emerging with these nice, 15 inch non-apple laptops. i say non-apple because they are attracting the pro crowd that used to buy apple exclusively. my personal fantasy is a laptop that isnt shy about being thick, affording it a huge battery, tons of ports, OLED screen and solid state trackpad like the macbook. with very reliable linux drivers for all the hardware. a very utilitarian machine.

I've been planning for my next laptop purchase next year, and for some reason, I can't pull the Alienware 13R3 off the top of my short list. It's big (for a 13"), heavy, ugly and adorned with hideous gamer bling (WHY, WHY, WHY??), but it also has all the ports and features (discrete trackpad buttons!) I want in my work machine. Right now, it's basically between the new XPS 15 and the 13R3 (or R4 if it's out by the time I am ready).

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#173

Post by meritt »

projectramo wrote: post #153

How does one tell which XPS 15 one is ordering? Suppose you order one through Amazon, other than doing a feature by feature comparison, can you tell it is the "latest" one?

Look at the specific model number. 9560 is the latest XPS 15" (and 9360 is the latest XPS 13", from Oct 2016)

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#174

Post by alkonaut »

sisk wrote: post #93

Tangential but I figure the folks who will know the answer will wander into this thread. I need to buy a decent but lightweight 15" for a family member who is undergoing cancer treatments and has gotten too weak for his current behemoth 17". Light work (browsing, some streaming) but definitely a windows machine. Any recommendations? I've been keeping an eye on this exact machine (previous model now)—anything better?

Whenever you look at a XPS you should always peek at the equivalent Precision machine (e.g. Precision 5510), there might be deals available. Also, although perhaps not applicable to your situation, the Precisions are usually more configurable than the XPS.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#175

Post by deong »

thirdsun wrote: post #118
fortytw2 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they block access to the US store from outside the US? No VPN here, just a DE IP and it's blocked. Incredible to see the price differential between the US and DE stores though, on top of the 18% VAT you expect

That seems to be the case here. Visiting http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/ from my german IP yields the same result. Unbelievable. Frankly, the whole site looks like a mess to me.

The Dell site is absolutely terrible. For a while, perhaps still, there was no way to show the tech specs for at least the XPS laptop I was looking at. The marketing speak would say something like "XPS 13 with 6th Generation Intel Core processors" and then just a series of prices. You couldn't tell what CPU it had, how much memory, nothing. There's a Q/A box on the page, and there were dozens of unanswered questions like "how big is the hard drive" with no answers.

I bought my XPS 13 from Costco, which was a nicer experience in pretty much every way.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#177

Post by pkolaczk »

caleblloyd wrote: post #108
hatsunearu wrote: post #95

GTX 1050 for the laptop? Why aren't there more laptops with this SKU...

The current gen (9550) graphics run in NVidia Optimus. There is no way to change to Only Integrated or Only Dedicated graphics in the BIOS. This means that you depend on the NVidia driver to switch to the graphics card based off which application you are running in Windows. It's a big pain in the ass for linux. You have to fool around with nouveau or Bumblebee to get Optimus working. Even then I was never sure the gr…

The proprietary Nvidia driver supports Optimus with nvidia-prime. No need for Bumblebee. There are still a few bits missing there, though, like external display support in low-power mode. So, basically I agree - it is still PITA.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#178

Post by rwmj »

StavrosK wrote: post #51

Speaking of laptops, what would you recommend to someone running Ubuntu? My 2013 MacBook Air is feeling it, with its non-upgradable 4 GB RAM. A discrete graphics card so I could play DotA2 once in a while would be nice, even if it's at medium graphics quality.

My Asus Zenbook UX305CA ran Fedora 25 out of the box with basically every peripheral including the touchscreen working perfectly. However it uses integrated (Intel i915) graphics.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#179

Post by slantyyz »

Roritharr wrote: post #18
Roritharr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most important tid-bid for me: 7th Gen Intel® Quad Core™ processors optional 4GB GeForce® GTX 1050 Supports up to 32GB of memory Killer™ Wireless: The Killer 1535 Wireless-AC

I just wish they'd give me this in a 13inch package. (like the Alienware 13, just with a more mature chassis)

The problem with the Alienware 13R3 is that it's a great professional machine with the most incredibly stupid looking adornments.

I absolutely hate how the best machines are Gaming machines, which means you're stuck with all sorts of LED bling-crap.

The 13R3 looks like an absolutely killer machine for everyday work. OLED touch, quad core CPU (HQ series), fast GPU, physical touchpad buttons, ports out the wazoo, user serviceable RAM (up to 32!) and storage, etc.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#180

Post by zanny »

hajile wrote: post #117
StavrosK wrote: post #51

Speaking of laptops, what would you recommend to someone running Ubuntu? My 2013 MacBook Air is feeling it, with its non-upgradable 4 GB RAM. A discrete graphics card so I could play DotA2 once in a while would be nice, even if it's at medium graphics quality.

I'm kinda in the same boat. I want a laptop with Iris Pro 580/p580 and NO dedicated GPU. The 580 has a bit over a TFLOP of compute (plenty for games like DoTA) and more importantly, the drivers don't suck on Linux. The issue is that any laptop that ships with that processor also ships with a crappy dedicated GPU. When I have a 45w processor, I want to pay a few hundred extra for a 55w Nvidia M2000m that has 10% more…

I think there is a bit of a meme that Linux Intel graphics don't suck. They have broken desktops repeatedly and still have a lot of glitches on newer hardware, whereas everyone calls AMD bad but I haven't had a bad experience on their Mesa stack in over 5 years. Its generally that Intel is buggy / edge case broken and AMD is rock solid if not patching Windows drivers in performance.

Albeit, I am biased, in that I intentionally avoid bleeding edge GPU hardware in general anywhere I can, but its hard to avoid Intel's latest because each year all the NUCs / notebooks / desktop platform switch to their latest CPUs. With AMD, since they have basically no market presence anywhere, I can get away with buying a 290 a year after it comes out for $240 and then having a great out of the box experience with it, whereas my 740SU notebook 4 years ago was only 6 months new when I got one and had massive Haswell GPU bugs on latest Mesa for about 6 months after buying it.

But even then, Intel and AMD are pretty much par for support times and when you should expect good stability in my experiences, but everyone memes AMD as being trash while Intel is the savior of consumer Linux.

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