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New XPS 15 Laptop

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Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#221

Post by giancarlostoro »

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 have an ASUS ROG laptop[0] which looks pretty sweet, but sort of reminds me to some degree to the MBP my girlfriend has, it's just black and red instead. If you want a total lookalike I think the Razer Blade[1] is pretty scarily close. You'd still spend quite a bit for anything from Razer though.

Edit:

[0] Asus ROG: https://www.asus.com/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/ROG-G501JW/

[1] Razer Blade: http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade

There were other laptops I've been shown from Razer that looked way too much like a 'sexy' Macbook Pro style. Of course Razer / ASUS ROG are gaming specific laptops, so the specs and the prices will be higher than most laptops.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#222

Post by andlarry »

chx wrote: post #188
andlarry wrote: post #158

Folks considering this should also check out the HP ZBook Studio G3. It has Quadro M1000M 4GB graphics, 32 GB of ECC RAM, quad core, Linux certified by HP, 4k screen, can handle two external 4k monitors and drive the panel at about 4.5 pounds.

Sniff, that's a Maxwell chip not Pascal. But it came out early 2016 so perhaps early 2017 we will see a G4 with Kaby Lake and Pascal quad core. Would be nice.

> Sniff, that's a Maxwell chip not Pascal.

Is there a substantial difference? This is a development laptop so I only cared about it being able to push enough pixels.

Perhaps there's a difference for gamers?

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#223

Post by kedean »

creshal wrote: post #161
StevePerkins wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to provide some recommended examples instead of just being snarky.

Dell's XPS series has been around since 2013, they just didn't make it to HN. Lenovo also had more compact-ish 15" models with the T540p and later the T550/T560. Not sure about HP's Envy series, I'm not following them too closely.

XPS has been heavily recommended for a long time, but dell does still have a stigma and I personally had a hard time finding a way to actually BUY one when I looked. Lenovo lost developers trust years ago when they started pulling stunt after stunt with security vulnerabilities, backdoors, and spyware.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#224

Post by sliken »

zanny wrote: post #180
hajile wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

I bought a NUC with the Iris 540, ran ubuntu 16.04 on it and I'm quite pleased with it. Minecraft, full screen youtube, full screen netflix, random web games like slither.io, random "rich" websites, webGL particle/water demos, etc all "just work".

I've had way less problems with intel than I did with my radeons. Not sure I'd say better than nvidia (who has a pretty good binary blob driver), but similar.

Even weird edge cases like rotating a display into portrait mode while logged in worked fine.

It's not a GTX 1070 killer, but it's quite a nice upgrade from other Intel GPUs. It runs a fair variety of 2d/3d stuff at 1080P quite comfortably.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#225

Post by pmlamotte »

lazarus101 wrote: post #124
StavrosK wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! What are some things you don't like about it? Looking for a laptop is pretty frustrating, there are a ton of models and each has a ton of versions, it's really hard to know what to get :(

One issue would be the webcam placement, it's below the screen. If you get the XPS 13 don't make the same mistake I've made, don't waste your money on this POS http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=uk... Linux support is very bad, it uses a proprietary technology. Get a USB-C to HDMI adapter instead.

I just switched to the XPS 13 as well and picked up the WD15 which is the same price on Amazon. The WD15 officially supports linux and from what I read is better than the 3100 as long as you're on a more recent kernel. Hopefully I won't have to return it.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#226

Post by jdmichal »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #145
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.

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.

I'm guessing the extra space is going to the (optional) discrete GPU. That doesn't appear to be an option on the XPS 13.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#227

Post by unknown2374 »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #145
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.

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.

I am in the same boat, even under Linux and no configuration at all, the new XPS 13 lasts an incredibly long time. Just a minor correction, the battery in the previous (early 2016 - 9350) model was actually 52W, not 56.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#228

Post by warfangle »

HCIdivision17 wrote: post #220
StavrosK wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a computer with capability that you don't have to carry around, why not get a desktop?

Because my Surface Pro 4 can run 3 1920x1200 monitors just fine (I'm partial to a -|- setup (dontjudgeme)). The dock really makes it, no question. My monitors stands stay bolted to the desk and everything's cabled together, but I'm personally not tethered. Best of both worlds, to me at least. (Except for when I need to do something irresponsibly inefficient like run three VMs and full screen video at once... which wi…

Are you rocking the i5 or the i7 to be able to do that?

I'm seriously considering getting one.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#229

Post by Roritharr »

slantyyz wrote: post #179
Roritharr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are absolutely right.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#230

Post by lucideer »

nine_k wrote: post #219
lucideer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dell Precision range (and probably the old Thinkpad W-range, which has since been renamed...) used to be the laptops targeted at people with your utilitarian requirements list. It's a few years since I retired my old Precision laptop, but it definitely ticked the thick, durable, huge battery, tons of ports and reliable Linux drivers back then. I'm not sure how the contemporary models hold up.

Thinkpad T range is also right about this: a thick, powerful, utilitarian machine.

The high-powered "Txxp" models in the T range were what lead to the creation of the W range.

More recently, I think the W range might have been superseded by some certain models in the P range, though I'm not too sure about this.

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