Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New XPS 15 Laptop

dell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–339 of 339 posts

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#331

Post by kedean »

creshal wrote: post #328
kedean wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dell sells twice as many laptops as Apple does (making it the third largest vendor). They only carry a "stigma" in a very small echo chamber of Apple fanboys.

A) You should stop the condescending attitude towards Apple's users. It doesn't help anyone you influence anybody's opinion.

B) I believe Dell's sales volume is heavily inflated by all of the government and school contracts they have. Every computer I used in K-12 and most in college were dell machines, simply because that's what schools buy. That makes raw sales numbers irrelevant, because we're talking laptops for developers, not average office workers or students.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#332

Post by deong »

deeth_starr wrote: post #280
deong wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 year…

"Lithium ion batteries (a.k.a.: rechargeable lithium, lithium polymer, LIPO, secondary lithium). Passengers may carry all consumer-sized lithium ion batteries (up to 100 watt hours per battery)" https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as...

I remember seeing the link in the original blog post, so I knew it was a real thing, but I'm extremely skeptical of the theory that it has anything to do with anything.

The simple fact is that the FAA doesn't screen battery sizes. If you brought something the size of a car battery, they'd probably not allow it, but the difference between a 95WHr and a 140WHr laptop battery is something they're neither interested in nor capable of actively checking. Apple put a small battery in the laptop because it's more important to them to have a thin light laptop than it is to have more battery life. This random person unaffiliated with Apple then decided with no evidence that it was because of some basically unknown FAA document. That's all I meant.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#333

Post by sofaofthedamned »

rwmj wrote: post #178
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.

Same with the XPS 13 2017, it doesn't have the power saving nvme mode yet which would I presume give it parity with Windows battery life, and Wayland was janky but X was fine.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#334

Post by karlgrz »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #312
karlgrz wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently running the 9550 with ubuntu 16.04 and can confirm #2 on your list. It's pretty annoying. Bumping the brightness up helps a lot, but when on battery and/or late at night that's a terrible compromise.

It's a bug in the Intel drivers. Windows suffered from the same problem, for what it is worth. "Suffered" because if you have updated your BIOS Intel has automagically updated their driver, so Windows is good now. Debian testing and Ubuntu 16.10 are also good now. Ubuntu 16.10 is a recent thing, but Debian testing was good well before Windows. Your problems are therefore caused by: a. Intel issuing shitty Skylake GPU…

I went ahead with a clean install of 16.10, and, coupled with the following firmware update (http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER04078627M/1/XPS_9550_1.2.18....) seems to have resolved the Intel graphics flickering. Thanks a lot for that nudge in the right direction!

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#335

Post by sagarm »

HCIdivision17 wrote: post #257
StavrosK wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to the "10 pound brick" you mentioned, not the Surface.

Oh I know. That's the normal counter argument, and the answer is simply that sometimes I have to work off-site, sometimes in places with questionable power. And thus more battery is better, and a 10 pound brick is probably going to devote a lot of that heft to power. (But it's rare. My coworkers sometimes need to work in the middle of nowhere, though.)

With USB-C now common for power, you could power the laptop off a USB PD capable battery like this one:

https://www.amazon.com/30000mAh-Portable-Charger-Outputs-Mic...

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#336

Post by AndyKelley »

haspok wrote: post #233
AndyKelley wrote: post #213

Did they fix the keyboard debounce issue? I'd like to try typing on the keyboard before purchasing.

They did not fix it, but the latest BIOSes (on the XPS13) make it better. Some people still complain though. I don't notice it, maybe I'm not typing fast enough :) The real annoyance for me about the input devices is that the palm detection doesn't work for the touchpad (on Ubuntu), at least I couldn't get it working. So either typing suffers, or have to disable "tap to click", which is so weird I can't get used to i…

Even with the latest BIOS on the XPS13, I can reliably type "asdf" and get "asdasfdf"

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#337

Post by IanCal »

IanCal wrote: post #327
socksy wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read the coil whine is related to having the keyboard backlight on. Is that important enough to trade-off for the noise? I always turn off backlights when using a computer on battery anyway (it's not like I'll be looking at the keyboard much...).

I'd happily turn off the backlight, I'll try that. I've turned off the c6 processor states as apparently the switching there causes some of it. I can hear the changes as things visually change on screen, so scrolling and videos are quite bad.

Ah no dice. I think it's inherent in all of these laptops but some are worse than others. This is a refurb, so I wonder if it was returned due to this... I'll talk to the support.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#338

Post by nhumrich »

criddell wrote: post #273
nhumrich wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always recommend the thinkpad T series. The 14s has almost the same profile as a macbook air. I've ran Linux on thinkpads for a while now, never disappointed.

I use two ThinkPads and one thing that I dislike about both of them is the Lenovo software. It's buggy and uses a lot of memory. I've gone through and uninstalled as much of it as I can and both machines have been much more stable. If I were buying a new machine today, I would probably reformat and reinstall Windows.

Doesn't matter if your just installing Linux on it

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#339

Post by karlgrz »

trzeci wrote: post #119

I have "old" one 9550 i7, 4K, 32GB - as a device for this money I wouldn't expect that I will have: - unaligned Jack socket, so that only one channel plays - Flickering backlight, where only one rescue is to downgrade BIOS: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3519/t/... - random freezes: Whole computer hangs, there is no error in Windows log, it's not related to nVidia card, it's not related to load.

This new firmware update fixed the flickering for me: http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER04078627M/1/XPS_9550_1.2.18....

Might be worth a try?

Post reply on HN