I'm looking for a (possibly) portable machine to do some deep learning exploration on. Would a developer edition of this with Ubuntu pre-installed, be a good choice? Is the NVidia powerful enough and accessible via drivers?
Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
41–50 of 215 posts
Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
#42This is the laptop I have. The biggest (and the only) complaint is that after about 3 or 4 days of use the track pad stops scrolling and starts doing a "click-and-drag" instead. A restart takes care of this.
How the hell is the acceptable ugh.
5-10 minutes every 72-96 hours. Behold the unwieldy struggles of the modern man!
Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
#43As a developer I can't imagine buying anything other than a Macbook Pro, and I mainly use Windows. The build quality is top of the line, the drivers are solid, and everything just works. The trackpad is industry leading, and the keyboard is great too. Performance is exceptional, especially in the 15" which comes with a HQ processor (not ultrabook-grade) and a discrete graphics card. It has a PCI-e SSD. The price is r…
I use the XPS 15 in an office with only mac users and this machine is just more powerful since Apple wont update the Macbook Pro line with developers in mind. I hated working on an under performing laptop when I was using the macs.
Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
#44If you want to buy one you should extend your analysis beyond the hardware specs because the software and operating systems are not ready yet. I can give the example of the latest XPS 13 2-1 where Office applications like Outlook cannot recognize a monitor with a different resolution and the fonts are blurred. Look for example at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Office-apps-appear-... high DPI is a whole issu…
Very true, the previous XPS 15 had huge problems with the Killer NIC card because the drivers for it took months to stabilise and its only recently been that a driver update has made the Wifi somewhat stable and the machine has stopped crashing every few days. What other people seem to have done is get Dell to swap the Killer NIC with an Intel one which has much better driver support.
I'll never buy a latest gen XPS ever again. I bought my wife the latest and greatest XPS last year (Cyber Monday) and it had the most ridiculous problems. For example, WiFi would randomly disconnect, Chrome couldn't play Netflix (what?), internet speeds were an order of magnitude slower than my Chromebook, etc.
I fixed the issues by swapping with an Intel card (didn't want to have to wait months for driver updates), but in my opinion that is unacceptable for a premium laptop. Why is Dell skimping on parts? I paid $1500 precisely because I didn't want to deal with crappy parts, but instead they took my $1500 and gave me a worse browsing experience than my $150 Chromebook...
Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
#45I bought one in February. Horrible experience. It couldn't display any video in the browser without freezing. Apparently an intel driver issue. The solution was to manually install an unsupported version of the video driver from the intel website. That solved it but left me with an unstable wifi and a noisy fan. I had much better luck with the Lattitude E74xx series.
Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
#46As a developer I can't imagine buying anything other than a Macbook Pro, and I mainly use Windows. The build quality is top of the line, the drivers are solid, and everything just works. The trackpad is industry leading, and the keyboard is great too. Performance is exceptional, especially in the 15" which comes with a HQ processor (not ultrabook-grade) and a discrete graphics card. It has a PCI-e SSD. The price is r…
You just described the XPS 15 9560... Except the Dell gets a mostly proper keyboard with real function keys (this matters greatly to me as a programmer). It's not ThinkPad grade, yet close. (I've tested my colleague's top spec model).
As for Apple, it's a shame they don't ship 32gb laptops with touch screens.
I'm currently on an ageing OG X1 Carbon (i7/8/256), which has a sensational keyboard and track pointer, with a superb light and strong chassis; for my next, I'm hoping they'll upgrade the core count to 4+ and memory to 32, and an AMOLED display.
Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
#47I wish business laptops still existed. I bought a 5 year old laptop because you can't get anything today with serviceable parts or design that makes sense. The thinkpad retro can't get here soon enough (assuming it actually has function keys and isn't slimmed down just to be slim).
The lattitude E74xx series is pretty good, I upgraded the RAM and disk on every model I owned. And they still come with win7 drivers. But the latest generation (E7480) has dropped the full Ethernet port with the same sort of foldable port that Sony used on its z-series and they break too easily. You should try a E7470 which has a full Ethernet port while still being an ultra book.
Also they haven't tried to be creative with the keyboard layout, which includes page down/up keys which the xps lacks, quite important for shortcuts.
Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
#48As a developer I can't imagine buying anything other than a Macbook Pro, and I mainly use Windows. The build quality is top of the line, the drivers are solid, and everything just works. The trackpad is industry leading, and the keyboard is great too. Performance is exceptional, especially in the 15" which comes with a HQ processor (not ultrabook-grade) and a discrete graphics card. It has a PCI-e SSD. The price is r…
Most of what you said applies to Surface Books and Surface Pros, you should check them out if you work on Windows. I'm pretty happy with my SP4 myself.
I don't doubt that, I've tried them and they're good too. No native OSX though.
Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
#49My experience with my 1-month-old maxed out 9560:
- less precise trackpad than my 3 year old rMBP
- palm-sensitive trackpad
- failure that politely states that I need to reboot (if I try to use fingerprint reader to login too quickly after opening the laptop)
- unplanned reboots due to updates
- laggy and choppy video on a single external 4k monitor (compared to no apparent lag when the old rMBP drives 2x 4k monitors)
- very slow Bash (ubuntu subsystem) - but at least they're making an effort
- Cortana seems less effective than Siri, and she wasn't great; and Cortana still only uses Bing search and displays results in Edge browser
- louder and more frequently spun up fan compared to old rMBP (which was also an i7 with an Nvidia GPU)
- occasional crashes when opening laptop or logging in
- very slow unzipping of files (on new 1TB PCIe SSD), regardless of whether 7z is used or built-in unzip is used, and regardless of where I unzip/extract to
In summary, it's just a sexy little game machine. In that regard, it does pretty well. You do have to wear headphones to game because the fan is so loud. And you can't play on an external monitor... too laggy and limited to 30Hz refresh.
Too bad Apple no longer caters to my crowd. Thankfully this old rMBP I use is still running well (despite the screen covering deterioration in weird spotty ways).
Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review
#50As a developer I can't imagine buying anything other than a Macbook Pro, and I mainly use Windows. The build quality is top of the line, the drivers are solid, and everything just works. The trackpad is industry leading, and the keyboard is great too. Performance is exceptional, especially in the 15" which comes with a HQ processor (not ultrabook-grade) and a discrete graphics card. It has a PCI-e SSD. The price is r…
I use the XPS 15 in an office with only mac users and this machine is just more powerful since Apple wont update the Macbook Pro line with developers in mind. I hated working on an under performing laptop when I was using the macs.
More powerful in what way? Processing power?