DontBuyDell.com

I have an XPS 15 I got at Costco for about $2k years back that I used out in the field (i7, 16gb RAM, 1TB NVMe). Extremely happy with it and it’s still my primary go-to laptop. No extended warranty, never repaired or any issues.

I just purchased my first MacBook Pro (M2) a few months back and I absolutely love it! Now that I no longer work out in the field, I always have both laptops at my desk mounted on two Twelve South Curve Stands with an extra monitor in between. I have a magic keyboard (Touch ID) and an MX Master 3S. Can’t complain!

This brought back memories of Apple in the mid 90s.

"It is impossible for them to properly design, test and support such a large number of different models. This is one of the reasons that their machines and support are such low quality. They don’t try to get it right, their business model is to produce a large quantity of models and obtain sales through bruteforce rather than quality."

> And I do not want to grab a screwdriver for changing battery which becomes common in modern razor-thin laptops, I love long outdoor sessions with a couple of spare batteries in my backpack.

With 24+ hours per charge on a lot of these modern laptops, why do you need to carry spare batteries?

Instead of spare batteries, you should probably be looking to use equipment more recent than a Thinkpad. You get far, far more "laptop usage per watt" on a modern system than anything 5 years or older. There's just all sorts of power-saving features on a modern system (most importantly: fundamental shrinking of the transistors down to 5nm or smaller, using a small fraction of the power compared to larger 22nm or 24nm transistors)

Ex: The new "P vs E" core on Windows 11 devices. The new sleep features on DDR5. NVMe using far less power than a hard drive. Etc. etc. Modern systems use an order of magnitude less power yet offer greater compute power on the go. The drive for better transistors is strongest in the laptop form factor IMO, since smaller transistors hit the "do everything": faster, cheaper, less power usage.

On top of that are the software tweaks. I know people are pissed off about Windows 11's new GUI, but the scheduler is solid and the support for Intel's low power "E" cores, plus GPU sleeping / other power saving features, really makes a difference in terms of battery life.

> I don't have any USB-C device (not everybody lives in a first-world countries) but at least once per year I actually need at least all 4 of my good old USB2 ports. External USB hub will suck in stability of connect and ability to charge several devices at once.

USB-C is something like 4GBps.

A singular USB-C hub can support 20x USB 2.0 A devices at full speed (each around 50MBps). You have all the bandwidth you need from USB 3.0 / USB-C connectors. You just need a hub so that the port can be "split" into more physical ports.

> External USB hub will suck in stability of connect and ability to charge several devices at once.

So right now, you carry a bunch of extra laptop batteries around and USB 2.0 ports that you only use ~once per year (or so).

When instead you could be carrying around a Li-ion charging station, using more efficient laptops (to get 24+ hours per charge, negating the need for spare batteries), and using a $30 USB-C port+hub on the rare occasions you need a large number of simultaneous devices on your computer?

It sounds like what you really need is a portable Li-ion battery.

Wholeheartedly agree. I only buy dell, and of them, I only buy latitudes. My favorite of all time was my e6440 with an socket CPU. I bought my wife one a couple of years ago, threw a quad core in there, maxed the ram and it's still working well. I had one just like it for myself but after years of my dog knocking it off the coffee table, it eventually stopped displaying. You can put three hard drives in these guys, one in the intended, one in the cd/dvd caddy and one in an m2 slot. I ran linux on it for it's entire 7-8 year life.

Today I have a 5490 (4 years old) which is a beast and puts up with tons of abuse, including drops. I've run linux on it since day 1 and never had a driver issue and is a solid workhorse.

I've always had dell latitudes, and will continue buying them as long as they last me 8 years each and run linux.

My last 3 PC's have been Dell. The most recent being a desktop I bought off-lease for about $120. Such a great experience that I can see myself never buying new again. I simply don't need top of the line performance for software development, no matter what anyone else says. There's essentially no usable difference between my 6 year-old personal laptop and the new one I got at work last year when doing development.