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Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

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Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#61

Post by protocolture »

A few things:

My G11 carbon is tolerable, but I did have a motherboard replacement in mine mid cycle. Known issue with charging just giving up. I like my carbon, but its a lot of money.

I have a gen 1 carbon, a gen 7 carbon and a gen 11. I still think the G1 was best in a lot of silos. The keyboard especially.

The G11 is performing better than the G7 overall, the G7 had the shittiest case so far.

Recently did an analysis on price/performance across Dell, Lenovo and Surface for a customer, and the Lenovos came out at best quality but not price competitive. This was before EOFY however and vendor pricing might have turned over. I also got the impression that both Dell and Lenovo were halfway through launching new product lines, and certain features were only available in either new or old, not both.

The Dell Pro line of laptops seems quite bad, having deployed several. Seems like they are trying to take Latitude and split it into Bad and Worse categories. Cant praise a single thing on it, case feels worse, screens worse, everything just got soggier. But it has an Ultra sticker on it so YMMV.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#62

Post by williamDafoe »

I'm had 15 months of daily usage (8+ hours per day) of an Asus S16 and it's been pretty great. I haven't been lugging it around very much - mostly just using the 10 cores at my desk to run minikube and WSL and Windows and also gaming on it and I upgraded the SSD to 2GB. I was a longtime thinkpad bigot (T41, T42, T60, T430, T460s) but their near-complete shunning of AMD CPUs has been a FAIL. This laptop had some MediaTek WiFi issues and STILL doesn't always come out of sleep, but the 16" oled is fantastic, it's thinner and lighter and FASTER than a macbook air, I love the build quality and ceraluminum ceramic coating, and it plays just about any 3D game you can think about ... The 31 watt power limit clips all the performance off the hx370 / 890m GPU (32GB RAM) so I went with the hx365 / 880m GPU (24GB RAM). The low amount of RAM is my only complaint.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#63

Post by waitforjames »

wildylion wrote: post #48

Fuck yes. Our 2022 Latitude 5420s have the worst lithium ever -- and Dell is actually offering to get you good batteries for twice the price, as an 'extended service life battery'. This, and literally all of them have paint chipping off the chassis at the slightest provocation. I have like 50 at work. edit: we have now a mix of MacBook Airs/Pros (most of workforce), Frameworks (specialized tech roles running Linux an…

Same issue here with our latitudes. They all look disgusting with half the paint gone.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#64

Post by williamDafoe »

AnnaPali wrote: post #52

Top of the line laptops from e.g. 2019 are very cheap and still competitive with current hardware for realistic use. You can find one with an i9 and 64gb of ram for $5-600, you'll just need to plug it in after a few hours!

Don't go ANYWHERE near a macbook pro 2019. Piece of garbage. I had to set mine to 100% fans and it went from 100% to 0% battery in 70 mins when I was streaming a meeting PLUGGED IN WITH A 90W CHARGER! The next time I buy Intel is NEVER.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#65

Post by jaffa2 »

mwpmaybe wrote: post #32
juancn wrote: post #22

Using Macbooks spoils you. They're so well made that almost everything else feels shoddy. There's also the software/hardware integration side. Power management on Macbooks is unbeatable in my experience, both Windows and Linux have really serious issues dealing with sleep and low power modes. On the Lenovo side, the only one I'm still reasonably happy with is my Thinkpad, but it pales compared to a Macbook (Air, Pro…

> Power management on Macbooks is unbeatable in my experience, both Windows and Linux have really serious issues dealing with sleep and low power modes. I've been dealing with this recently. Linux won't hibernate if you have Secure Boot enabled, even if your swap is encrypted. So I either have to leave my laptop plugged in all the time or remember to shut it down before unplugging it so it doesn't completely drain it…

this just sounds absolutely horrendous. I could not operate like this. Is this a general linux on laptop thing or just a specific to your situation thing?

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#66

Post by greatgib »

I miss so much the first generation of the Dell XPS 13 dev edition. I think that we were almost at the top of the curve in term of quality/price. Only a few things could have been fixed (like the webcam at the bottom of the screen) and it would have been perfect.

But, sadly, next generations went deep shit instead.

Nowadays, I have a very hard time selecting a laptop that would fit my needs, even disregarding the price. One of the worst feature in term of offender is the keyboard: Manufacturers are going on with this totally stupid unergonomic trend of having "half size" enter keys, removing page-up/page-down keys, and hiding directional arrows behind over keys needing to use the "FN+other_key" to be able to use the arrow.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#67

Post by venturecruelty »

chaostheory wrote: post #25
ferguess_k wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, everything I bought don't use those ports. I have to buy a new keyboard and a new mouse (wireless mouses also need a driver dongle) for the ports. And what is worse? New laptops have less ports than the older ones. That 5550 only has 3 ports and 1 is for charging. If I want to mount an external hard drive, I need to bring a hub. What again, looks like everyone is doing that, so yeah, better embrace it.

Rapid change and new things are an integral part of tech especially laptops. This is a strange complaint

Rapid change and new things are an integral part of planned obsolescence and needing to justify your job to upper management. A sufficiently-repairable laptop with 16 gigs of RAM has absolutely no reason not to work for at least a decade, ideally longer.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#68

Post by wolrah »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #41
Zaskoda wrote: post #17

I am resisting the urge to detail my insane story with my most recent Dell XPS purchase. Long story short, I will never again buy a Dell laptop. I went months without my machine during a critical time. I kept getting it back in worse shape than it was before I sent it for repair. After months of pure insanity, I just accepted that I'll never have a properly function touchpad again. At least they finally got a working…

Its such a contrast to the Dell I used to know. Back in 2012 I had the hard drive in my Dell laptop sale and had the Dell small business service contract and they sent out a guy to replace it that afternoon, right there in front of me in the office. I was without my machine for 4 hours. That is what Dell used to be like.

About six months ago I had a Dell Optiplex motherboard fail and they attempted to schedule a tech to come out the following day. I was not available for that and scheduled it a few days later but they did make as full of an effort as can be reasonably expected to make it happen within one business day.

The default warranty on at least the Optiplex line is one year of next business day service and upgrading to three years is cheap. I've never had a situation where same day service was worth the extra cost but it is an option.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#69

Post by _ea1k »

ferguess_k wrote: post #13
ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #7

>The other issue is that 5550 uses USB-C ports. I blame on myself not checking it closely before the purchase. I really hate those ports. Why is everyone copying from Mac? It's not copying Apple. It's that every port does everything, including charging. It is standards-compliant. As just one example, you no longer need to lug a laptop charger with you; there are no longer "computer chargers" and "phone chargers", but…

The thing is, everything I bought don't use those ports. I have to buy a new keyboard and a new mouse (wireless mouses also need a driver dongle) for the ports. And what is worse? New laptops have less ports than the older ones. That 5550 only has 3 ports and 1 is for charging. If I want to mount an external hard drive, I need to bring a hub. What again, looks like everyone is doing that, so yeah, better embrace it.

The port count is a real problem on modern laptops. I like USB-C, but why are there so few of them? Having to have a hub for basic things is really annoying.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#70

Post by Izkata »

About 15 years ago I had a Dell, then two Asus, and about 6 years ago I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad (T490), which I still use. The Thinkpad was a major step up in quality compared to everything I had before - I haven't even needed to replace the battery, though I think it has dropped from around 5 hours to 3-4 (I unplug it multiple times a day, every day, to use it in the kitchen or while sitting on a couch).
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