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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?

#141

Post by cedws »

brooke2k wrote: post #89

I got a Dell XPS for work a couple years ago on someone's recommendation... one of my worst-ever decisions. The touchpad sucks and routinely breaks requiring restarts, constantly having driver issues (and you have to deal with the capital-N Nightmare that is SupportAssist for drivers), graphics card is busted and makes the display driver crash once a month. Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly tur…

Yep, I had the high end "Developer Edition" a while back and it was a terrible experience. Very hot, build quality was poor, touchpad was small, speakers were terrible. I don't think I could use anything other than a MacBook now.

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

#142

Post by kalleboo »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #97
_ea1k wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

USB-C ports have so many features that require extra connections, which makes them costly. And then adding extra ports without those features gets confusing to the end user if it can't properly communicated. Imagine having 4 USB-C ports, but 2 of them are USB 2.0 only. Like that but more complicated because it's a feature on a separate controller. Video out, which requires additional connections to the GPU. Power inp…

> Imagine having 4 USB-C ports, but 2 of them are USB 2.0 only

To be fair, that's already how PC laptops are - they have USB-A ports with random colors and symbols on them that you need to figure out which is the good one, so I don't see why they aren't doing the same with USB-C.

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

#143

Post by AbbeFaria »

ferguess_k wrote: post #34
AbbeFaria wrote: post #31

I just bought a Thinkpad T14s a couple of months ago. It’s lightweight, has great build quality. I installed Ubuntu and it almost ran out of the box but I ended up having to tinker with it to get My Dell docking station and i3 window manager to work. But that is something I was willing to live with. So far, I have had no complaints. If you’re using Linux, the sleep and standby performance aren’t good. But much better…

Thanks. Yeah my 470S is still holding strong and I only upgrade the RAM to some 24GB and replaced the two batteries. Now the battery lasts around 4 hours and I'm happy. I do agree that it's showing its age, e.g. having too many tabs in Chrome while playing HD videos in Youtube may stress it a bit, but so far no complaint. I'll check out the T14s. One of my concerns is: it seems to be more difficult to replace batteri…

As long as you have the small screwdrivers used to tinker with electronics, you’re good. You can easily open up the laptop.

In my L480, I opened the laptop to change the battery and also install more RAM. Even for a hardware neophyte such as myself , this was straightforward.

Thinkpads are modular, you can easily get the components such as a battery etc. My T14s comes with a 3-year warranty as well.

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

#144

Post by NSPG911 »

themafia wrote: post #72

> I'd prefer a "low-end" workstation with 32GB memory, but because of the price point I can only afford a 16GB non-workstation one. I don't do gaming any more but I still prefer a good integrated video card. I started buying 4x4 mini PCs. They're exactly what you describe. For $600 I got an 8 core AMD Ryzen 7 8745H with 96GB of RAM from Minisforum. The graphics aren't half bad and the overall system has been really g…

do you have a link to the $600 PC?

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

#145

Post by adrian_b »

microtonal wrote: post #120
brooke2k wrote: post #89

I got a Dell XPS for work a couple years ago on someone's recommendation... one of my worst-ever decisions. The touchpad sucks and routinely breaks requiring restarts, constantly having driver issues (and you have to deal with the capital-N Nightmare that is SupportAssist for drivers), graphics card is busted and makes the display driver crash once a month. Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly tur…

Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly turn on when it's in my bag and rev up to ten thousand degrees. If it was in sleep - Dell themselves recommend completely switching off a laptop before putting it inside a backpack: https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/faq-mode... For somebody who has used MacBooks the last 18 years, this is insane.

I have never understood why some people want to avoid switching off their computers.

I have stopped using Apple laptops more than 15 years ago and since then I have used only Linux laptops.

I have no idea whether hibernate worked on my laptops, because this is a feature for which I have never felt any need.

I always take care to optimize the boot time on my computers with custom built kernels and carefully selected daemons (and I do not use systemd). For decades, the boot time on my laptops had been of perhaps twenty seconds at most and the biggest delay in starting to use the computers after being powered off is entering a password to unlock them, not the start-up of the OS. Using something like hibernation instead of complete power off would speed up negligibly the process of beginning to work on the computer.

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

#147

Post by egorfine »

I have been using MacBooks for the last 20+ years (back then they were called PowerBooks). A couple of days ago I have got a top spec Dell G5 15 5500 and I needed to upgrade the SSD. Oh. my. god. I did not realize the world of PC laptops is that much broken. This Dell has such a dismal quality of everything it's not even funny. Like, I am prepared and ready to pay premium price for premium computer, but why won't Dell create one for me? Do all Windows people need a computer that's shit?

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

#148

Post by adrian_b »

Hacker_Yogi wrote: post #12

The quality you get for the money from Mac's is truly unmatched by any other laptop out there - why not use a VM on it for other OS & software?

I have not purchased any laptop recently so I do not know about what is true right now.

However, whenever in the past 20 years I bought a laptop, for a given amount of money there were always laptops with better quality than any Apple model.

Moreover, while the Apple computers are fine for the general population, there are also users like myself, for whom the Apple products lack adequate computational performance. My laptops typically used Intel Xeon/NVIDIA Quadro combos that were much faster than anything sold by Apple and 4k screens and very good keyboards. Apple has a poor reputation for keyboards.

If I bought a laptop right now I would probably choose something with Ryzen 395, which easily beats any Apple CPU for the things in which I am interested, like computations with big integers and FP64 array operations. The very good single-thread GeekBench results of the Apple CPUs are not at all representative of the CPU performance in other kinds of workloads, where the Intel/AMD ISA still provides features not yet available in the Arm-based CPUs.

Why many comments in this thread indicate that at least the consumer laptops made by Dell have a poor quality nowadays, I still have a rather old Dell Precision mobile workstation (sold with Linux) with excellent quality that no Apple laptop ever approached. Of course, such a mobile workstation has poor battery lifetime, incomparable with that of an Apple laptop, but for my needs this is a really minor inconvenient in comparison with its advantages.

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

#149

Post by throwaway808081 »

microtonal wrote: post #120
brooke2k wrote: post #89

I got a Dell XPS for work a couple years ago on someone's recommendation... one of my worst-ever decisions. The touchpad sucks and routinely breaks requiring restarts, constantly having driver issues (and you have to deal with the capital-N Nightmare that is SupportAssist for drivers), graphics card is busted and makes the display driver crash once a month. Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly tur…

Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly turn on when it's in my bag and rev up to ten thousand degrees. If it was in sleep - Dell themselves recommend completely switching off a laptop before putting it inside a backpack: https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/faq-mode... For somebody who has used MacBooks the last 18 years, this is insane.

It's all about trade-offs really.

In this case, a laptop sometimes waking up in a bag vs a constantly and deliberately cripled GUI and keyboard.

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

#150

Post by eckelhesten »

adrian_b wrote: post #145
microtonal wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly turn on when it's in my bag and rev up to ten thousand degrees. If it was in sleep - Dell themselves recommend completely switching off a laptop before putting it inside a backpack: https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/faq-mode... For somebody who has used MacBooks the last 18 years, this is insane.

I have never understood why some people want to avoid switching off their computers. I have stopped using Apple laptops more than 15 years ago and since then I have used only Linux laptops. I have no idea whether hibernate worked on my laptops, because this is a feature for which I have never felt any need. I always take care to optimize the boot time on my computers with custom built kernels and carefully selected d…

Pop open the lid, be right back to where you were. No amount of boot time optimizations will trump that.
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