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

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

#151

Post by dangus » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 12:29 PM UTC

OP needs to do some actual research on laptops before buying rather than just blindly buying used Lenovo and Dell systems.

Those brands aren’t really the end all be all like they used to be.

Based on the requirements that OP has I think they’d be really happy with a Framework system.

OP could also run Linux on the MacBook Pro M1 that they already own.

For laptop reviews, I’ve been enjoying Just Josh on YouTube, and he has a website associated with it. There’s also rtings.com

Another Lenovo model that’s getting acclaim as a solid premium laptop is the Lenovo X9 15 Aura Edition.

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

#152

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 12:42 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by olejorgenb » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 12:51 PM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #121

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.

The laptops waking up in the backpack until the thermal security triggers or the battery is empty is a Microsoft Windows thing.

Not really - my Dell Precision (Ubuntu Certified even) frequently have problems going to sleep. To be fair - technically it doesn't wake up in the backpack - it fails to sleep in the first place. But if you don't pay attention you wont notice the failure so I'd say that's very close to just as bad.

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

#154

Post by edgineer » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 1:07 PM UTC

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…

Sleep is just different from shut down. With an unplugged laptop, after an idle period or by shutting the lid, I'd like the machine to save energy. I haven't always taken the steps to prepare for a shut down, saving open documents. I wouldn't like to wake back up an idle machine to see that my programs had all been closed.

And sometimes I'd like to quickly put a laptop into a bag without waking it up just to shut it down first. If I had a way to transition from sleep to shut down I'd use it, but also... this is where I see that if the sleep state were more perfect (used zero energy, zero unintended wakeups), it would obviate my need to shut down most of the time.

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

#155

Post by jrklabs_com » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

The driver quality (mainly around display and sleep/resume features) has been terrible on my now 2 year old AMD powered Lenovo P14S. I've been using Lenovo laptops since 2001 and this one may push me to another brand for my next purchase. My issues have been seemingly slowly getting better with software updates but it's still really tarnishing the brand reputation/experience for me.

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

#156

Post by vitaliyf » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

freehorse wrote: post #131

speedgoose wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laptops waking up in the backpack until the thermal security triggers or the battery is empty is a Microsoft Windows thing.

Ime turning windows laptops off is really hard. You tell them to shutdown and they restart for some reason, and it does not seem to be update related because it happens with laptops completely offline too. So you may think that you have shut them down, close the lid, but actually they reboot and when you get to them again they are dead. This happens with some dell laptops but I do not think it is just them. Not all t…

Apparently "update and shutdown does a restart instead" was very recently finally fixed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797934

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

#157

Post by Telaneo » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

littlecranky67 wrote: post #137

Telaneo wrote: post #103

I'd still be on my 2012 Macbook Pro if it weren't for the fact that I seemingly can't get a battery that lasts for it. I got a 2021 Macbook M1 Pro to replace it, and I can't imagine needing to replace it for at least another 5 years given what I usually need my laptop to do (any really heavy compute gets off-loaded to a desktop). My only worry would be the same as my previous machine: the battery. I'll give Framework…

What OS do you use on it? I have a 2014 Macbook Pro and macOS with CoreLegacyPatcher on Ventura was almost unusably slow. Older versions had issues with Safari, no modern Browser support (I found some chromium fork patched for older macOS versions but slow and no full feature support) etc. I installed Linux on it recently and it works better, use it as a secondary machine with some home-network services but would nev…

I was on the latest officially supported OS, which I think was Catelina. No unofficial patches or anything. Had no problems with Firefox (other than battery life, which I didn't need other than it nominally being there).

To be fair, I did replace the SSD early in its lifespan, and I don't use my laptops for anything heavy. It could still play Youtube when I decommissioned it, and that was probably the heaviest thing I regularly did on it.

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

#158

Post by Telaneo » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

sgc wrote: post #116

Telaneo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never had either of these problems across phones or laptops. What kind of GaN charger are you using that has problems with overheating? And even in that case, USB-C chargers and cables are available everywhere, unlike proprietary laptop chargers, If the ports are dying on you though, I don't know what to tell you. They seem fine on phones, so I can't see what the problem would be on laptops, unless there are specific…

Dell, they are not wonderful. I have one on a book because it can't sit on the carpet. The other one overheats no matter what, and I have to unplug it for a couple minutes every few hours or it angrily flashes at me and stops charging. usb chargers and devices have many different voltages and power, and they don't always work very well together. It helps to have one format, but it doesn't mean no charger bloat. Cable…

Sounds like Dells chargers are garbage. Yet another reason to stay away from Dell in that case. Never had this issue with any charger in my life.

Everything USB should still take normal 5 volts, which any charger should provide without needing negotiation, and anything larger that actually needs more juice also should have the appropriate electronics to handle that (i.e. it's a phone or a laptop or a tablet or similarly expensive device). If you have devices that don't fall into either of those categories, so they don't take normal 5 volts, or they need more juice but are picky about USB, I'd consider them faulty from the get-go, as it's clear they haven't actually implemented USB-PD in any meaningful way. And if your charger doesn't provide 5 volts without asking, it too is faulty.

It's hard to go wrong with charging cables when it comes to USB-C. I agree there's a mess on the data side, but the USB Forum can't even get its head straight with what it should even be called, so it's no wonder nobody there has the balls to mandate colour coding or something similarly helpful.

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

#159

Post by nameless912 » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

I had a hilarious experience the other day with an (HP) laptop that I thought might be fun to share here.

I've been getting into astrophotography recently, so I went out to my local Astronomy club's dark site in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Ohio, star tracker, DSLR, lens and nearly brand new HP Gaming Laptop I bought specifically for this purpose in tow.

It was cold as shit outside - 25 with a wind chill of just under 15 degrees. But I came prepared, and the club has a small heated clubhouse on the grounds of the site, so I set up all my equipment, did my polar alignment, and left my laptop plugged into a power outlet and remoted into it on my iPad so I could monitor the data capture from inside where it was warm.

About 20 minutes later, I lost remote access to my laptop suddenly. No problem, I thought. I headed outside to go debug what was going on, to find that the laptop had shut down randomly. That's weird. I tried to turn the laptop on, and it spun on the windows logo for over 5 minutes. I got worried that somehow out of all this gear I brought out to the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold, somehow the laptop was what had died. I try force-resetting a few times, to the point where I get the windows recovery environment, and it boots _so slowly_ that I think something is seriously wrong. Then the CMOS battery reset screen comes up (what the fuck?) and I finally get it to boot after about 8 attempts. However, it's so slow it's completely unusable - the CPU is pegged at the lowest possible frequency and just opening up the controller software for my star tracker takes nearly 5 minutes. decide to pack it in for the night, assuming my laptop is dying.

I bring all my equipment inside to tear it down, and leave the laptop in the warmth for 15 or so minutes while I tear everything else down. Then I hear the familiar Windows 11 startup chime behind me. I turn around and the laptop happily boots up, running at full speed, as if nothing was wrong.

Friends, the laptop got _too cold_. I have never experienced this before in my life, and I have put laptops through similarly extreme conditions in the past for other projects, let alone all the Raspberry Pi's I've left to bake in the sun and freeze in the cold. I am so done with modern technology, I want to return to 2011 when Thinkpads were good, Macbooks were great, and phones couldn't break my brain's dopamine circuits. I'm so tired.

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

#160

Post by stusmall » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

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.

I had the same experience in 2021 when the mobo died on a laptop that I bought slightly less than a year before. I was bothered by the failure but understand sometimes things just break. The service quality was good.

I'm not dealing with the scale other people are in here. We should take the ancedotes of personal laptops with a grain of salt. Anyone pushing the scale that Dell does will have incidents where service runs totally off the rails. I don't know how they stack up at scale but I'm reading this thread with interest. When I'm due for a laptop upgrade Dell will still be in the running but right now Framework might be the one to get my business.