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Dell XPS 13 Review

anandtech.com

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Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#181

Post by quasse »

thanksgiving wrote: post #160
hippich wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised to see that kind of setup from Dell. From my experience they produce work horses and don't mind people tweaking their laptops. You can disassemble, replace memory, hard drive, clean CPU/GPU fans, assemble it back, and still have valid manufacturer warranty. And yes, I personally replaced wifi and bluetooth cards on my inspiron, precision, xps15 laptops without problems before. So unless they dras…

Probably not Dell (I have no idea) but Lenovo apparently has a white list for these things. I don't mean to pile on the recent carp storm that they are in... I just happen to have a idea pad y510p. (I am contemplating removing everything and installing Windows from scratch.)

That doesn't surprise me, Lenovo seem to be working hard to become the next HP in terms of hardware quality. I recently spent hours and hours trying to get a Thinkstation to boot with ECC memory that it specifically listed as supporting. The Lenovo engineers seem to basically get the motherboards to the point that they can kind of boot with the exact hardware the machine ships with and then completely give up. The smallest hardware changes would render that machine unbootable, including inexcusable things like changing graphics cards (Nvidia -> Nvidia too, just a model change).

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#182

Post by moe »

Igglyboo wrote: post #148
steveax wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the appeal of touch screens (really, not trolling). What sort of tasks do you find one superior for?

They are extremely convenient when laying down on my back and my laptop is on my upper chest. It's very awkward to try and reach the touchpad in that position.

Yes, I have a similar problem.

I often carry my Macbook on top of my head when I go around the house.

It's just really awkward to reach the touchpad that way, so I hope the next Macbook will add one on the bottom as well.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#183

Post by pearjuice »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #7

The interesting difference between this review and that of most others is that Anandtech endorsed Dell's claims of 15 hours of battery life. Reviews like at The Verge[1] measured the battery life at 6.5 hours. I trust Anandtech more than The Verge to conduct properly controlled tests, but it really does illustrate the point that usage has a far bigger impact on battery life on modern notebooks than it did in the past…

TheVerge is more like a lifestyle blog than an actual tech blog. They have this belief that Apple hardware is the best and any review - or any post really - will reference Apple if they get a chance. And if they don't get that chance they will work hard to create it. For a very specific cult of people thadt is OK, but it wouldn't work for an independent tech blog.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#184

Post by ako »

ekianjo wrote: post #173
MetaCosm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was excited until I read 8GB max... that can't be right can it? What modern developer machine would have an 8GB cap?

I'm curious, but why do you need more than 8Gb for ? I can think of a few potential uses of more RAM (large video files edition, R on very, very big data sets) but 8Gb seems reasonable for most tasks. Are you really in a situation where you need 16Gb every single day ?

I have 8gb and get warnings quite often that I'm running out of memory: windows 7, ubuntu vm with oracle or Postgres, IntelliJ, Firefox, chrome, office, R. Both R and the virtual machine take 2gb+, IntelliJ 1gb+...

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#185

Post by sliverstorm »

cgag wrote: post #145
jbk wrote: post #13

It seems great, but I really need a 16GB RAM option. (At least they have the 512GB SSD) With a couple of VMs, and a webbrowser, 8 GB can get tiny, and those machines don't evolve, so I'd like to plan for a couple of years...

I'm using 16 gigs of ram right now, and I'm upset by the idea of only having 8 gigs, but just out of curiosity, why do you regularly run multiple VMs? I almost never run any VMs, but occasionally one to play around with other distros. I see a lot of people talking like running multiple VMs is the norm for devs, and I'm curious what people are doing that requires it on a regular basis.

what surprises me is that they would run all of them on their laptop. If it was me, I would be strongly inclined to build a workstation in my basement for hosting all those VMs and remote connect.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#186

Post by bluefinity »

crdoconnor wrote: post #174
tkms wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RAM footprints of most development tools on Linux are also less than on other operating systems, due to shared libraries and not just shipping every dependency bundled with binaries. A developer on OSX told me he was close to maxing out his 16gigs of RAM, blaming it on having to run 2 vagrant VMs simultaneously while working. While I wasn't able to establish a conclusive cause of his sizeable memory consumption (…

I look at my RAM usage on ubuntu sometimes and I suspect that about 40-50% of the machine's total use is due to adblock running on firefox.

Give µBlock[1] a try, it seems to use quite a bit less memory. I've also found it to block more ads by default.

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#187

Post by mturmon »

01Michael10 wrote: post #118
tramjoe_ wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not understand, do you? We do work on these machines. Using VMs, mostly headless. I have 10 to 20 VMs running on my X220 while on the road - in my case mostly build environments - and _none_ of them is taking a sinlge pixel on my display.

I understand perfectly... You guys have use cases much less common then mine. Sorry that I have use of more then one computer and my laptop is strictly a portable device that is stored in my backpack (I don't really want to connect and disconnect it all day long). These were reasons to down-vote me?

I think the downvotes may be due to perceived boasting about your many systems, and/or to mockery of others for not working the way you do.

You should not boast about having two desktops and a laptop. Lots of people prefer a single machine setup and use very large servers or large external displays when needed. This usage pattern has got nothing to do with money constraints.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#188

Post by mercurial »

estebank wrote: post #155
currysausage wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 3rd Gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon has 4GB (soldered) by default, and the biggest configuration that I can find has 8GB. What are they thinking?

Know that the most it can go to is 12GB. If you want more memory you have to go to the T4XXp series, and probably buy the RAM yourself as the premium charged is considerable: 16GB on NewEgg is $120, while the premium payed for 16GB out of the box is $340. The T440s also maxes out at 12GB.

Just don't buy the RAM from Lenovo. On my T430, access to the RAM is a screwdriver away.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#189

Post by splix »

ekianjo wrote: post #173
MetaCosm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was excited until I read 8GB max... that can't be right can it? What modern developer machine would have an 8GB cap?

I'm curious, but why do you need more than 8Gb for ? I can think of a few potential uses of more RAM (large video files edition, R on very, very big data sets) but 8Gb seems reasonable for most tasks. Are you really in a situation where you need 16Gb every single day ?

An Java app, IntelliJ IDEA, few Docker VMs, 2 browsers (and you know how much memory Chrome eats?), few not so complex tools for development (like SourceTree, Dash, etc) - and 14Gb are used. Just checked. And I didn't run anything serious yet.

Had 8gb before, machine was swapping too much, become unresponsive, etc.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Review

#190

Post by matthewmacleod »

pearjuice wrote: post #183
bryanlarsen wrote: post #7

The interesting difference between this review and that of most others is that Anandtech endorsed Dell's claims of 15 hours of battery life. Reviews like at The Verge[1] measured the battery life at 6.5 hours. I trust Anandtech more than The Verge to conduct properly controlled tests, but it really does illustrate the point that usage has a far bigger impact on battery life on modern notebooks than it did in the past…

TheVerge is more like a lifestyle blog than an actual tech blog. They have this belief that Apple hardware is the best and any review - or any post really - will reference Apple if they get a chance. And if they don't get that chance they will work hard to create it. For a very specific cult of people thadt is OK, but it wouldn't work for an independent tech blog.

Isn't that because Apple is by far the biggest laptop manufacturer? Comparisons with the market leader are often useful.
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