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It's a bit of an overstatement to say that the batteries are unreplaceable. They have some tape on them and they require patience to remove, but that's not anything new as far as laptop part upgrades go.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Dell+XPS+13+Teardown/36157

> Surface Book

Man, I love the idea of this thing.

But I recently tried moving to Surface Book. Spent nearly $3k on a real nicely specc'd one. It BSOD'd daily, sleep modes are really confusing, battery drained terribly overnight, it was overall a bit of a nightmare. Granted probably half of my complaints are about Win10 rather than the SB itself, but still. I returned it.

It's SO CLOSE and if it was $1,000 cheaper I may have just dealt with it. Just not quite there.

I have a Surface Book and am sticking through the problems, I've experienced everything you've mentioned. Bought it on launch, things have gotten significantly better with firmware and driver updates, but it still has a little ways to go. Seemingly the majority of the problems have to do with Skylake. At the rate things have been going, I estimate a couple more months before they have the big bugs all ironed out.

S and X Thinkpad lines have considerably improved screens nowadays. Nowhere near Retina, but they get the job done. Also, most of the parts inside are field serviceable, you don't really need more than a screwdriver to fix it.

The P Thinkpad has a 4K IPS screen: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p70/#...

I'm not sure about the battery, as it's brand new, and I don't have a need to replace it yet, but the RAM and SSD are both user replaceable on the XPS15. The battery looks like it would be a fairly easy swap as well, as long as you could source the new one.

> "as long as you could source the new one"

Thats the most difficult part. Original battery costs a fortune (some of them cost almost half of the new basic laptop). And if you decide to get a third party alternative - its basically a russian roulette, you never know what you gonna get, most of them are just terrible and barely last couple months

The big difference being a lot of the competition's options are at a 30-50% lower price.

>[1] My non-technical wife, who has a Mac, recently needed to use my work laptop. Her first reaction on seeing the screen was "wow, your firm cheaped out, huh?" I've got a totally maxed out ThinkPad T450s with i7, 20GB of RAM, and FHD IPS display.

Oxymoron: tech reasons of how great your computer is; and an argument on why a non technical people don't like it.

I've concluded that spec sheets in advertising are at best excuses, and at worst lies. Most users don't care what the exact pixel count is, they just want enough pixels that everything looks great. They don't care exactly how much RAM or storage there is, so long as they don't run out of it (either "brick wall effect" or discernible slowdowns). They don't care exactly how fast the processor is, so long as it's perceived as "fast enough". If specifications are presented, it's done so precisely to convince the user "this is good enough" ... but if it was good enough, customers wouldn't be looking at those numbers to see if it's at least above some criteria indicating "well, I guess I can put up with it since you put it that way".

That's precisely why Apple doesn't give specifications for as many products as they can get away with. RAM specs are limited to regular computers. Devices with "retina" displays don't list pixel counts any more (or at least overtly so). Given how they're pushing to make storage size irrelevant on mobile devices (iCloud, dynamic app deletion/installation, Photos cloud storage, etc), I expect they'll eventually drop exact local storage specs in most ads (opting for "small/medium/large").

My point wasn't that a non-technical person would appreciate the specs. It's that the screen is so bad that it makes a non-technical person think it's a cheap-o laptop instead of one that costs almost $2,000.

And my point is that the lousy screen is sold as satisfactory because the customer is told & convinced that the specifications say it's satisfactory.

Many business class laptops are modular enough to replace the hard drives.

I swapped the DVD player out on an elitebook for a second 500 GB SSD.

ThinkPad screens have been getting better. I'm actually pretty happy with contrast/brightness of the FHD IPS on my X250 (color gamut definitely could be better, but at least it doesn't do dynamic contrast like recent Dells), but the new screens, like the X1 Yoga's new OLED screen looks fantastic (I believe that'll be a 100% Adobe RGB screen).

Whenever I switch back and forth, I'm always shocked by how many PC laptops do trackpads so terribly when the Macbooks have been out there for years now.

Not sure about the patents that apply to Apple's trackpads, which is probably the biggest reason... the closest I've seen have been on some of the chromebook models, which aren't near as good, but still better than most... then again, it's entirely possible google is paying for the ip licensing.

It may be a pain in the butt to do so, my 2014 Dell XPS 13 it is serviceable - the RAM is still soldered onto the mainboard unfortunately, but aside from that every other component can be replaced. I fail to understand why I can't even replace the battery safely in a modern MacBook without a headache.

Where do a I buy a first-party replacement battery for the XPS 13?

You can install OS X on a surface tablet. it's definitely been done.

@[1] that says more about your wife then about the ThinkPad.

There are plenty of serviceable laptops out there.

The parent to you comment also said this:

> And no other PC laptop hits that right sweet spot of power/battery/display quality.

... so I'm going to venture a guess that "the laptop is serviceable" isn't the only criteria being weighed here.