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Comment by procinct | Hacker News Reader

I have a 2015 MBP and a Dell XPS 13 (I forget the year) and the thing that blew me away the most with Dell is the support. One day I went to turn my XPS on and it wouldn’t start. After some research it seemed like a dead motherboard. I was concerned I was going to have to send my laptop away for months to have it fixed but surprisingly because the XPS is an enterprise grade machine it qualifies for their pro support. This meant I was entitled to on premises repair. They sent a guy out to my place and he repaired it in front of me in about an hour. I very quickly went from a very poor impression of Dell (due to my laptop failing so soon) to a very good one. I still prefer my MBP but that was likely the best support experience I’ve ever had.

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Really? I've had a generally poor support experience with dell. Granted, I don't have enterprise support, but still. My dell laptop stopped charging (still within warranty!), called up support and spend a while trying to explain what the problem was. Eventually, I got it through and they said they had to replace the motherboard and would charge $200 (the whole thing was ~$500) for it.

Every Dell laptop I've ever purchased has had the on-premise technical support (which I used to great effect over half a dozen times) and most of those were purchased through the Dell website which I assume is targeted towards consumers. It may have been part of paid warranty upgrades but obviously not enough to make an impression.

I always used the Dell web chat to get warranty support and the vast majority of the time I just wrote a few sentences that made it clear that I was a power user that knew what was likely to be broken, someone would get dispatched with 24-48 hours, and I'd spend less than hour on the whole affair (most of that time spent doing something else while the support person replied or the tech worked on the laptop).

> the thing that blew me away the most with Dell is the support.

I have an XPS 13 and when my keyboard got flakey a repairmen came to my house and replaced the keyboard without even checking it first. Also, after I bought the laptop they randomly put $50 in my credit card account because I was "a good customer". WTF? I guess buying customer's loyalty is a thing now.

Recently had to contact dell due to the 'floppy screen' issue on the xps 13's, really good service, got the laptop back in 3 days. And you know what, Microsoft is also kicking ass in the service department. Had an issue with a license and in the middle of the night I was able to contact someone and they gave me a new pro key for the trouble.

Compare that to all the terrible customer service news from apple, and I think apple is really the one that needs to change more the the other guys at this point.

The onsite and accidental damage options on ThinkPads was (is?) absolutely amazing. I think I paid an extra $100, but when I knocked my machine off the desk, Lenovo dispatched an IBMer to my office with a replacement panel in under 24 hours.

My wife had a refurbished X40 for the longest time. One time, the fan gave in, I tried to clean it, but couldn't get it to move. I figured it couldn't hurt to Google the part-number, and quickly ended up on IBMs country-local website with a local phone number. I dialed, and braced, half for an infinite IVR tree, half for being quoted a number in the range of the GDP of a small country. But neither happened, a few minutes later, a very helpful woman had quoted me something like $9.46 including postage and taking payment by card. The new fan arrived a few days later, and the X40 went on to live for a few more years. That thing was a tank.

My experience with older ThinkPads was that they were about as likely to damage whatever they landed on. The most damage I have done to one is to drop it onto pavement from 4ft because I forgot to properly zip up my backup. Only cosmetic damage, broke off a small piece of plastic from the battery.

Although the machine has been working wonderfully, I had the opposite experience with support. My battery started swelling on my 2017 XPS after a year. Dell will not sell me the original 97 WHr battery, only a 56 WHr refurb. 56 WHr does not last long on my GNU / Linux configuration and it's really lowered the value of the machine for me.

Perhaps they would not sell it to you, because the entire line of cells were defective, and they did not want to burn your house down with a defective battery.

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