Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

So I clicked through this article, expecting something that totally misses the point (like their Adamo a few years ago).

It doesn't match my immediate expectations. Which is good! The machine looks solid. I don't know if I like it more than my Air, but it looks promising.

I keep clicking through. In a machine like this, two things really matter: keyboard and display. As allwein says in another comment thread, they don't show the keyboard head-on. Which is concerning, but I can live with a crappy keyboard if the screen is great. So click click click, I keep on looking for display information.

"A tough yet brilliant 13.3" screen in a compact form similar to an 11" laptop." This sounds...well, I'm not sure what they're saying, but it sounds interesting at least! So I go to check out the specs.

No specs, anywhere. After a bit I realize that clicking "Buy XPS 13" takes me to the (god-awful, ugly) Dell page for the product line, where (if I pick "Customize") I can get some specs. The prices get me a bit frowny, but they're not that crazy. So I look at the bottom-line one, which for my use case is more or less equivalent to my 11" Air except in size.

At last, there it is...WTF? "Silver Anodized Aluminum and 13.3" HD (720p) Truelife WLED Display with 1.3MP HD Webcam".

There we go--there's the "attention to detail is for suckers" Dell I've come to know and loathe. Apple puts a 1440x900 display in their 13" Airs. They put a 1366x768 display in the 11" Airs. I mean, that's just sad--Dell is using a worse panel in their 13" 'ultrabook' than Apple does in their 11" Air. Dell has no excuse.

Somehow, the lessons of "don't make people use screens that suck" is lost along the way to the rest of the laptop manufacturers out there. I am (not very) deeply sorry, Dell, but packaging crap in a thinner, lighter box only makes it thinner, lighter crap.

Keep an eye on Vizio.

The thin and lights they announced at CES are going to pack 1600x900 screens in the 14" model, and full 1080p screens in the 15.6" model.

Gorgeous industrial design, great screens, they're working with Microsoft to ship Windows 7 bloatware-free, and Vizio has a reputation for being absolutely ruthless in cutting prices while maintaining quality. They're supposed to hit market in June, and I'm holding off on buying a new notebook until then.

The Verge had a great interview with their CTO:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/13/2705064/vizio-cto-matt-mcr...

They seem to get it. If they mean half of what McRae says in that interview, Vizio stands to really turn the commodity PC market on its head. Given that we keep seeing the same mistakes made by the likes of Dell, HP, et al, I think it may just take an outsider like them to shake up the industry.

This is interesting. I hadn't realized they were getting into PCs (my only knowledge of Vizio is "shitty Walmart TVs") and they're at least saying all the right things.

Admittedly, at this point it'll take a lot to get me to come back from Apple, but that is definitely a start.

>(my only knowledge of Vizio is "shitty Walmart TVs")

FWIW, Vizio has developed a reputation for building TVs that match the quality of more expensive sets at lower prices. They're generally far better than the junk budget displays you'll find while considerably cheaper than something from a "name" manufacturer like Samsung or Sony. The hope -- and what Vizio is claiming they intend to do -- is that they bring this to the PC market.

Totally possible! My only knowledge of them is through the fine Walmart electronics department, though, which has no reputation for quality. :)

Sounds promising, but I wouldn't normally consider a 14-15" screen "thin and light", and I don't see any statistics on thickness or weight to indicate otherwise.

And the biggest open issue from my perspective: will they have an incredibly good warranty? Always a major concern with a new company in a field, particularly when you don't know if they'll remain in that field for the lifetime of the product. To calibrate expectations: I currently have a ThinkPad, and on the rare occasion that something goes wrong with it, it gets fixed the next day for free. I wouldn't buy any laptop without at least a three-year no-questions-asked warranty, and the end of that warranty period indicates the time to buy a new laptop.

>Sounds promising, but I wouldn't normally consider a 14-15" screen "thin and light", and I don't see any statistics on thickness or weight to indicate otherwise.

From Gizmodo's hands on with them at CES:

>Like its new tablet, the specs aren't final, so Vizio won't say just how thin, or how light they are. But the 14-inch felt comprable to my Macbook Air, and looked to be similar in terms of thickness. (See comparison shot.) Bottom line, this thing will be a breeze to shove in a bag and tote around all day.

http://gizmodo.com/5874470/putting-my-hands-on-vizios-new-ma...

Just guessing at the photos the prototypes they were showing off looked like they were in the inch-ish thick range. I do know that pretty much every hands-on I read about them said they fit the ultrabook mold even though Vizio is choosing not to use the term to describe them. (And I don't blame them. I always thought ultrabook was a pretty terrible name).

Seems like putting in a crappy display is what allowed them to hit the $999 price point.

Screen aside, it is reasonably close to the MacBook Air (real world keyboard/trackpad usability and battery life notwithstanding) that it could get some people to get one over the MBA, except that Dell completely blows it with their presentation.

The site is completely Flash and tries to do one of those fancy scrolling sites, except the scrolling doesn't feel right and the clicking-and-dragging the scroll bar doesn't work. I ended up hitting "Shop XPS Laptops" which took me to the entire XPS range, where I found the ultrabook, clicked on it and was led back to the same Flash site. I hit "Buy XPS 13" and entered the checkout process by accident before going back, scrolling down, hitting Tech Specs and getting most of the information I want (the actual display resolution; it says it's 720p, but is that 1280x720 or 1200x720?).

720p means 1280x720, 1080p means 1920x1080.

edit: apparently not, see sibling comment

Exactly my point :)

It means 1366x768 like usual "720p" displays.

Most manufacturers seem to do that these days, hiding display resolution somewhere obscure, while it represents one of the most important details that I need to know.

Personally, I'd like an Ultrabook with the 13" 1080p screen from the Sony Z series. (But not made by Sony, since I need something with decent quality, a decent warranty, and a decent company.)

hiding display resolution somewhere obscure, while it represents one of the most important details that I need to know.

This isn't a coincidence. Sales can profit from ignorance, whether natural or engineered.

Depends on who you want to sell to. Newegg very effectively demonstrates the value of showing specific technical details and making them easy to filter or compare. Many vendor sites offer similar search mechanisms ("monitors larger than this size and this much resolution, with these inputs").

They want to sell to Dell customers.

Dell has one of the search mechanisms I just mentioned: on their laptop or monitor pages, you can click a few links to filter the set of products based on features you want. For monitors, they include resolution in those features; unfortunately, for laptops they don't.

Good thing we're talking about laptops, then. If we were including their monitor product pages in this critique we'd really look silly.

Or how about the Asus Zenbooks? 13" 1600x900, 11" 1366x768. Played with one briefly in Staples a few weeks ago, but not enough to get a good feel for it.

Holding off till Linux runs better on them and there are some Ivy Bridge models, but they're definitely on my short list.

I want an ultrabook to throw Arch on. I'm real close to buying the Lenovo U300s, but I'm not a hardware geek, does it look reasonable to anyone in the know?

Dell should have mentioned the resolution specifically, but it's also 1366 x 768, not 1280x720(720p).

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/xpsL321x/en/sp...

"It's not steaming crap. It's cooled!"

I'm not trying to rip on you, but to me that's about all that says. (Yes, it's fairly standard among not-Apple laptops to put a 1366x768 13" panel in a laptop, but that's unacceptably crap given the competition.)

Apologies.

From your comment, "Dell is using a worse panel in their 13" 'ultrabook' than Apple does in their 11" Air", I assumed you interpreted the 720p resolution as strictly 1280x720 instead of being concerned about PPI as both the MBA 11" and the Dell have the same resolution.

No worries. :) I did interpret it as 1280x720, but even 1366x768 in a 13" is really disappointing.

PPI is king as far as I'm concerned - I love the 1680x1050 panels in the 15" MBPs.

+1. Very disappointing. Can't get it without Windows either :-(

I think we're going to have to wait until a year or two after Apple releases retina display Airs before ultrabooks start having high resolution displays.

Same here. Was amazed by the initial marketing gloss, but let down by the 1366x768 display :(

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