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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I had a top of the line XPS. Battery life is less than half that of the Air. The speakers in the XPS sound like they are from the 90s. It gets painfully hot on the bottom case. The keyboard wrist rest area is cheap plastic. It was thicker and heavier than the MBA. Intel Iris GPU (ie slow af) versus M1/M2 GPU.

One point to the XPS: the pixel density of the 4k 13" was absolutely LOVELY. I have never seen a screen so nice.

There is really no comparison overall, though: the Apple laptops blow them (and everything else in that category) out of the water.

The top end iPhones are similarly 2-3 years ahead of the flagship Pixel devices in build quality, too. I tried, really I did.

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Same here. The XPS’s hard drive died within two years and I had to replace it.

The keyboard and touchpad also don’t hold a candle to MacBooks.

I bought a MacBook Pro in 2013 and my mom bought a Dell XPS at around the same time. Her laptop died, she got a Lenovo Yoga. That one died within a year and was replaced for free. The new one died after two years. When the M1 Air came out I gave her the old MacBook Pro, which she still uses every day, going strong (aside from battery life, but it's mostly plugged in).

It has essentially outlived 4 Windows laptops. I expect the M1 Air to still be relevant in a decade, as well.

The M1 won't, the SSD will wear out before that and with no way to swap, it will be landfill as well.

Do the M1s have especially short write lifetimes? I have a Toshiba from 2010 or so and the SSD is still fine even if the trackpad and speaker ports died years ago.

In 2013, TechReport did an SSD endurance test: for months, it ran non-stop write operations, a much more strenuous use case than what a regular laptop would experience, which will be primarily read operations. 4 months in, after writing 300TB, all the tested devices were still working without issue.

If the characteristics of the SSD in an M1 are sufficiently similar to the SSDs that were used back then (I have no clue if that's the case), wear out will be a non-issue.

Since 2013 there have been multiple iterations of SSD technology that increased storage density but sacrificed storage durability: https://www.howtogeek.com/444787/multi-layer-ssds-what-are-s...

This is why people are concerned about SSD endurance. An old SLC SSD's NAND would be good for many, many writes, tho the controller would often fail. Nowadays the NAND fails, but the controller is fine.

I'd note that the 2013 MBP also has an SSD that hasn't experienced any problems so far.

After 2 years of use, my M1 MBP has 5% write life used. Extrapolate that out and you get 40 years of lifespan.

I bought a mid-range Acer laptop in December 2012. I used that thing as my daily driver until 2018 until I finally got a desktop. In 2020 I repurposed that laptop as a server and it's been running ever since. For tens of thousands of hours.

My point is that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on quality. Perhaps I'm pretty lucky in this sense, but I have had great longevity out of all of my hardware, and I have owned very few Apple devices.

Been running a XPS 9560 since 2017 and its rock solid. Windows 10 with WSLv2. Basically the key to any Windows machine is finding the combination of drivers that are stable. That is the trade off with Windows. They support a ton of hardware so naturally the driver quality varies. Apple's problem space is easy in comparison. One set of hardware, one set of drivers. A lot of the complaints about XPS hardware really boil down to the bad set of drivers Dell ships them with. As I get older it has become pretty clear the sweet spot is to be two generations behind the latest and greatest. You get the ideal spot between price, cheap replacement parts and stability.

So not turn key, but also not a rip off prison like Apple :)

Isn't a good high density screen typically a large power drain? Perhaps there's a trade-off that was made there…

It's not included because it's really hard to make a high quality screen, not because of the battery tradeoff.

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