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I once heard a repair tech say that XPS stands for “eXpensive Piece of Sh*t” and now that always comes to mind, although it never totally made sense to me as I didn’t think they were particularly expensive. I have an XPS and I did replace the battery at one point, but other than that I think it performed fairly well for my simple needs. I think I paid $499 for it around 2018.

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I've had a number of Dell's in the past and IMO their "consumer" and "professional" lines might as well be different brands that happen to share the "Dell" name.

Their consumer laptops are all garbage IMO, mainly cause I find they try to max out specs so it looks good on paper and skimp on really basic things like the hinges, batteries, etc.

Their professional laptops are much better, my parents just got rid of a Dell Latitude that I passed down to them after college, and when I bought it for college it was already 5-6 years old so all in all it had a service life of more than a decade. Specs might be down compared to the consumer line but everything else IMO is much better built (chassis, battery, hinges, etc)

>I think I paid $499 for it around 2018.

The base model XPS laptop was ~$999 at the time (vs $1299 for a 2023 model). Which sadly doesn't feel all that expensive today even though I would absolutely still call a $1000 laptop expensive.

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