Dell admits it made a mistake when it abandoned XPS
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
I just bought our entire G&A team M4 Macbook Air 15" for the same price as our Dell Pro laptops.
They are 20% faster, have 2x the battery life, and 8 more gb of RAM. Also standby actually works.
We had done an initial batch of Dell Pro 16 laptops and with 16gb of ram + the 255h (now 258v) it's over $1100 a laptop. Only problem is... they need 32gb of RAM on Windows 11 because the performance was terrible. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team at 16gb. The upgrade to 32gb of RAM moves the price to $1500+ each, they also recently swapped to soldered RAM for both Intel and AMD, so we are forced to the $1500+ option with a faster CPU.
Initial reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, about 50% of them are new to Macs and have figured it out, additionally they all love the battery life and performance (most are switching from 11th and 12th gen Intel).
Our more tech savvy members have mentioned the better screen, webcam and audio as positives.
I am considering switching our call center (~200 members) to Mac mini's, the same price as our Lenovo mini PCs and will last a long time, the Core Ultra 210 is not great. My only fear is people stealing them really.
Why would I pay $2000 for Dells mid line series of business laptops? How much is this XPS going to cost vs a Mac book Pro?
edit: https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-mar...
> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
My main reason Apple can charge slightly more: Better performance, screen, battery, camera, microphone, and trackpad.
At least with Windows you have several hardware vendors competing to force market rate pricing.
There are several good reasons to choose Apple, but I question the wisdom of choosing them for price.
Lenovo, Dell and HP are pretty much all the same price at this point. It's basically an oligopoly.
The prices have crept up over the past 5 years and they have no reason to lower them. They know they aren't even competing with Apple since most large enterprises are all in on Windows.
My bet is they have basically made their prices the same as Apple, and they plan to keep it that way.
However, depending on how you procure this hasn’t been the experience for over 20 years. By the time you’re done with CDW or whomever is your VAR, you’re not comparing a $600 basic PC laptop to a $1200 basic Mac Laptop. They know you’re like the GP and going to pay $1500 minimum and are probably game for $2000. They sell the “Business” line with whatever terms added.
When I did this in K12 in the late 00s the price for a truly terrible Dell or IBM/Lenovo was the same as an iMac.
For the corporate world there have been times you couldn’t get Virtualization support, hardware dock ports, and various other bits of support until you moved to buying the “Business” line and after a certain number of units the direct to retail options send you down the VAR path. There’s simply too much money involved for them to make it easier for you.
I have not had to deal with this as a buyer since 2019 but the song seems to be the same as I work for a company that sells through CDW. Per the reps, the same stupid games are being played.
The only times I haven’t had to deal with this is when the companies I’ve worked for just hand you a credit card to walk down to the Apple Store or are using Apple’s program which is basically the same thing but comes with a shared App Store account and some better support for swap outs.
"Man, I wish Apple ram upgrades were priced like the rest of industry"
<monkey paw curls>
What I really hate is you don't even get the main benefit - high bandwidth and low latency. They are just soldering lpddr5x RAM which doesn't really need to be.
Not to mention that iPhones work with any standard Bluetooth headphones and USV C standard headphones.
"Dell has priced it's Pro line of laptops in-line with Apple's Air equivalents, however Window 11's high resource utilization means we have to pay for higher spec machines while still ending up with reduced battery performance, and inferior screens, webcams and audio."
But instead you make weird misleading statements like "and 8 more gb of RAM" and "it's over $1100 a laptop" that need to be decoded but are easily misunderstood if the reader lacks certain domain knowledge.
Then you have these unqualified statements like "they also recently swapped to soldered RAM for both Intel and AMD" which implies that it's a bad move but don't articulate why or acknowledge that Apple has been doing this since 2008.
Meanwhile,
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names
Is that really much different than macOS? Checking my 32gb Mac Mini now, I'm sitting at 84% memory usage with just browsers, chat apps, some RDP/terminal windows, Mail and Apple Music open.
I'd also note that Dell does sell Qualcomm laptops - I've got a 12-core/32gb Dell Qualcomm as my work PC - every piece of software I use for work is now native ARM64 and I've got no complaints about performance/functionality.
https://softwareg.com.au/cdn/shop/articles/Windows-11-RAM-ty...
And I've been mostly in the Mac camp ever since even if I'll use other OSs as needed.
Is that what Microsoft Surface laptops are? Did Microsoft get in the game themselves to make sure a premium-quality laptop is available for Windows?
But Microsoft stopped caring about hardware a long time ago. I would never recommend overpriced Surface Pro to anyone unless you have a special need for that form factor. As to Surface Laptop, you have so many better choices.
That's a Windows issue. The recent active sleep (or whatever it's called) has been buggy across basically all hardware.
i bought an expensive 240hz qd oled and i kept coming into my office with the damn thing on without the screensaver, just burning in after having left it asleep.
i’m so paranoid i just turn the whole computer off now.
I imagine Event Manager or whatever still exists for those that want to investigate after it happens.
I no longer use Windows and use Ubuntu instead.
Yes it's shit. I have a work laptop that have all sorts of problems. I would leave work and return the next morning to find that the laptop had a bluescreen and rebooted. Many times. So IT disabled modern standby. (Now it takes almost as long to boot as a cold start, but at least I don't lose my work.)
Although I have a personal laptop at home that seems to do fine. Still, that's nowhere as responsive as "instant on" experience as you would find on a Macbook. Of course, Microsoft lied again.
My 64GB MacBook Pro sits around that level after using it for a while, too. So do my Windows and Linux machines even with different amounts of RAM.
There's a popular page explaining it for Linux, but it's applicable to every OS: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
Isolated RAM usage numbers aren't useful because spare memory is used for caching. Even if you are using 88% of the RAM, that's not indicative of a problem unless you're encountering a lot of swapping. Even swapping a little bit isn't bad if it's not stalling the machine out. You have to look at actual performance, not RAM usage percentages.
I don't care how much cache is being used and I can't really do anything about it even if I did.
If I'm asking the question "Is my system starved of RAM?" I am going to look at USED and AVAIL. CACHE is a curiosity more than anything else and FREE tells me nothing.
Also, under what circumstances would I have a ton of AVAIL and be starving the CACHE? That's an OS/kernel problem. If AVAIL drops to zero I can expect to get OOM crashing pretty quick.
If they were making decisions based on RAM, they were almost certainly encountering real-world issues which prompted looking at their usage statistics in the first place, rather than just looking up their RAM usage metrics for funsies.
It makes sense to watch memory use but one should make sure to discount the amount used for disk caching from the total.
But to that point, having to explain to people why this 32GB machine with two processes using 10GB each can not, in fact, fit another 10GB process because the response times of the two existing processes relies heavily on that “unused” memory that is actually part of the working set of the machine. And also occasionally one of those services spikes to 14GB so what happens when that happens?
So in that regard showing that memory as used has advantages for avoiding arguments with people who are not equipped to have their half of the argument in a useful and meaningful way.
I thought the minimum spec was 16gb ram as of a while ago?
> Mac mini
If you’re paying for power, it would be interesting to see what effect that change to Mac’s has.
I went from a nuc 9 to a mini and use less than 10% the power on the mini, and it’s more powerful.
Yup, since forever and the reason is:
> ... on Windows ...
There's no fixing that.
It doesn't matter how much inconsistent and how much suckage there's in every new MacOS release: it's simply impossible to suck as much as Microsoft products.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops/app...
Only in certain countries. Dell refuses to sell laptops with Linux installed in Australia. And they've never given a believable explanation as to why.
Additional point since you are considering Mac Minis. My wifes 2008 and 2010 Macbooks (the 2010 is a Pro) still turn on and run the OS just fine. I swapped the drive on the 2010 but its because she dropped it ages ago. Thats 16 years for the 2010, and 18 years for the 2008. I cant find a single Windows laptop that has lasted me this long EXCEPT the ones I installed Linux on. Something about *NIX literally saves your hardware lifespan.
Repaired under warranty.
Less than a year later that battery was swollen.
No warranty replacement. No OEM batteries available through Dell.
I buy 4 replacements from Amazon and none work. The XPS line has battery DRM.
I have an i7 with a discrete card, 64gb of ram, and a 4k screen that’s worthless.
Good comment to cc: to your Congressional reps. Only legislation can fix this.
I've seen quite a few various laptops with swollen batteries, and their users don't understand that can't habitually store their laptops in the sun (well, in sun rays through windows).
Those people also don't even realize their battery is swelling, and that it's a bad thing.
More importantly they can all accept 3rd party batteries.
Mine is sitting on a shelf. I can’t even use it without the battery because it throttles when the only power source is the charger.
I keep it around to maybe scavenge the 4k touchscreen for a project or the ram for a family member’s under-specced laptop or maybe one day someone will crack the battery DRM…
They can never seems to get their shit together.
Going public and then back to private. We stuck with them through that, even though it was a shitshow trying to get a hold of anyone. They blur together, but this might have also been the time when they offered everyone the opportunity to leave and it was a ghost town at Dell.
We stuck with them when they outsourced their support, which we later realized was the best years of support. More on that in a sec.
Outsourced support turned out to be better because we could triage everything ourselves, then tell them which piece of hardware was broken and they would send a tech or replacement part. Basically exactly what we expected for when we purchased premium support.
We stuck with them when they brought their support back to the US. Each tech person wanted to make a career out of each ticket. We couldn't get broken hardware fixed without screaming and begging.
Keep in mind, we always bought the best hardware with the most expensive support level. Precision laptops. Precision desktops. Best servers and storage.
We tried to stick with them when their sales teams basically wanted to remind us every time they don't really want to talk to anyone anymore. Everything is done online and they prefer not to talk to anyone.
We tried to place an order for a laptop refresh, which was going to be followed by desktop refresh, and then a complete server/storage refresh. The sales teams made it seem like they were doing us a favor by even quoting us anything. More reminders to use the customer portal and don't call or e-mail us. That was the final straw and we did the complete refresh with a different brand.
The people I talk to doing laptop repairs and trying to get parts from Dell say that Dell is treating them like potential scammers. They've diagnosed the broken part, everything is under warranty, Dell was previously fine with trusting these people.. But now Dell is forcing them to prove, every time, that the part needs to be replaced.
It's the weirdest combination of time wasting and incentivizing this team to be _lower_ skilled that I've ever seen. Because, I'm guessing, Dell was dealing with too much warranty waste and decided to crack down on everyone.
If that’s the case, then it’s further mismanagement from Dell.
All of the parts get refurbished and go back into circulation. Not in a secretive way. Dell points out that replacement parts for warranty claims might be a refurbished item.
We had pretty good luck with the hardware. Some refreshes were better than others. We would refresh about every three years when technology was rapidly changing. Then hardware got really fast and it would last longer. We always bought maxed out specs, which meant we could push the life of the hardware. The Precision series was pretty good. Some models had problems and others were rock solid. We always had spares on purpose, which I think helped save our sanity when dealing with Dell support.
There was a time where even this was fine as Dell Premier was actually functional. When the bottom fell out of that part of their service we left for good.
CDW had better Dell support than Dell did. :|
https://i.imgur.com/4SdAQu9.jpeg
When they released the 16" series, most of the updgrade features were gone. Memory was tied to the CPU, which puts you in the same position that Apples does. Not a fan. I swapped out the 17" for a 16" macbook. I doubt I'll look at an XPS again.
Dell XPS 14 starts at $2,050, while the 16-inch model will demand $2,200 starting Jan. 6. If you think that’s high, that’s because Dell revised its price point from $1,650 and $1,850, respectively.
EDIT: sorry, my numbers are off. It’s $250-300 more expensive for 32gb not 16.
My Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 laptop has working keyboard and display but speaker has driver issues (one speaker turns off after a while until I reboot), and the right-clicking on the trackpad does not work in some places.
Surface laptops have good keyboard and trackpad but the display uses 150% scaling, and that has artifacts (such as 1px lines map to 1.5 device pixels, but use 1 device pixel, so are out of proportion).
The older Dell XPS line was reasonable. It had 200% scaling display, normal keyboard and good trackpad, but the new version has weird keyboard and trackpad.
Windows PCs are made by multiple manufacturers which in theory should have produced great choice and quality, instead they all suck. Mac laptops are made by a single company, so no choice, and yet it is excellent.
#3 was out of warranty and I had just changed companies so it went into the trash. It lasted 3 years tops.
I also have a dell ultrasharp 4K monitor that had to be replaced under warrant within ~1 year of purchase and I am just waiting for it to go again now that it is out of warranty.
Dell seems to have had reasonable service(in-warranty) but their stuff is always breaking down.
I have had several macbooks. Each lasted ~10 years+.
It had a Killer WLAN network card that would frequently disconnect from wifi on any OS - so much that I had to switch it out to a different one. The speakers blew up within the first year and the cooling system had to be replaced too - thankfully warranty covered that.
I bought the XPS only because I couldn't justify the cost of a Macbook Pro back then (easily 30% more expensive and the XPS was already a stretch), but I regretted that since the first day I've had it. Bulky, unpleasant to use, frequent hardware issues. Never again.
Isn’t it good to test your UI on different scale factors? I run several non-uniform scale factors concurrently for that exact reason.
There was a period around Project Sputnik where they were making really good machines. Years of abuse, and it's still in good condition, though the battery has been showing its age lately.
It's rather sad that things have gone downhill since then, as there was a period there that Dell were really good.
Then don't ruin it. Put real resources behind it. Think of it as almost a reverse merger, not financially but spiritually.
It would make them unique and relevant again.
Spiritually, Dell can only desecrate Framework. Nothing good would come out of that, I feel quite certain.
Dell does not have a "spirit." Nor do they need one to survive. They simply need to be competitive and once again create desirable products.
The fact that we have more competition is part of the reason you're seeing this admission in the first place.
Figuring out which laptop to get was horrible because of their completely inexplicable branding, which I'm glad to see them roll back, but the computer is fine. I'm not sure I can agree with all of the "Dell computers are bad/dying" arguments.
I think they went through a huge quality slump from ~2020-2023, as did most things, but so far my experience has been that they're quite good now. I haven't had any standby issues (or issues of any kind, really) using Windows. Windows 11 is Windows 11 but Tahoe is also Tahoe so that's a net medium. A little bit of Group Policy tweaking to remove the junkware and a little wince when hit with new-Notepad aside, it's good enough. I also tried running Linux on it and everything was straightforward except for the webcam (most modern Intel laptops use a new Intel thing where the CPU has the ISP on it and the camera is attached over CSI, and the kernel support is quite bleeding-edge) and the usual Nvidia graphics switching and arcane Linux power management problems, but I really got it for Windows anyway.
My only beefs are the terrible virtual function bar (this was stupid the first time vendors tried it, and trying it again in 2025 is a really incredible choice, I'm glad they backed down on this ludicrous idea) and that the OLED model only comes in touchscreen form and the digitizer is ever-so-slightly visible. Otherwise I like it as well as my M2 MacBook Pro; the screen is square and notchless, the performance-to-dollar ratio was far superior, and the physical build quality is quite good. The "infinity" touchpad that's not really infinite is a stupid gimmick on paper but overall I don't notice it at all - it works just as well as any non-Apple touchpad I've used, which is to say about 85% as well as an Apple one.
my macbook pro on the other hand is still going after 10 years, and even tho i upgraded i kept it as it was too solid to throw away.