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?
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.
My 32 GB MacBook Pro sits at about 50%, even after months of being powered on, unless I'm running programs that use a lot of memory. That's at least what Activity Monitor reports, perhaps Activity Monitor reports it in a different way.
I’ve had to explain too many times to people who should know better that “rss” is not how much memory a process needs but how much the operating system allows it to have. Put other stuff on the machine and that number will go down. No it’s not that improvement you think you made to that data structure. If you want that, look at total memory or heap size after GC if it’s a garbage collected language.
I truly hate, more than anything else in the tech discourse, that this gets trotted out every time the discussion of RAM comes up. "unUsED rAM iS wASTED RAm", always used to defend and justify abhorrent and incompetent software development practices. Even with 32gb, I routinely run into out-of-memory crashes on a near-daily basis with workloads that should not in principle be anywhere near that usage.
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.
This is talk about how the OS uses that RAM to make your software better.
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 think the point is not that one should not look at RAM use, but be careful when looking at it since total RAM use may include the amount that is used for disk cache which will fill to use whatever is available (and will be freed back if necessary).
It makes sense to watch memory use but one should make sure to discount the amount used for disk caching from the total.
Apple has kept prices stable for existing models, but is rumored to be paying 50% more for DRAM in 2026, which may impact pricing of new Apple devices that will be launched in 2026.
> 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.
Apple may be a good deal now, but historically they have been the expensive option. I would be concerned about the rug pull of spending time training people on macOS, setting the expectation that they will have it in the future, and then Apple returning to premium pricing before the next upgrade cycle.
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.
Hard to know for sure, I'd be curious the breakdown in cost for enterprise laptops, it's hard for me to understand why the price has increased 50% while Apple has increased 10%.
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.
Historically they've been the expensive option, but historically they've been much more niche than windows laptops. So their unit economics might be better nowadays due to volume.
If you have the freedom to buy from Best Buy, Amazon, etc, this is certainly the case.
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.
If Apple can keep the price near $1500 for the M5, it will still be a no brainer. They are currently $200 cheaper, granted for less memory. I also am in the camp of you don't need quite as much memory on Apple, our most significant usage is Chrome, Excel and Teams.
My main reason Apple can charge slightly more:
Better performance, screen, battery, camera, microphone, and trackpad.
In my last job, I just bought my own laptops for a variety of reasons. Know that may not work for everyone. Also for a variety of reasons. But worked dor me.
I didn't even think about that, all the reviewers were in a fury about soldered RAM... and now almost everyone is soldered. It's a shame.
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.
Fairly long history of Apple doing something anti-consumer and then all other manufactures following their lead. Same with non-replacable batteries, no headphone jack, have to pay extra for a charger, etc.
Been debating about buying a Mac mini to replace my old iMac--which I don't use at this point. Have a newish MacBook Pro but it's not the best ergonomic choice to use with a big monitor.
> 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. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team at 16gb.
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.
For windows specifically cached memory looks very similar to unused memory so when someone is complaining about "windows is using all my memory" it's very unlikely to be caused by caches.
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.
omg is this a thing? i thought i was dumb or something.
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.
When I joined my last company, it would have been politically unpalatable to run Windows which was what I was used to, Linux was sort of frustrating to me at the time (even if I'm sure I could have adapted and it has improved in the last 15 years), and then there were Macs--which I had never used but turned out to be very straightforward.
And I've been mostly in the Mac camp ever since even if I'll use other OSs as needed.
I take the "premium" experience of Apple hardware for granted, and if I wanted to buy a Windows laptop, I'd have no idea which brands make similar quality laptops for Windows. I'm shocked at the Windows laptops I see in the wild.
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?
Yes about the surface part. They thought all other 2-in-1 touch devices were terrible and needed to do something.
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.
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.
What a weirdly worded post. You could have said something like:
"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.
Bro, this is HN where the are so many obscure acronyms, frameworks, random Saas providers assumed everyone knows. This isn't a site where discussion can break down to the level of detail you seem to want. It just needs to be on the level anyone who knows what an XPS even is can follow.
Additional anecdata: my top of the line XPS 15 had to be repaired twice due to a "stuck" trackpad issue. It seems to me like they crammed as much compute as they could into that tiny chassis while their manufacturing tolerances really weren't up to the task.
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.
I used XPS laptops with Ubuntu for years and thought they were great. The last one I got, though, at the last place I worked, had that weird, 'seamless trackpad' or whatever they call it. I couldn't stand the thing. I much prefer the basic trackpad on the $250 Chromebook I use for personal email/browsing these days.
It was a maddening guessing game, where occasionally - but not always - the edge of my lower thumb would touch the track pad and send the mouse pointer warping off to some other part of the screen while I was typing.
That "seamless" touchpad is the ugliest thing I have seen this year. How do you guys touchtype on it if you never know when to get out the hands? Proprietary software which supposedly allows to not bother about it works not on all OS and probably not always.
Just posted on that same subject. That stupid touchpad... I'd be typing along and then I guess some portion of my thumb towards the palm would brush it and WOOSH, the mouse pointer would warp across the screen and I'd be typing in some other window.
I had an XPS 9560 / 9570 or something like that. Top of the line spec, mind you.
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.
I had the 17" XPS, which was lovely. A nice 16:10 screen, which was the main thing I was looking for. Battery was easy to replace. Easy memory and M2 drive replacement. It was a pretty good laptop for x86. Main issue was heat/sound. Linux was pretty easy to get going on that hardware. You could get at the internals - so cleaning out the fan was doable. (order new screws, as they ship with silly soft metal on the orignals)
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.
25% / ~$400 laptop price increase due to market price increases for 16GB RAM?
DDR5 is about $250-300 more expensive now for 16gb than it was at all time lows. The $400 price might be to absorb any additional cost increases while maintaining their existing profit margin.
EDIT: sorry, my numbers are off. It’s $250-300 more expensive for 32gb not 16.
It is so hard to find Windows laptops with working keyboards, trackpads, displays and speakers!
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.
I recently switched from a XPS 13 with tons of issues, replaced twice, to a Surface Laptop 7 on ARM64. Absolutely no regrets, it's so much better. They really need to focus on quality control.
The problem with Surface laptops is fractional scaling of its displays. Scaling is set to 150% which causes display artifacts which some people don't notice, but others are distracted by. If you are a UI developer you want 200% scaling. 150% and 300% have display artifacts.
While we're doing anecdotes, I don't actually hate my 2025 Dell 16 Premium at all, and it looks like they fixed most of my quibbles with the new XPS 16.
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.
We dropped Dell after almost 30 years of exclusive use for our desktops, laptops, and server/storage infrastructure.
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.
> Everything is done online and they prefer not to talk to anyone.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I have a 2020 XPS 13, and love it. I was disappointed when the keyboards in the batch of 2020 XPS 13 laptops after mine, had rattly key caps. My XPS 13 is still doing well after the last nearly 6 years, and I look forward to trying the new XPS laptops if I can get one with the specs I want.
I have a Framework laptop. It was expensive for the specs, but I really appreciate the philosophy of openness. I have replaced both the keyboard and battery, which was easy and painless. At least for Dell, I don't think Framework's target market is a fit for acquisition like Alienware's was. Although, Dell is big enough that they could probably build a competing brand themselves. It would be great for consumers if they did.
Dell needs to admit they're in deep shit.
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?
> We were seeing average 88% memory usage
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.
My 32 GB MacBook Pro sits at about 50%, even after months of being powered on, unless I'm running programs that use a lot of memory. That's at least what Activity Monitor reports, perhaps Activity Monitor reports it in a different way.
I’ve had to explain too many times to people who should know better that “rss” is not how much memory a process needs but how much the operating system allows it to have. Put other stuff on the machine and that number will go down. No it’s not that improvement you think you made to that data structure. If you want that, look at total memory or heap size after GC if it’s a garbage collected language.
I don't understand why the default way to show RAM usage on Linux isn't to simply show "In Use vs. Available".
I don't care how much cache is being used and I can't really do anything about it even if I did.
I truly hate, more than anything else in the tech discourse, that this gets trotted out every time the discussion of RAM comes up. "unUsED rAM iS wASTED RAm", always used to defend and justify abhorrent and incompetent software development practices. Even with 32gb, I routinely run into out-of-memory crashes on a near-daily basis with workloads that should not in principle be anywhere near that usage.
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.
This is talk about how the OS uses that RAM to make your software better.
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 think the point is not that one should not look at RAM use, but be careful when looking at it since total RAM use may include the amount that is used for disk cache which will fill to use whatever is available (and will be freed back if necessary).
It makes sense to watch memory use but one should make sure to discount the amount used for disk caching from the total.
Apple has kept prices stable for existing models, but is rumored to be paying 50% more for DRAM in 2026, which may impact pricing of new Apple devices that will be launched in 2026.
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.
Apple may be a good deal now, but historically they have been the expensive option. I would be concerned about the rug pull of spending time training people on macOS, setting the expectation that they will have it in the future, and then Apple returning to premium pricing before the next upgrade cycle.
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.
Hard to know for sure, I'd be curious the breakdown in cost for enterprise laptops, it's hard for me to understand why the price has increased 50% while Apple has increased 10%.
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.
Historically they've been the expensive option, but historically they've been much more niche than windows laptops. So their unit economics might be better nowadays due to volume.
If you have the freedom to buy from Best Buy, Amazon, etc, this is certainly the case.
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.
If Apple can keep the price near $1500 for the M5, it will still be a no brainer. They are currently $200 cheaper, granted for less memory. I also am in the camp of you don't need quite as much memory on Apple, our most significant usage is Chrome, Excel and Teams.
My main reason Apple can charge slightly more: Better performance, screen, battery, camera, microphone, and trackpad.
In my last job, I just bought my own laptops for a variety of reasons. Know that may not work for everyone. Also for a variety of reasons. But worked dor me.
Apple is rumored to have long term price controlled contracts for DRAM. That would fit their 20 year MO
I read this recently, made me chuckle:
"Man, I wish Apple ram upgrades were priced like the rest of industry"
<monkey paw curls>
I didn't even think about that, all the reviewers were in a fury about soldered RAM... and now almost everyone is soldered. It's a shame.
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.
Fairly long history of Apple doing something anti-consumer and then all other manufactures following their lead. Same with non-replacable batteries, no headphone jack, have to pay extra for a charger, etc.
So soldering RAM is all about being “anti consumer” and has nothing to do with the much better bandwidth?
Not to mention that iPhones work with any standard Bluetooth headphones and USV C standard headphones.
The average person isn't upgrading their RAM. The average person might want to use headphones.
And the average person buys Bluetooth headphones and USB C headphones
Been debating about buying a Mac mini to replace my old iMac--which I don't use at this point. Have a newish MacBook Pro but it's not the best ergonomic choice to use with a big monitor.
> 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. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team at 16gb.
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.
How much is cached files? That is one thing I always note on Apple, typically I sit around 6-8gb of cached files.
For windows specifically cached memory looks very similar to unused memory so when someone is complaining about "windows is using all my memory" it's very unlikely to be caused by caches.
https://softwareg.com.au/cdn/shop/articles/Windows-11-RAM-ty...
4.3GB... which seems roughly similar to my 32GB Windows PC - it's sitting at 89% memory use with 3.5GB cached.
> They are 20% faster, have 2x the battery life, and 8 more gb of RAM.
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.
Maybe they should just shut the company down and give the money back to shareholders…
What is G&A?
General and administration staff?
> Also standby actually works.
That's a Windows issue. The recent active sleep (or whatever it's called) has been buggy across basically all hardware.
Modern Standby https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
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.
omg is this a thing? i thought i was dumb or something.
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.
When I joined my last company, it would have been politically unpalatable to run Windows which was what I was used to, Linux was sort of frustrating to me at the time (even if I'm sure I could have adapted and it has improved in the last 15 years), and then there were Macs--which I had never used but turned out to be very straightforward.
And I've been mostly in the Mac camp ever since even if I'll use other OSs as needed.
I take the "premium" experience of Apple hardware for granted, and if I wanted to buy a Windows laptop, I'd have no idea which brands make similar quality laptops for Windows. I'm shocked at the Windows laptops I see in the wild.
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?
Yes about the surface part. They thought all other 2-in-1 touch devices were terrible and needed to do something.
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.
It you bought anything except RAM, a laptop refusing to use 12% for no obvious reason would be note worthy.
> Dell needs to admit they're in deep shit.
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.
You can install Linux on Dell laptops, or Dell will do it for you:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops/app...
> or Dell will do it for you:
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.
What a weirdly worded post. You could have said something like:
"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.
This is HN. I much prefer someone's raw, unfiltered words than ChatGPT generated legalese. I have enough of that nonsense at work.
Bro, this is HN where the are so many obscure acronyms, frameworks, random Saas providers assumed everyone knows. This isn't a site where discussion can break down to the level of detail you seem to want. It just needs to be on the level anyone who knows what an XPS even is can follow.
Thanks for the clarification Bro. I now realize that I've been using this site incorrectly for 15 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
My top of the line XPS battery swole so much it broke the keyboard.
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.
This post talked me out of buying the new XPS that is going to be released in a few weeks.
Never buy an XPS. Always been trash always will
Additional anecdata: my top of the line XPS 15 had to be repaired twice due to a "stuck" trackpad issue. It seems to me like they crammed as much compute as they could into that tiny chassis while their manufacturing tolerances really weren't up to the task.
My nearly 6 year old XPS begs to differ.
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.
The XPS line has battery DRM
Good comment to cc: to your Congressional reps. Only legislation can fix this.
I’d like to think congress is busy sorting out some of the more pressing issues. But maybe they can walk and chew gum.
I used XPS laptops with Ubuntu for years and thought they were great. The last one I got, though, at the last place I worked, had that weird, 'seamless trackpad' or whatever they call it. I couldn't stand the thing. I much prefer the basic trackpad on the $250 Chromebook I use for personal email/browsing these days.
MacBook trackpads are their single best feature. Even 10 year old ones seem to be better than everything else out there.
Is the entire area under the keyboard a trackpad or do you have to just guess where the edges are?
It was a maddening guessing game, where occasionally - but not always - the edge of my lower thumb would touch the track pad and send the mouse pointer warping off to some other part of the screen while I was typing.
On the previous one that OP is talking about, you had to guess. On the new ones just announced, there are physical and visible lines.
It is slightly wider than the space bar. I've never had an issue with mine, as it is located exactly where I expect it to be.
That "seamless" touchpad is the ugliest thing I have seen this year. How do you guys touchtype on it if you never know when to get out the hands? Proprietary software which supposedly allows to not bother about it works not on all OS and probably not always.
Just posted on that same subject. That stupid touchpad... I'd be typing along and then I guess some portion of my thumb towards the palm would brush it and WOOSH, the mouse pointer would warp across the screen and I'd be typing in some other window.
I'm typing this on one right now. I honestly thought the same but I got used to it within a day or two of use. Its muscle memory at this point.
My muscle memory is for vim and not for eating a cactus without getting punctured.
I had an XPS 9560 / 9570 or something like that. Top of the line spec, mind you.
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.
I had the 17" XPS, which was lovely. A nice 16:10 screen, which was the main thing I was looking for. Battery was easy to replace. Easy memory and M2 drive replacement. It was a pretty good laptop for x86. Main issue was heat/sound. Linux was pretty easy to get going on that hardware. You could get at the internals - so cleaning out the fan was doable. (order new screws, as they ship with silly soft metal on the orignals)
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.
DDR5 is about $250-300 more expensive now for 16gb than it was at all time lows. The $400 price might be to absorb any additional cost increases while maintaining their existing profit margin.
EDIT: sorry, my numbers are off. It’s $250-300 more expensive for 32gb not 16.
That’s the same price as a 14 inch 10 core M5 MacBook Pro with 24GB RAM and 1TB storage.
The only thing I didn’t like about my XPS-15 was when the battery got pregnant and made the trackpad stop working.
It is so hard to find Windows laptops with working keyboards, trackpads, displays and speakers!
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.
Well I could've told them that for free.
Yeah, but then they wouldn't have listened. It's only the expensive advice that they listen to.
I recently switched from a XPS 13 with tons of issues, replaced twice, to a Surface Laptop 7 on ARM64. Absolutely no regrets, it's so much better. They really need to focus on quality control.
The problem with Surface laptops is fractional scaling of its displays. Scaling is set to 150% which causes display artifacts which some people don't notice, but others are distracted by. If you are a UI developer you want 200% scaling. 150% and 300% have display artifacts.
> If you are a UI developer you want 200% scaling
Isn’t it good to test your UI on different scale factors? I run several non-uniform scale factors concurrently for that exact reason.
While we're doing anecdotes, I don't actually hate my 2025 Dell 16 Premium at all, and it looks like they fixed most of my quibbles with the new XPS 16.
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.
loved my xps but the built quality is BS. mine fell apart after a year (even with light use), and was pretty much dumped for parts when i upgraded.
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.
We dropped Dell after almost 30 years of exclusive use for our desktops, laptops, and server/storage infrastructure.
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.
> Everything is done online and they prefer not to talk to anyone.
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. :|
> 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.
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.
> 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.
What did you stay for 30 years?
I have a 2020 XPS 13, and love it. I was disappointed when the keyboards in the batch of 2020 XPS 13 laptops after mine, had rattly key caps. My XPS 13 is still doing well after the last nearly 6 years, and I look forward to trying the new XPS laptops if I can get one with the specs I want.
Radical idea many won't like, but if I were CEO of Dell I'd consider it: buy Framework.
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.
I have a Framework laptop. It was expensive for the specs, but I really appreciate the philosophy of openness. I have replaced both the keyboard and battery, which was easy and painless. At least for Dell, I don't think Framework's target market is a fit for acquisition like Alienware's was. Although, Dell is big enough that they could probably build a competing brand themselves. It would be great for consumers if they did.
We need more laptop makers not fewer.
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.
I haven't bought a Framework, but I wouldn't wish ill on them either.
Spiritually, Dell can only desecrate Framework. Nothing good would come out of that, I feel quite certain.
I kind of like your idea, except I wouldn't trust Dell not to ruin it.
IMO XPS had a terrible reputation and needed sunsetting. I highly doubt these will be much better