Notebooks Reasons *not* to buy an XPS 13?

So, fingers crossed I might be getting a three-month contract at a decent consultancy rate for some technical writing - which means it might be time to splash the cash and finally ditch my four-year-old macOS laptop.

I've got my eye on this model of Dell XPS 13, which ticks all my boxes: portable, decent battery, anti-glare screen, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, SD card slot, decent processor (Iris Plus graphics, no less) and Ubuntu Linux pre-installed (once I'd found it in my history, 'cos it's disappeared from Dell's main product page - according to Dell, you can only get this model in Windows 10 flavour...)

So, is there any reason - beyond it being nearly £1,600 once you've shoved VAT on the top - that I shouldn't pick up said laptop to replace a mid-2013 MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD? Answers on a postcard, please...

 

I'm hesitant to wait, 'cos if the Commie Lunix version has been delisted from the main page then it may at some point disappear altogether. Then there's the undeniable status of Commie Lunix users as second-class citizens when it comes to cutting-edge stuff - I remember building this desktop near the first APU launch and it took months for the glitches to get ironed out. Eighth-gen might be faster, but seventh-gen is likely to give me fewer troubles - for the first year or so, anyway.

Oh, I very much do mind. The whole reason I'm in the market for a new laptop is I've been putting up with macOS for four years now, and I'd quite like to go back to an operating system that doesn't drive me absolutely crackers. I also definitely don't want a high-DPI display: 1080p (or 1200p), please and thank you. When I first looked at the XPS 13 range last year, I was thoroughly disappointed that the 1080p non-touch version maxed out with the Core i5 and 8GB of RAM, while the Core i7/16GB model was an automatic 'upgrade' to a 4K touch screen. 4K. In a 13" diagonal. No, ta. Thankfully Dell's come to its sense and started offering the i7/16GB with the 1080p display - and, oddly, with a more powerful CPU/IGP than the 4K version, which is just daft.

Two reasons for going for the Commie Lunix flavour. The biggest: if I have to make a support call it won't start with "we don't support Commie Lunix." The next-biggest: it's literally £100 cheaper than the same hardware running Windows 10, which I'd only be replacing with Ubuntu anyway.

That does sound a bit annoying. When you say "out of the box," does that mean there's a workaround to get palm detection/typing detection up and running?

 

Why replace something that works when you could buy an average amount of coke and hookers with that money instead?

 

What, my MacBook? I think we have very different definitions of the word 'work' here. The OS is an absolute trainwreck.

Caffeine makes me twitchy, and what would I want with a bunch of rugger buggers?

 

15" is too bulky for me - that's why I bought a MacBook Air four years ago. My priorities are: compact and light so it can go in the cabin with my clothes, camera gear, and everything else I need for an up-to-a-week trip abroad (no checked luggage, yo!) and battery life. Performance is significantly less important: I spend most of my time with a couple of web browser windows open side-by-side, perhaps LibreOffice Writer chugging away in the background, and The Gimp for common low-resolution and less common high-resolution image editing. Might spin up a VM every now and again to test something, perhaps stick a game on if I'm bored.

Good to know, ta. I know people have problems with Apple's poorly-designed cables, but - touch wood - so far my four-year-old MagSafe charger is showing no signs of fraying or breaking.

 

That is a poor design. I wonder if I could reinforce it with a blob of Sugru?

 

Y'see, never have I looked at my 20-something-inch 1200p screen and thought to myself "you know what, I wish my fonts were crisper."

I've got a Surface Pro downstairs which has a 10.6" 1080p display, and I find Windowses' high-DPI scaling an absolute nightmare. Things appear to decide to be semi-random sizes, legacy stuff - which is most of what I do on Windows - is tiny, and Windows 'helpfully' makes things full screen on a whim. I can't imagine how much worse it'd be with a 4K panel...

 

Yeah, I get you. Incidentally, my first ever Windows-based laptop was a Dell: Inspiron 6400, or some such. Pentium II, 64MB of RAM, 4.3GB(?) hard drive, 4:3 display, blue replaceable personalisation panels. I loved that thing. It blew up a few years ago - literally, magic smoke and everything. Sad days.

I remember paying £1,499 for it - which corrected for inflation and assuming it was around 1997 when the PII came out would be £2,500. Makes the XPS 13 seem like a proper bargain, that!