This is the way of Dell. I bought one of their laptops that has fried itself because you can't close dell laptops and put them in your bag as though it was a laptop, you have to shut them down and wait to close the lid. FFS. Of course just out of warranty and you cannot even contact them to enquire if they're happy with that being what they are as a company. Dell is way overpriced for the quality you get.
Compare to Samsung where I had a tv with bad caps out of warranty and they came to my house, quickly replaced the power supply and left a note asking if I was happy with the service. I was. I am.
"It wasn't just Dell" There were fraudsters who hadn't been prosecuted when dell was doing this so don't criticise Dell. Yeah...
I fell for the XPS hype around 2017, when all reviews were praising those machines as the best non-Apple laptops ever made.
Turns out mine was pretty badly done, and trying hard to imitate a MacBook Air down to the motherboard, yet half of the components of my (heavily used) XPS 13 showed to be quite unreliable within just few years sadly.
Having said that, what's the most reliable, decently portable laptop around for a Linux-oriented developer? I keep hearing bad things about newer Lenovos as well
I replaced mine with a second-hand lenovo t480s and it's the best laptop I have ever owned, by a huge margin. I'm astounded how good it is. Paid A$500 (~$USD 350) for it.
Installed linux, everything I care about just worked. (I don't care about finger print readers, maybe that just works too? Hate it either way so dunno).
I set the power setting to "power saver" on the incredibly obvious and discoverable gui selector and I get 10 hours out of the battery. A battery which I did not even replace. You want me to list annoyances, well I can, and they're all minor and all to do with choices that my linux distro made.
Now I've heard brand new lenovos aren't as well supported as 2-3 year old models and I've been hearing that for more than a decade so there is probably something to it. Seems like enough linux devs use them that it shakes out really nicely in that 2-3 years.
If this one exploded I'd probably be looking for another one just like it second hand.
Can't tell you about other T series or X1s or all of the other wild and wonderful lenovo "thinkpads" some of which those who claim to know say "thinkpad yeah, but not really..." Just the T480s I'm saying here is a beautiful machine.
So that met my specs. But what to do is go to the relevant thinkpad page on wikipedia [1] and all the models and specs are listed there. Use it to look through the places where you get ex-corporate and ex-govt laptops. Find the thinkpad that meets your needs. Vastly cheaper sure, but don't overlook just how much /better/ and higher quality it is than anything Dell have for sale. Support won't be worse if something breaks either. I can burn through 4 of these for the price of a Dell but somehow I doubt that will happen or anything like it in the same amount of time as the Dell was actually working.
Seems like you can close it and stick it in your bag like it's a laptop too, which you can't with the Dell because it isn't despite the advertising.
I think not all Dell laptops are like that, at least the older ones weren't. The last one I had for work could be closed and carried around just fine without fear of it catching on fire.
Unfortunately though my company deployed new Dell laptops to everybody, and yes I do have to shut it down whenever I want to put it in the bag. Always great to see technology move backwards...
Compare to Samsung where I had a tv with bad caps out of warranty and they came to my house, quickly replaced the power supply and left a note asking if I was happy with the service. I was. I am.
"It wasn't just Dell" There were fraudsters who hadn't been prosecuted when dell was doing this so don't criticise Dell. Yeah...