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Dell brings back XPS laptops — ditches the capacitive touch bar, adds 1Hz display option, and upgrades 14 and 16-inch models (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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A new, thinner XPS 13 is also coming later this year.

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[–] 47 points 10 months ago (12 children)

Hijacking top comment to report that: This is true across the industry for (most) OEMs

The Secret is to buy "Enterprise level"

Check out the LATITUDE line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Latitude

Those are enterprise fleet laptops ... the ones they have to support for 5-10 years.

You know which line they don't discontinue parts for? You know which line has repair manuals and driver updates available? wanna take a wild guess which line is usually more modular and powerful at the expense of being less sleek looking and thin?

And the best part is that you can usually buy them fairly cheap if you find them used.

I prefer Dell Latitude to HP Elitebook, Thinkpads are OK too but they've gone down in quality a lot since they got bought by Lenovo

TL;DR = Buy an enterprise level laptop, consumer line laptops are all trash,

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  • [–] 17 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Replying to my own comment to give yall one more tidbit.

    The latitude product nomenclature is still standard

    • 2 first digits of the model number are the "class" the higher the laptop the more high end
    • last 2 digits of the model number are the generation (we are current in 60)

    So for example the Latitude 9460 is the very high end laptop that came out at the beginning of this year while the 3540 was the entry level economy latitude that came out in 2023

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago*

    Top tip, buy a used enterprise laptop. You can get one hell of a deal when big companies throw their entire lineup out after a few years and flood the market. Some have a few scuffs here and there, but others are mint after sitting plugged to a dock for the last three years in a row.
    Might need a new battery though, so research how easy it's to swap and calculate that in the cost just in case.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    The Latitudes are balls in the worst way. Including the new "Pro" models. I've had i7 and i9 Latitudes that are slower than my i5 XPS 13, and yeah that thing sucks too but at least it sucks predictably.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I got a couple of latitudes and found they had soldered ram so I couldn’t upgrade them later 😭

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    Unfortunately soldered ram and non replaceable batteries are becoming more common on the ultralights ... Thanks Apple

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    It's not JUST because they're copying Apple, it's because there's no SO-DIMM LPDDR and LPDDR uses less power (Low Power DDR).

    With CAMM2 being an actual standardized thing that is fairly thin (though the modules do take up more area than SO-DIMMs) AND supports LPDDR (in slightly smaller modules than regular DDR CAMM2), we might yet get back our user-replaceable RAM. As for batteries - never have they been truly non-replaceable, but of course quick swaps aren't a thing for many laptops these days. Almost not a bad thing if you consider how often the battery latch fails on laptops with quickly replaceable batteries.

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