Despite Dell being a horrible brand and company this is significant. Finally a big player states the obvious and gets back to actually focusing on what consumers want. Again, it’s Dell and I won’t touch their products with a ten foot pole, but the messaging is really quite frank and surprising. I wonder if others will follow.
Their business lineup used to be solid, but they haven’t been for quite a while in my experience. I have owned and used Dell’s business laptops and SOHO style servers for nearly two decades and if I had to put a time frame on when they went downhill it would be somewhere around 2013-2015. They did a major shakeup in their offerings then and their Lattitude and Precision PCs started resembling their far lower quality consumer PCs. My current company had bought quite a few high end business laptops from them over the past several years and they have been a shit show. I have quite literally never seen hardware from a reputable OEM with such chronic and severe issues, especially not when we’re talking $3k-$5k machines. We won’ t even consider buying from them again.
We ended up split down the middle between people willing to use Apple and (for now) Framework laptops. I have no desire to use an Apple laptop and it wouldn’t work for me anyway since I mostly use Linux, but I need the option to use Windows as well as I do a lot of work for another company that is a strictly Windows-only shop.
Love my old precision, but my new latitude uses this Intel ipu6 bullshit with god-awful kernel support on Linux. No effort made from Intel or Dell on upstreaming. Onboard audio support only halfway works, webcam straight up doesn’t work in-tree, and power management is hilariously bad. Shit’s already awful on Windows, but on Linux I’m delighted if I get 90 minutes of runtime, and even when sleeping I only get maybe 8 hours before the battery empties.
Also don’t get me started on DisplayLink. The real thunderbolt docking stations work great though, love mine.
But I would never buy a Dell product I haven’t used before at work. My experience is literally 50/50 between “great, no notes” and “I would rather use anything else”.
I just finished refurbishing an aging G5, and while it has some issues overall it has been an absolute workhorse. Especially given its price, not many laptops hold up to nearly 15,000 hours of power-on time between any major maintenance.
Dell batteries also don’t balloon or catch fire when they die, they fail gracefully and just stop holding charge. Too many popped mac and Razer batteries sitting in the battery bins at my local recycler, but they have a whole shelf of used Dell batteries that have a couple more years in them.
Despite Dell being a horrible brand and company this is significant. Finally a big player states the obvious and gets back to actually focusing on what consumers want. Again, it’s Dell and I won’t touch their products with a ten foot pole, but the messaging is really quite frank and surprising. I wonder if others will follow.
Their business and enterprise lineup has been solid however though, e.g. Latitude, PowerEdge, etc.
I agree. Their business line up and support is great. It’s just a shame that their consumer service is piss poor.
Their business lineup used to be solid, but they haven’t been for quite a while in my experience. I have owned and used Dell’s business laptops and SOHO style servers for nearly two decades and if I had to put a time frame on when they went downhill it would be somewhere around 2013-2015. They did a major shakeup in their offerings then and their Lattitude and Precision PCs started resembling their far lower quality consumer PCs. My current company had bought quite a few high end business laptops from them over the past several years and they have been a shit show. I have quite literally never seen hardware from a reputable OEM with such chronic and severe issues, especially not when we’re talking $3k-$5k machines. We won’ t even consider buying from them again.
What are you considering replacing them with?
We ended up split down the middle between people willing to use Apple and (for now) Framework laptops. I have no desire to use an Apple laptop and it wouldn’t work for me anyway since I mostly use Linux, but I need the option to use Windows as well as I do a lot of work for another company that is a strictly Windows-only shop.
Love my old precision, but my new latitude uses this Intel ipu6 bullshit with god-awful kernel support on Linux. No effort made from Intel or Dell on upstreaming. Onboard audio support only halfway works, webcam straight up doesn’t work in-tree, and power management is hilariously bad. Shit’s already awful on Windows, but on Linux I’m delighted if I get 90 minutes of runtime, and even when sleeping I only get maybe 8 hours before the battery empties.
Also don’t get me started on DisplayLink. The real thunderbolt docking stations work great though, love mine.
But I would never buy a Dell product I haven’t used before at work. My experience is literally 50/50 between “great, no notes” and “I would rather use anything else”.
I just finished refurbishing an aging G5, and while it has some issues overall it has been an absolute workhorse. Especially given its price, not many laptops hold up to nearly 15,000 hours of power-on time between any major maintenance.
Dell batteries also don’t balloon or catch fire when they die, they fail gracefully and just stop holding charge. Too many popped mac and Razer batteries sitting in the battery bins at my local recycler, but they have a whole shelf of used Dell batteries that have a couple more years in them.
Then again, which company would you touch up close? Cause I feel like there is none left. At least not a major company.