Hmm, no second SSD slot in the “XPS 16”? No trackpad? Touchbar? Crappy keyboard? I am suspicious, hehe…
I do like that there is an XPS 14.
CES 2024: Dell’s XPS laptop lineup is about to look very different - The Verge
That keyboard is just ugh. Suddenly in the market for a new PC laptop for my wife and was thinking that Dell would be the winner.
Not anymore. Guess I’ll look into MS surface or Thinkpad.
I’m amazed Dell went with a “touch bar” design for the function keys, when it was such a huge fail for Apple.
They’ve had it for a couple years now and it hasn’t really sounded like an issue.
Maybe because Apple kept dynamically changing what they keys did every time you changed applications?
Anecdotally, I don’t think the XPS 13 Plus (with the screwy touch bar) was actually all that popular, at least in comparison to the vanilla XPS 13 and XPS 15. I don’t see all that many of them “in the wild” while the vanilla XPS machines are everywhere.
For me, the touch bar is one thing, but the indeterminate touch pad is what kills it for me. And the touch pad isn’t the bad part, honestly – it’s the left and right click! It’s bad enough on my current XPS 15, but removing any sort of delineation/market in the name of aesthetics makes is almost entirely unusable.
I’m also in the market for a laptop this year, and have been a loyal XPS guy for the last decade and a half or so (going back to the XPS M1330, which I’ve got sitting on a shelf and which still runs!) That said, I suspect I’m going to look elsewhere this time around – maybe at a Framework laptop or if Dell ever gets Concept Luna off the ground in a usable fashion. I liked the XPS (or at least the XPS 15) because it was a blend of the usability and repairability of the Latitude combined with some more appealing aesthetics. This is just all aesthetics at the cost of repairability and usability, both of which are/should be more important than aesthetics. Ugh.
I’m actually thinking of getting a Surface Laptop this year. Qualcomm is finally delivering an ARM CPU designed for laptops and not smartphones, and the early numbers look really good. Snapdragon X is their first proper effort to battle Apple Silicon.
Funny, I spent a LOT of time trying to figure out my best laptop workstation-like solution and went with an XPS 17. It won’t run things as fast as a Thinkpad P1, but since I have multiple desktops was just looking for a decent performer that is relatively quiet and can be used off of the charger for stretches. Went to the outlet store, found a good deal on an i7 H, put in a 4TB SSD (in the second slot with the 1 TB SSD in the first) and I am set. Has a 4070 but it is W-gimped so was not expecting much, but it is serviceable. 4K screen is nice to look at. And not a lot of fingerprints (looking at you Thinkpad).
I guess I got in before this nonsense. Maybe Dell is in a two- or three-year delayed Apple copying time loop, so they too will get rid of the touch bar and ditch the worst keyboard on a Windows laptop.