1603

Badum bing.

1604

The Nexus 7 was great, until the memory degraded and the OS left it behind. I used the hell out of mine.

I’d absolutely buy another $200 small tablet with no bullshit and good performance. Especially now that Android is less confused – the N7 was IIRC concurrent with Android 4, which was the first unified Android after they decided forking the tablet OS in Honeycomb was a failed experiment, and there were a good number of rough edges there.

1605

Yeah, I loved my Nexus 7. Used it as an ereader and general purpose device back when phones were 4".

These days my phone is 6.5" so a 7" tablet isn’t quite as necessary, even if it was a much wider form factor.

1606

I bounced hard off of the Nexus 7. Standby power consumption was the biggest reason. My Apple tablets at the time (not so much now on the Pro with the magic KB) could easily go for a couple of weeks or more without draining their battery, but the Nexus, which I used infrequently as a secondary or tertiary tablet (too many devices!), was often dead when I picked it up.

1607

I imagine it’s tough selling an expensive device laser-focused on pocketable mobile productivity when so many early-adopter tech workers are working from home anyway. Unfortunate timing.

1608

The press is getting their Surface Duos today, and they aren’t allowed to post impression of them turned on. Really not a good sign.

The hinge is supposedly great through.

1609

They’re honestly doing the marketing wrong on this - this thing is (all imo of course) for professionals only. Tech dudes/dudettes aren’t the market for this. Although i guess trying to get influences to buy in on it isn’t necessarily a bad idea (apparently, i just read, there’s some steakhouse in LA that is Influencer Central? that basically hosts influencers 24-7, who compete with each other to go, and have groupies hanging around it all day long, for max $50 plates? So what do i know.)

They’re probably not telling them to turn it on because all you’re really going to be doing with that second screen is productivity. And all that tech dudes use for productivity are Adobe suite and Google Docs and some sound editing software, none of which is going to be relevant to the Surface Duo. I’m sure it’s also got a workmanlike, business camera and not some superdeluxe consumer grade camera like a Samsung or Pixel.

1610

I don’t really understand. How long does the embargo last?

1611

Not sure. Marques Brownlee did impressions of the hardware, but said he wasn’t allowed to show it turned on yet. Then he finished the video saying that a full review was coming soon.

I have seen other people say the same thing on Twitter, but none said when they could show it.

Very strange marketing by MS. It didn’t stop Brownlee from tearing it apart for it being over priced for the specs.

1612

It was hardly all negative. He also spent most of the video talking about how it was physically one of the nicest pieces of engineering he had ever seen and I think he spent half the video talking about how amazing the hinge was.

1613

Yes, consensus is it’s cosmetically and physically lovely hardware. It’s the internals (last year’s CPU) and the software that’s in question.

1614

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply it was, but as stusser said, there are greater concerns than the hinge, which does indeed look great. I especially thought the comparison to the Fold’s hinge was interesting. It looked cheap compared to the Duo (although, I guess, you would never use a Fold partially folded).

1615

The Verge wrote that they can’t review it until launch.

1616

Just wanted to thank you for writing this, stusser! I just got my new XPS 17 yesterday and I love it. Basically as soon as I read your comment, I decided I really did need a new laptop for remote teaching this coming semester. Your seal of approval meant I could avoid the paralyzing rabbit hole of doing my research. Cheers for the assist!

1617

Yeah? I got so irritated with a couple of consumer-grade Dells in 2008 or so that I swore them off. Just awful builds, plastic shells, bad heat dispersal, the whole thing.

They’re better now?

1618

The XPS13 and derivatives have been best in class since 2015

1619

I have basically no experience with laptops but, yeah, it’s slick as hell. My wife took one look and said, “I didn’t know they made them like Macbooks!”

It’s a touch heavy and it’s stiff to open but the overall build quality and tactile feel is aces. I still don’t like the pre-installed Dell software, but, 'twas ever thus.

1620

Happy you’re enjoying it! XPS is crazy great.

1621

Same here. I bought an Alienware around 2009 and it was junk out of the box. Horrible build quality on top of too frequent blue screens.

They were a public company then, I believe they turned it around once Michael Dell privatized it again.

1622

Exactly right. Dell craptops were awful before they went private. We had a whole NOC full of them and they constantly overheated, we had people buying their own cooling pads just to keep their computers from getting unusably slow when they clocked down.

Dell has come a long way. Bezels on the 2020 XPS series are unmatched by anybody. They’re the only laptop without a bottom bezel, unless you count the Surface Pro with its keyboard hiked up. Gorgeous, durable, great battery life, and quiet too.

I imagine they’re selling a lot more of the 15" and 17" models now that everybody is WFH.