Dell XPS laptop gets a 2024 overhaul with XPS 13, XPS 14, and XPS 16 laptops (liliputing.com)

Yep. Lenovo did this with the Thinkpad Carbon X1 and abandoned it veeeery early on. I liked the design philosophy of the XPS Plus last year, but I'd wager their capacitive function row is headed for the exit.

Yup, that's a non-starter for me.

I didn't even notice at first. I was glad to see they all have 16:10 screens and sad to see low usability up/down arrow keys popularized by Apple (making it inverted-T shaped helps marginally even when small).

The other thing they got right (IMO) is not including a number pad on the 16" which seems common with larger screens and a discrete GPU.

I'm not sure if Dell ever officially stated, but it seems like their touch bar exists mainly to free up space for bigger heatsinks without making the machine thicker or moving the keyboard down, not for the sake of usability. The lack of concern for usability is apparent in several other design choices.

I’m surprised they included the Esc key in the touchpad at least.

That was the deal breaker for me on Apple keyboards. I could deal with the F-keys being a touchscreen but I use Esc way too much for muscle memory to not work. In practice I remapped Caps Lock to Esc, but it was still a pain not having it in the right place.

I know I wasn’t the only one with this opinion. I thought touchbar Esc was a long acknowledged usability don’t at this point. Even Apple changed that one up pretty quickly.

The same thing happened to me! Except they gaslit me for a while, telling me it was possible, then ignoring every communication. Never again.

Funny, I had nothing but problems with high end Lenovo's for years. They all went away when I switched to Dell!

It goes both ways I guess :/

The trick that worked for me was to directly call Dell's parts ordering phone number and ask for the specific part number for the battery; ditto for when the fan started whining. I was able to get a replacement for my old XPS 13 (4+ years old at that point) for a fairly reasonable price.

I don't have an XPS 13 anymore though; the backlight controller on the motherboard failed, and because it's an OLED, I couldn't see anything on screen anymore.

Friend of mine had exactly the same problem, after just a year and a half. The battery did the swelling thing. There was even a recall for the battery but he was too late and they didn't sell them any more(!!) He got some 3rd-party battery from eBay or whatnot and the laptop refused to work with it because it's "non-genuine". You could make a safety argument with batteries, but 1) it's my safety and my choice, and 2) I'd be somewhat okay with if you actually gave me an option to buy a genuine battery.

It's not even my laptop and I'm still angry about it. I tried to find a solution for him, but all I found were other people in the same situation.

Selling broken $1500 products, saying it's not your problem when people report their product is broken, and actively preventing the customer from fixing it? As far as I'm concerned it's a "business" in the same sense that Michael Corleone was running a "business".

Yeah, Dell XPS laptops used to be standouts, but they've been making some crappy design decisions for a while now. We're a Lenovo Thinkpad T-series household right now, and I suspect that my next laptop will be a Framework 16+ laptop with a swappable GPU -- pending reviews from folks I know who have preorders for them.

I just changed my XPS battery with a spare from iFixIt.

Did you get ProSupport? (I think they call it different nowadays) They came by and replaced mine, no questions asked. Same for the Wi-Fi chip, GPU, motherboard and heat dissipator. They even do it worldwide, which is nice when travelling like I often am.

The problem isn't Dell, but which Dell. An IdeaPad from Lenovo will be even worse.

The consumerific lines, including high-end ones, aren't meant to be serviced. They're designed to skim off every ounce and mm. So many computers have SSDs and RAM soldered onto the motherboard now, and are held together with increasing amounts of snaps and glue.

For Dell, the equivalent of ThinkPad is the Precision series, as well as some of the higher-end Latitude laptops. I've been servicing my ancient Precision for years until it completely died. Everything was replaceable.

I was given an XPS 13 cat work a few years ago. The machine was solid: I even managed to drop it twice on a pavement and spill it with soup and some tomato juice. It still worked. However,over a 4 year period I changed 3 batteries. The last one swelled so much that it made the keyboard bulge. I now have a Dell Precision,which is amazing and hopefully the battery will hold a bit better.

Sometimes just a USB-C wall wart, but it depends on models.

Thank you. I'm glad to hear someone saying this. I had a battery in an XPS 13 9360 which became swollen. After much support pain, denial of fault, and internal escalation, they agreed to send me a replacement battery where I "just" had to pay for the engineer's time (the machine came with home call-out service for hardware replacements).

Within weeks the replacement battery started to swell.

For a supposed enthusiast laptop, I really feel they don't understand that enthusiasts expect premium customer relations.

I actually feel for the designers and engineers behind the XPS line. They seem like a bunch of super passionate and invested folks, but the support story for what was clearly a safety issue has really put me off buying from Dell in the future.

They refused to take any actions after doing a one time fix up where battery swell and deformed the keyboard. After that one time full fix that came with subpar customer service repair … the issue persisted And repeated. They deliberately waited until full service warranty expired. Then kept arguing that the entire thing is out of warranty. Worst people ever. Worst support and worst silencers. Also worst design for battery replacement.

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