Spoiler: Rant Really have a tough decision, i've been drooling over the XPS 15 2in1 9575, it hits every mark i want a laptop to do, only downside is that it is expensive. Normally i am one for budget things, but budget laptops in my opinion are just a wreck, they get bogged down by windows updates, you have very low storage space in some, and in general are just weak, barely enough to get through todays internet, let alone the future's. But then again, for the price of an XPS 15 2in1 9575 (obviously going used ) i could literally get two laptops, one for high performance like DTR (Clevo/sager) (desktop replacement), and an ultrabook/netbook that has a long battery life, i think i could put up with not having it all in one laptop, just carry round two laptops when i might need both of them, or just the DTR. But then again, not many have a 4K touch screen for cheap, nor a 2in1 design (which i love). Those that do, cost nearly as much as the XPS! despite having significantly poorer performance. (iGPU isn't fun). In the ideal world, i would have a laptop with just an iGPU and stream from my desktop, but internet is shocking in some places, and thus it wouldn't really work. And besides, the XPS is basically faster than my desktop machine (although i could transform my desktop if i didn't spend so much money on a laptop). Also spending a lot on a laptop gets you much better buildquality, i broke my (well it was £200) tablet/laptop thing by opening it..... not even pushing it too far, it just went crunch and the connector fell off the motherboard, not happy about that! Even when budget laptops are working, they are just a pain in general, constant driver issues, fan noise, throttling, battery issues, that sort of thing *sigh* yeah the XPS has a few of those issues, but the price of the laptop hurries the manafacturer to get on with it, they push BIOS updates, new drivers are made, budget laptops, just don't get that kind of attention, your device with your issue is just one problem in a vast ocean of laptops your OEM pushed out. Take the asus tablet for example, here is a list of some of the variants... T100, T100TA, T100TAF, T100TAM, T100TAL all with different parts in them, drivers not compatible, and of course it was an absolute sh*t show, it was just not good. I actually want a laptop i want to use, not something i have to use, and unfortunately that's bloody expensive, one laptop, pretty much one laptop, in the world does what i need a laptop to do. I could get it, but it's not perfect, there are compromises, 1) price, 2) batterylife. But it's a damnsite better than anything else. having 2 laptops sounds a good idea, until you realise that syncing the two's files and stuff will be an absolute nightmare. Is it really justified for me to get an XPS, i really don't know, someone who knows a bit about laptops chime in please, i'm holding fire since i feel as though i have got lured in too bad. I do video editing and gaming and surfing the net-ing but video editing i can do at home on my desktop, and gaming also, but it would be soo nice to just do that on the go, and the xps does have some other amazing things like the 2in1 and pen support, it could be really good. The price is making me apprehensive. £1500 is a lot of money, especially for a computer. But you could argue that it will last longer than the average computer. And i'll actually want to use it, i remember having the 2010 macbook air, that was just incredible, it's annoying i had that as now i have such expectations for a laptop.
Not worth it, only if you really need such, then such is better than nothing, but what I have seen such machines, they are not exactly long lived and seem to have exact same built quality issues too, unless it is industrial model, then those are better, but you will faint when seeing price of those.
The question is simple, are you actually going to do gaming or rendering or 3d modeling or serious amounts of office work while you're away? If so, you can pretty much replace your desktop with a good high-end laptop like this. If the awnser is no, then you might as well just do the occasional Word document you might have to do while you're in school on the sucky phone app and upgrade your PC. Because obviously that's a better long term investment and an XPS or Spectre or Thinkpad won't have better gaming performance than a $700-900 PC even if you pay $2000-2500 for them. I'm drooling over those high end HP Spectres but there's just no realistic point for me to get them.
yeah i've got a tablet and my main issue with it is that the keyboard cases never have palm rests, so typing is a real chore, and not good experience, but i found a really nice keyboard case from it, which Huawei themselves made, which is £60, still steep, but pocket money compared to a Dell XPS and besides an XPS will just be a hot mess in 5 years time. Money better spent on upgrading the desktop
Get an iPad air 2 or Pro 9.7 with a keyboard case if you’re desperate for an upgrade. Used ones should exist now.
got a tablet, just sometimes i miss windows, using a tablet to do work is really annoying at times, this is my general workflow trying to do stuff on a tablet: Spend 10min learning the new app, since it got updated and now is quite different... spend 50min editing, which would take about 30min, since you have to fumble around with touch controls spend 10min getting onto a proper windows machine and fixing the document. and that's just not fun. i think i might still get the high end laptop, depends on how the keyboard case is for the tablet. I do spend rather a lot of my free time away from my desktop, and i'll be totally honest here, my desktop has a steering wheel, i try hard not to use it but BeamNG gets the better of me, i don't need to avoid that if i have a laptop But i probably wont pay £1500, i'll wait for prices to drop further, hopefully the next model isn't too alluring. Might still get the dell xps and if the xps wears out, or is no longer powerful enough, i'll get a mITX motherboard and diy my way into a laptop chassis this'll be expensive, so i'll need to get a job and work my a$$ off, but that's just life it'll be worth it in the end.
Heavy and thick laptop might be actually faster than thin one, depends how much throttling there is, that is something I recommend to research because some fast in paper models can be terribly slow in practice. Full metal construction also is nicer especially on big screen models as motherboard does not develop cracks so easily. With large gaming laptops lifting it from the corner can kill it if it is one of those flexy build models, plastics creaking when lifting from corner. Best laptops in age wise at work used to be thick ones, especially those with very stiff frame so that there was no creaking when lifting them from corner. Flexy ones died always first. Toshiba Rugged one would last well and I think it runs docs just fine, but maybe not modern 3d games, but there is way around that, playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe or open version of that
How about a midranger? I mean something like the Acer Aspire E15 or similar with an Core i5, decent amount of RAM and discrete graphics. It may be not as powerful as the XPS 15 2-in-1, but it still works fine for most tasks, and will smash those crappy budget laptops with ease.
Acer is short life expectation product, I am truly amazed how good their contracted factory is at making products to specs, how hundreds of same model laptops did fail like a clockwork right after warranty period was over, only 10 or so failed before and only 5 did last more than 3 months over warranty period. Aspire is consumer grade product, which means it will be lower quality in viewpoint of buyer, but best quality possible in viewpoint of manufacturer. Any product that outlives warranty period is bit too well made in viewpoint of manufacturing. Now for marketing purposes, generally it is better than products do outlive their designed life for some percentage, but for manufacturing target is to have products die fairly closely to end of warranty period and on that Acer is number one.
Gaming laptops thermal throttle a lot, have poor battery life, and extremely expensive and unreliable. I would say they are not worth it at all. Well, every ASUS product I've ever had has massivley outlived its warranty. Samsung products seem to be similarly reliable from my experience with them so far. Acer is indeed quite poor quality. Not as bad as eMachines was though. I also have an 800W NZXT PSU that has significantly outlived its warranty. As of next year, it will be 10 years old at which point I plan to replace it.
I think that low tech items such as PSUs tend to outlive their planned life quite well, at least in quality tier, but with PSUs there is that yearly decline of performance so after 10 years power delivery is lot less. I have only 450W as going too big is generating lot more waste heat in PSU as efficiency drops, but this one has been thoroughly tested by silentpc review and they measured better voltage control at 500W than most 500W PSUs, heat etc. was still not an issue either, even this one does not have a fan at all. My monitor is also way beyond it's warranty period, it is really ancient technology I think it is about 10 years old now and my hardware gets quite lot of use, so that is bit I'm most worried about. Next year I might be forced to get new one. Asus is nice brand as most of their stuff is over engineered slightly more, especially mid range to higher tier products, they cost bit more, but usually in long term cost is easily made back with higher probability to last longer. There are different ways to sell products and make profit, some manufacturers do it by manufacturing process, they keep product life short enough to sell more, in big picture consumers don't really care, some try to profile themselves as better brand and have products that fail less frequently within or shortly after warranty period. Here lies issue from viewpoint of consumer though, even brands profiling themselves as higher end ones tend to have lower life expectancy models. So it gets confusing real fast below mid range. Then there is consumer grade, business grade, industrial grade and so on. Consumer grade usually is lowest you can get, industrial is quite at the top, not sure if military grade is even better, haven't played around with those, but with industrial grade failures are really rare and dealt super fast, however nobody here wants to pay those prices So business grade is little bit more expensive, but usually void of most useless piece of junk, with laptops I did try to stay at business grade or higher and it did work fine, except it was sometimes difficult to explain to financial department as why not to get that supermarket cheapest offer as it was 2-3 times cheaper. My last computer upgrade was not too well thought out though, did go for cheapest model gaming MB from GB and of course it blows up, now about 6 months later it might get resolved, finally, but own fault for being cheapskate, 30-50% more cost and there would of not been such issues. With any product it just tends to be that more cost in relation to features decreases probability of potential issues, then some Brands tend to be more generous than others in that.
Military grade equipment and ratings can sometimes be found at consumer level. My motherboard has some military spec components such as capacitors for example. Given that motherboard failures I've seen have often been from bad capacitors, this is probably a good thing. In terms of laptops, industrial and military grade are essentially the same thing (i.e. Panasonic Toughbook). For CPUs, going above consumer grade is almost always pointless. A Xeon or Epyc CPU will not benefit almost anyone even for home servers. Also, at consumer level there's many different levels within that. A $100 phone for example will probably not be as high quality as a $700 phone.
What I think is that there is definition of grades feature wise and then durability wise, sometimes these go hand to hand, sometimes does not. Always best to check data, adjust budget and preferences according to that.
Got my tablet's keyboard case, and wow my tablet is a good remote PC receiver, good battery life, 10 hours, and if i treat it like a laptop i can have privelliges like playing games and cranking the brightness to almost excessive levels (normally i use screens on the border of readable so i can maximise battery life, now that i treat my tablet like a laptop, i can crank it so colours pop and all looks juicy ). There are some annoyances, mainly with the touchpad, but thats to be expected, i'll just pretend it's a mouse, which is likely what android sees it as anyway. Scrolling is janky (like im using a touchpad to scroll a mousewheel and that is used to scroll which ends up a bit janky). There are no gestures at all other than two finger scrolling, and that is only in one direction, but i suppose it can be improved upon with software, likely with Android Pie maybe. Although that is highly unlikely. Keys are good enough, and palm rests mean its nice and usable! Also nice to have one that isn't bluetooth, therefore i don't need to wait for it, it just works as soon as i press the buttons onthe keyboard, no pairing required, no charging. I likely will still get a 15in 2in1 with pen support at some point, but maybe not the Dell XPS since it still has a few downsides. CES is coming soon, so that will be interesting.
