News Dell’s New XPS 13 Shows the Price of Going Too Thin

[bigdragon]

Thin and light screams "overheating annoyance" to me. Sure, the portability is nice, but the compromises on performance and thermals are not. Plus, dongles and adapters for everything.

Having thin-and-light systems is fine as long as Dell keeps producing thicker, beefier, better-cooling solutions too.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Thin and light screams "overheating annoyance" to me. Sure, the portability is nice, but the compromises on performance and thermals are not. Plus, dongles and adapters for everything.

Having owned an XPS 13 for over half a year and used it quite a bit for development, including on-machine testing:

• Performance and thermals are not a problem. In fact it barely gets hotter than "that's nice and warm"
  • The only gotcha here is I installed Zorin OS
• I have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse if I need those
• It has a microSD card reader and a headphone jack
• Most of my portable drives use USB-C

I did buy a USB-C dongle with various ports but I haven't really used it. I think my phone got more use out of it than my laptop when I wanted to try out Samsung Dex.

 

[bigdragon]

Performance and thermals are not a problem. In fact it barely gets hotter than "that's nice and warm"

I have a work-issued XPS 15 2-in-1. While the regular XPS 15 is fine, the 2-in-1 is so thin that I easily overheat it. I think system vendors anticipate people use the thin-and-light stuff for Word docs and simple note taking. I tend to some software dev and rather complicated artworks. Thermals and throttling have definitely been a problem.

I feel like there's a disconnect between device designers and users sometimes. That middle ground between the hefty gaming systems and the featherweight document pushers has been shrinking -- a big concern.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I think system vendors anticipate people use the thin-and-light stuff for Word docs and simple note taking. I tend to some software dev and rather complicated artworks. Thermals and throttling have definitely been a problem.

And that's the intended market for these 2-in-1's. People who do what you'd call "office work"; nothing more complicated than typing up word docs, sending out emails, checking the internet, and simple note taking.

If the work you do is constantly hammering the hardware, you bought the wrong hardware.

 

[bogda]

And that's the intended market for these 2-in-1's. People who do what you'd call "office work"; nothing more complicated than typing up word docs, sending out emails, checking the internet, and simple note taking.

If the work you do is constantly hammering the hardware, you bought the wrong hardware.

For that kind of work, no Windows laptop can touch MacBook Air, even "old", M1 version.

 

[shady28]

The problem is, we get little benefit in terms of performance that we get with MacBook, while loosing all of flexibility. On many PCs, there is space for slots, manufacturers just choose not to include them.
We complain and whine because we do not like where the whole thing is going and want to put our 2 cents on this matter. If more people would do it, it might matter.
I also vote with my wallet. All computers in my company are upgradeable.
Why are you commenting, I do not know?

In principle I agree with you, I am a 'desktop replacement' kind of person. My favorite laptops tend to be big, hot, fast, and loud with lots of ports and expansion options.

But that's not where the market is going. I'd point out that we are already seeing this with LPDDR4 and soon LPDDR5 systems. And all the best performing systems like on TGL, they have non upgradeable LPDDR4. AMD is also moving this way, you either have some garbagy DDR4-3200 that you can upgrade, or much higher performing LPDDR5 on their U series laptop chips. Guess which one makes your integrated graphics shine?

If I have to choose between not upgradeable LPDDR4/5 and not upgradeable but significantly higher performing on chip memory like the M1/M2, I'll go for the M1/M2 design. That's why I think we will eventually see this same M1/M2 on chip memory design in the x86 laptop space.