Stuck with Laptop Choice

[StuMor]

So I've been considering replacing my 3 yr old Dell Inspiring 15rse for a fee months now, although I love it and performance is great, weight is an issue nowdays.

I'v narrowed it down to either a Mac pro 13" or the Dell XPS infinity 13. I'll be mainly using it for college and browsing so no gaming really. I plan on doing java programming, Linux work, networking stuff and word docs etc... While virtualization is an option within OSX for windows programmes.

Anyway, to cut a long question short does anyone have experience to weigh in on either machine that may help ?

 

[Solandri]

They are both really great laptops. I think most people get the MBP for the wrong reason - it's really made for graphics professionals, and a large chunk of the price you pay is for the calibrated screen with 100% sRGB coverage. If you don't do graphics art, photo, or movie work, that's really unnecessary. A regular laptop screen will do. (The 1080p XPS screen covers 96% of sRGB in CIE color space, 80% in Lab - for non-professional work you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between it and the 100% sRGB MBP screen.)

The only caution I'd give with the Dell is that if you plan to run Windows with Linux in a virtual machine, avoid the QHD screen. AFAIK, VMWare is the only Windows virtualization program which supports guest scaling, and it currently only supports it in full-screen mode. Yes the marketing blurbs for Workstation 11 makes it sound like it supports scaling just fine, but if you dig through the support boards you'll find it only scales in full-screen mode. If you try to run Linux in a VMWare Workstation window on the QHD screen, the fonts will be microscopic. Though I suppose you could always run the QHD screen with Windows in 1600x900 mode.

I believe Parallels on OS X supports scaling of guest OSes for the Retina displays.