On the contrary I've had great experiences with Dell's business line (Latitude, Precision models). Likewise the business warranty is excellent - log into TechDirect and I can submit a ticket for any one of the machines in my fleet. Dell will either send a technician out to service it in the field, or they'll mail me an empty box so I can send the unit in for repair.
Consumer _anything_ is going to be hit or miss. This is known. Buying Dell's consumer line and having a hard time trying to cash in on the consumer warranty doesn't mean Dell is shit, just means their priorities are elsewhere. XPS in particular I see lots of complaints about so I don't know why one would willingly buy what one _knows_ is their lowend (yes, it's lowend crap - we know this because they advertise it as "consumer highend"). It probably still gets the job done for most people who own one.
Buy a recent, used Latitude next time and quit worrying - they are great.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that the consumer line has less support and extras than a business-class device backed by an enterprise support agreement.
I'm not sympathetic to someone dropping $1,400 USD on a new laptop, and gets written off because "consumer _anything_ is hit or miss".
Like, half of the complaints come from devices like the XPS 13, which isn't some $300 cheap-o WallMart special, that's supposed to be their flagship top-of-the-line device. If Apple did the same to like, the MacBook Air or whatever, there would be months-long complaint threads all over HN about it.
> Buying Dell's consumer line and having a hard time trying to cash in on the consumer warranty doesn't mean Dell is shit, just means their priorities are elsewhere.
This is the whole point of the site: don't buy products from companies whose priorities are elsewhere.
Friend of mine had an XPS; I don't remember exactly how much it cost, but it was certainly not the cheapest, so ~$1000 USD at least.
After about 1.5 to 2 years the battery started swelling up, and became essentially unusable. Turns out they even had a recall for this model, but who keeps track of that so he never knew. Tried to order a new battery from Dell: they don't deliver them any more, no way to buy it from Dell. Tried to order one from 3rd party: that one won't work because "not a genuine battery detected kthxfuckyoulol".
I don't care if it's "consumer" or "low end" or whatever, this is just ridiculous and in my opinion should quite literally be illegal (and perhaps it already is). If Dell doesn't want to manufacture batteries: fine. But let someone else do it so we don't have to throw away our laptops after 2 years.
Wholeheartedly agree. I only buy dell, and of them, I only buy latitudes. My favorite of all time was my e6440 with an socket CPU. I bought my wife one a couple of years ago, threw a quad core in there, maxed the ram and it's still working well. I had one just like it for myself but after years of my dog knocking it off the coffee table, it eventually stopped displaying. You can put three hard drives in these guys, one in the intended, one in the cd/dvd caddy and one in an m2 slot. I ran linux on it for it's entire 7-8 year life.
Today I have a 5490 (4 years old) which is a beast and puts up with tons of abuse, including drops. I've run linux on it since day 1 and never had a driver issue and is a solid workhorse.
I've always had dell latitudes, and will continue buying them as long as they last me 8 years each and run linux.
We have had terrible problems with the Precision 3000 series overheating/blue-screening on our engineers while using SolidWorks and AutoCAD, and Dell’s response to us was that they couldn’t recommend that series for that purpose, after their rep had done exactly that.
Also their WD19TB docks have been terrible. The display ports randomly crap out, the power supply randomly craps out, the ethernet ports randomly crap out. Sometimes it requires driver updates, sometimes a dock firmware update, sometimes it actually is just the hardware. Such a bitch to troubleshoot.
I get the appeal of Dell for business use, but I would never tell anyone that they are “great” for any kind of customer. They are the Sears of laptops.
I have friends who had bad customer experience with Bell for their cell, have switched to Rogers, and for the rest of their lives will yell that Bell is horrible and Rogers is awesome. But I also have friends who did exactly the opposite thing from Rogers to Bell.
I have friends who have had bad personal experience with TD Canada bank teller / customer service, and switched to CIBC, and will spend the rest of their lives telling everybody how TD is awful and CIBC is awesome. And I also have friends with exact opposite experience.
One of my friendships completely deteriorated when they warned me to NEVER EVER shop at Canadian Tire. Why? In 1978 her dad had a bad experience with a Canadian Tire car shop in Regina. I made a mistake of engaging and discussing there are over 500 stores with tens of thousands of employees and millions of different experiences, EVERY company will have statistical error rate, and "This one time at a bandcamp something bad happened" might not form the pinnacle of my decision making process (not that bluntly of course:), I got a look like I'm an alien being and what KIND of friend doesn't immediately take another person's word to not shop somehwere, no follow-up questions asked???!?!!!11
Anyway :).
Every company will have some percentage of bad customer experiences.
Stories, even reviews, are a poor and maybe even deceptive way for a person to decide how to weigh their risks.
I don't know of a perfect way because we don't have perfect information - what is Dell error rate compared to Lenovo compared to HP? I do agree that every company will have an error rate especially in their consumer stuff where we are explicitly not willing to pay for quality, and only pay, at best, for superficial specs or attributes.
Nothing on that website has shown me any statistics or argument that Dell is special. Like others, I've had good experience with Dell business models, just like with Lenovo business models and HP business models. And I've tended to have bad experience with plasticky crap of consumer models.
My daughter bought an Alienware laptop and a key broke off the keyboard after about a month. I contacted Dell through Twitter and they sent a technician to her college dorm next day and fixed it.
Granted my experience is filtered through my IT department, but my experience with Dell's enterprise warranty was anything but smooth. Replacing a faulty m2 and a motherboard were both multi-week affairs, so bad that I wrote our CTO about our machine requisition policies.
I had such a bad experience with a Precision M90 that I decided to never ever buy Dell again. Motherboard changed 3 times until the warranty ran out and it was over.
I discussed with the last contractor that came to repair my machine and he told me that a) he would never buy from Dell, b) that the pieces use for repair were often refurbished, c) they knew that there was an issue with my particular laptop model but was running the warranty expiring game.
With that being said, their onsite servicing is outstanding.
My last 3 PC's have been Dell. The most recent being a desktop I bought off-lease for about $120. Such a great experience that I can see myself never buying new again. I simply don't need top of the line performance for software development, no matter what anyone else says. There's essentially no usable difference between my 6 year-old personal laptop and the new one I got at work last year when doing development.
Me too. My last laptop was a dell outlet refurbished precision laptop that was 2 years old when I bought it, I then used it for 5 years and it still works today, in just replaced it with a smaller/faster precision that has also been great. I need high performance and reliability to run Solidworks all day and count on our to deliver, they haven't let me down yet (knock on wood)
I worked in one of Dell's outsourcing partners' call centres (admittedly I left almost 15 years ago), and back then it was the same people manning both consumer and business support lines. Towards the end of 2007 Dell started separating the two segments and that's where the problems started (edit: not sure about the exact date -- processes like that tend to take a while to plan) :
* Dell European consumer division was centralized and controlled from Ireland (IIRC).
* Consumer models like Inspiron and Dimension had a noticable drop in build quality.
* Support agents were forced to adhere to strict scripts during support calls, rather than use their own brains.
* Support agents had to convince a certain percentage of customers to replace parts themselves, rather than getting the on-site service they paid for. Agents not fillin their daily quotas were disciplined.
* Exceptions to the scripts had to be escalated. In many cases, Dell would outright ignore local consumer laws when handling complaints.
I'm sure things might have changed since then. Personally, I'm not taking the chance and will never buy a Dell product again, if I'm given a choice.
I worked for a Dell outsourced tech support center in America (Sitel, then ClientLogic). We only handled "busines" lines. In reality, it's a mix of business and consumers who used an employee purchase program. Systems are given a company number (might not be the correct name). The company number determines if a support queue handles that system. If it's not your numbers, transfer.
This was circa 2005-2007. I was in the pilot program for chat support in America.
Dell did not directly manage agents. They give a call center average metrics and it's up to the call center to hit them. Call centers are terrible places and want to cut corners and make money. 1 in 10 agents on our floor could actually fix your computer without help. Level 2 agents walk the floor to help the level 1 agents.
We did not have scripts past a greeting and maybe a closing. I don't think it was required, but you just start doing it.
There's an internal support decision tree from Dell. Once you follow it enough, you learn the shortcuts. For example, if a customer says they swapped a part to a new system and the problem follows the part, we can skip troubleshooting and replace.
Parts are split into cru and fru (customer vs field replaceable units). We tried to get customers to work with crus. Crus wouldn't get on site service. It can happen but takes approval. I never heard of a quota around this.
Second tier escalations were handled in house. That was me for technical and sometimes the customers bad day. I don't remember if there was a third level of escalation that got you to dell if you were out of technical options. If you were out of warranty by more than a grace period, I was your last stop.
Consumer systems are not as good as business grade. That's why their standard warranty is shorter. Business systems are easier to work on.
There is a level of support above business if you spend enough money where we will have a part leave the warehouse in 4 hours (maybe less). Usually, these companies have their own company numbers and presumably better agents.
I only buy Dell Latitude and above, though would consider business products from other companies. I buy them for my "business" which doesn't need any kind of proof.
I have been using the same Dell XPS 13 for about 6 years now, and I cannot say agree with most of that article. The Dell XPS line was my goto recommendation for people when they ask what laptop they should get.
Dell XPS support is also fantastic, if you go though the business channel and pay for support.
That said, Dell XPS is no longer my recommendation as the "New" line is a serious downgrade. They removed the headphone jack and added a touch bar. The amount of disappointment I have is immense. They took their best line and decided to make it horrible.
In June I got a new XPS13 (without the touchbar), preloaded with linux. Upon arrival, the camera and fingerprint reader did not work. The battery lasted about 2 hours and the screen literally fell out. After 2 days of frustrating tech support calls, they finally agreed to ship me a replacement.
1 month later, no replacement arrived. Many calls to support yielded no answers. I finally got them to refund my order and cancel the replacement.
A very bad experience for me and I will never buy a Dell again.
I have a XPS 13 with a broken hinge. The hinge broke after about ~3 years for apparently no reason.
The broken hinge is also next to the power button, so when the screen is opened, the detached hinge section pushes the plastic of the chassis upwards. This has both cracked the plastic, and made it impossible to press the power button normally.
I fixed it by using some really strong adhesive I found (called “plastic cement” or something like that). The power button is permanently wobbly, but you can at least press it now.
But exactly a week later the other hinge broke in exactly the same way. So more hours of my life and more adhesive later, it’s somewhat salvageable, but I am very gentle when opening and closing the lid.
Maybe I got unlucky with a shitty unit, or you got lucky with a non-shitty unit. Either way, I think our anecdotes cancel each other out.
I think for XPS line Dell has always prioritized form over function. My wife(then GF) bought top of the line XPS13 somewhere in 2011-2012. It was red, thin and looked pretty amazing, except it had crippling overheating issues that required motherboard replacement 2 times (in India). The trend continues to this day ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZpwCpubr_0 ) and hence I wouldn't touch XPS line with a 10 feet stick, if I can help it.
I got a 1200€ XPS 13 Developer Edition (with Linux) a few years ago. Sleep did not work well from the start and it would randomly drain battery while sleeping. About 9 months in, the battery swelled up and outright died, and was replaced under warranty with a week+ wait. 9 months after that, so just after the 1.5yrs warranty expired, the motherboard died. 500€ to replace. Got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon for about the same price instead and never looked back - will not buy Dell again.
Build quality on Dell XPS has slipped dramatically. I had one whose case would flex when you would touch it (let alone pick it up or use it in a laptop). This caused all kinds of issues, from the touchpad to being unusable to the entire system freezing.
I guess it really boils down to whether or not you specifically received a lemon or not. There's always going to be anecdotal evidence on either side of the ledger.
That said, there's plenty of customer complaints that appear to point towards poor QA/QC by Dell. In particular, there's a very specific hardware defect with keyboards in the XPS line.
Just search for "XPS tilde (~), F1, F2 not working". You'll quickly see this is an issue plaguing various models of XPS.
My gf bought a dell xps 15" with OLED and an i9 processor. I think it was reasonably priced compared to competitors but it just so happened that her screen broke, or it got loose.
She called Dell and they sent a new one so she could transfer her work over to the new machine and picked up the other one a few days after. All and all it was a good customer experience.
In my view, it seems like it has good build quality (in general, stuff can happen) and good customer support. Although she will never run linux on it. This website reads like a frustrated developer who decided to take matters into his own hands. I am very doubtful that this is the common experience, at least if you order directly from them. Sure it may have driver issues but at least they have an option to ship it with linux and without paying the windows tax, most companies don't even do that.
I personally use a Thinkpad t460p from 2013 that runs Ubuntu and still works great honestly, even the battery life. I will soon upgrade to a desktop instead of a laptop so that I can run more heavy duty stuff like training models.
The last 2 laptops I’ve had. In 2020 work provided a brand new dell XPS 15.
I opened it up. Logged in. The fans sat at 100% while idle in windows desktop. I ended up just giving it back.
Current job I got a 2022 dell XPS 15. It has an annoying whine when the fans spin up. It gets HOT! And it’s the first time ive experienced audio issues. And I’m not alone on the audio issues. Everyone at work with the same laptop has audio issues which is always resolved by restarting the laptop… for example today I connected my Bluetooth headphones. It connected but didn’t appear as an audio device so I couldn’t hear anything. This also caused the speakers on the laptop to stop working.
2 XPS-13’s in the past few years. 1 with camera’s positioned at the bottom of the screen, which was the absolute worst design ever, unless you enjoyed showing off your nose hairs.
1 with the screen flicker and an issue with an internal fan that failed to start consistently which resulted an a blaring alarm. It would go off in the middle of the night.
The last one was replaced by a Dell XPS-15 (by my employer) which has worked fine.
I also own a personal XPS-15 that was my first Dell purchase ~3-4 years ago. It’s never had an issue and I do some heavy compute and web scraping.
I have a refurbished Dell Precision T-5600 with 128GB of RAM and 16 core processor 4TB SSD + 2TB SSD. It’s a beast, I’ve had it for 3 years. Run it daily for large scrape jobs, store and process a lot of data. It has never let me down.
Dell shipped a monitor to my billing address (office) instead of the shipping address (home). Because of COVID there was no one at my office but it was picked up by "GUARD". Never found the monitor.
DELL wanted me to do an insurance claim with the shipper. The shipper wanted me to do the insurance claim with DELL. Took two months to figure out. In the meantime, I just went to a brick-and-mortar place and bought a monitor.
In the end DELL credited me the money for the missing monitor and would not provide a cash refund. I ended up selling the DELL credits to the next person who had an equally horrible experience with them.
I have a Dell Precision. It's the worst electronic device I've ever had, and not just among computers.
Audio driver stops working randomly, I have a bookmark named "fix driver" on my bookmarks bar. Its update crapware interrupts me constantly, it rejects sleeping often, external display working is a lottery, sometimes the battery doesn't charge and sometimes windows gives warnings on low voltage adapter while I'm using the one it came with, screen backlight has weird gradients and bright points, the hinge makes weird sounds so I think it won't live too long, the fans are noisy, keyboard lighting leaks through key edges like a 10$ keyboard from AliExpress, fans are too noisy (yes I know I already mentioned this but seriously, they are noisy), battery optimized mode makes this laptop a slug and it sometimes takes a couple of minutes to wake up from sleep if you managed to make it sleep by luck.
But yeah, other than that it's a great business laptop.
Dell is the Walmart of desktops/laptops. Somehow their server line has remained high quality.
Lenovo is my laptop manufacturer of choice, but only the T, X and P Thinkpads.
They are doing their best to water down and trash the lineup. Along with the Thinkpad, there's the Thinkbook, Ideapad, Yoga, Legion, Lenovo Slim, and just the plain Lenovo.
But buying a 'Thinkpad' isn't a guarantee of quality. It used to be the T series was the standard laptop, X was thin and light, and the P series was a workstation.
Now they have the E series which is "affordable and stylish". The L series in "entry-level". Why do you need two lines of cheap junk? The Z is "is engineered sustainably from recycled vegan leather and recycled aluminum, then boxed in rapid-renewable, compostable packaging".
Based on your comment, I opened up the Lenovo website and tried to look at options/prices. I spent about 15 minutes in earnest just trying to use the selection filters (they keep unchecking themselves and freezing the screen) before the results failed to load then froze the screen. After several minutes, I gave up and came back here.
This is not the first time I've had this experience with Lenovo.
I have never bought a Mac before, but my next computer purchase will be one unless Framework fixes their battery issues first.
Two anecdotes that have nothing to do with each other:
1. When I was a computer technician back in the mid 00s, I hated working on Dells most. Their internal architecture was very dense. I often marveled at how little airflow there was.
2. I have an Alienware R11 that I bought a couple years ago. It's still doing fine. The only oddity is the result of a brief power outage a couple months ago; now it always tries to PXE boot on startup for some reason.
"The laptop does not sleep in Linux" is not a compelling reason to hate a manufacturer without a lot more details, but I always hear it as some catch-phrase when people talk about Linux/Laptop compatibility.
linux isn't linux isn't linux. distribution and wm/de matter a lot with regards to power management, and many distributions/DEs have strong opinions about defaults in many different directions.
I wouldn't expect a lot of laptop specific tweaks in a performance or desktop-flavored distribution, just as I wouldn't expect a high performance/risk file-system or IO scheduler on a user-friendly consumer-centric laptop-oriented distribution -- thus I think it's an unfair assessment when someone judges the other end of the field from the wrong side.
All that said, I own a current gen XPS15, i've ran just about every major flavor of OS on the thing. The compatibility is exactly what i'd expect out of a generic Intel 'ultrabook', ubiquitous.
I have bought/deployed Dell business Latitude and OptiPlex systems for 18+ years.
While everything is lighter and cheaper in terms of build quality, stability is still rock solid overall unless you get cursed with a "known issue". I have had Dell replace almost every part of one system over weeks even after I proved the issue was their driver.
When I have needed support in the last few years, I have found that the once-hallowed Dell Pro Support now is just "low-level offshore workers moved onshore", hence the creation of Dell Pro Support Plus, which once was Pro Support.
One of the bummers too is if you have a sales rep you don't like, you can't get rid of them (at least in the SMB sector). You have to just ignore them from 60 days at which point you can get a new one.
The way they name models now is baffling. We were buying OptiPlex 7090 towers but they were recently discontinued. So I figured that meant we'd be seeing OptiPlex 8000s. Nope, the replacement PC is the OptiPlex 7000.
I've noticed their disaster of a website before. It's a miracle they sell anything. I work in IT, I do this kind of thing for a job and I can't make any sense of it, for the exact reasons mentioned in the article. I can't imagine any average person bothering with it when the Apple website is right there.
I don't even know why they bother selling laptops to consumers at all (as opposed to to businesses) if it's so unimportant to them that their website doesn't even work.
My Dell G5 5515 gaming laptop has this weird issue where every 15 minutes or so, the trackpad will start lagging consistently for about 5 minutes, then switch back to working normally. Upgrading from Windows 11 to a fresh install of Windows 10 didn't even fix it. The power cable also falls out easily.
They really need to consolidate their laptop lineup.
I'll just chime in with my opinion, too. Why not? Maybe somebody will find it helpful.
I generally disagree with the opinions of the article, which is to say, my experience is different. I have used XPS 15s exclusively as my dev laptops since 2016. None of the 3 I've used since then ever let me down. My oldest still works marvelously and I use as my primary dev platform with Linux, and my newest from 2021 as my backup/gaming machine with Windows 10. They do require opening and cleaning occasionally.
That said,
1) the Dell website experience when accessed from outside the US is so terrible that it's clear Dell does not feel that they actually need it to generate revenue
2) my experience with 3 laptops is a lot, but still anecdotal. I'll keep my eyes open for another dev-friendly option.
I usually tell family members that if they’re dead set on buying a new laptop (as opposed to used), then don’t buy anything under $1000 since it’s going to be a piece of shit.
The only exception to that rule is Dell. Don’t buy Dell at all, since it’s always going to be a piece of shit.
Might be an example of how an AI just integrates whatever biases are out there (as there are probably more people complaining than saying they are happy)
My experience with Dell was great. I have a Dell Latitude (business line) that works without issue for more than 10 years (ofc, now it's only for browsing). And I also have a more recent Dell XPS 15 that got a full glass of water on it, and still keeps working - with the exception of the GPU - but considering it was soaked and out of warranty I am still happy with that.
Not sure what I would buy next, but would definitely consider Dell. In fact the most annoying thing for me is the pattern below the keyboard on the XPS, but esthetics is a personal choice anyhow.
> Might be an example of how an AI just integrates whatever biases are out there (as there are probably more people complaining than saying they are happy)
Definitely. I expect that, were they to try the same experiment with other manufacturer brands, the resulting text would be roughly the same.
Back when Dell had its Latitude series they were known for being as indestructible as the Thinkpads.
Little did I know how shitty Dell laptops were afterwards. My excourse had gone through the 300/310 Touch Ultrabook series, the XPS13 and XPS15 series, and the Dell Precision series. Bought 5 laptops from Dell, all broken within under a year of lifetime.
It was so bad that in the Ultrabook the GPU literally melted, and they claimed this laptop is working totally fine by just using the internal display with more artifacts than actual pixels.
And now, here I am in 2022, using my Thinkpad from 2012...because it keeps working.
I don't even know what to buy after the Thinkpad dies, so I have one other as a spare parts donator.
5 year's ago I've bought a 2-in-1 Dell Inspiron laptop.
2-in-1 functionality turned out to be useless and annoying in Ubuntu environment, so I almost never used it.
1 year after the purchase, WiFi signal on this laptop started to weaken rapidly.
After disassembling the machine I discovered that the cable connecting WiFi module (behind the keyboard) and WiFi antenna (behind the screen) was torn apart as a result of lid movement. It was almost impossible to fix without complete disassembly of the laptop.
I was amazed how bad that design was. It was absolutely not suitable for frequent 360 degree movement of the lid.
It's ridiculous how easily they traded visual appearance (metal casing) for operational stability.
I have a XPS 13 9310 2-in-1, bought directly after release & put Linux on it. For a brand new released Laptop, this was the best Linux experience I had. Dell's preinstalled Ubuntu wasn't available as an option, but on other devices I used it always sucked, not suprising if the Ubuntu Kernel is much older than the device release. I don't understand why they do this half-baked thing.
Build quality is very good, except for the standoffs, the silicon is getting loose 2 years later. This was much better on Precision devices I had before.
I think this website is a rant by a disappointed customer, but does have lots of valid criticism listed.
[+] [-] branon|3 years ago|reply
Consumer _anything_ is going to be hit or miss. This is known. Buying Dell's consumer line and having a hard time trying to cash in on the consumer warranty doesn't mean Dell is shit, just means their priorities are elsewhere. XPS in particular I see lots of complaints about so I don't know why one would willingly buy what one _knows_ is their lowend (yes, it's lowend crap - we know this because they advertise it as "consumer highend"). It probably still gets the job done for most people who own one.
Buy a recent, used Latitude next time and quit worrying - they are great.
[+] [-] maxsilver|3 years ago|reply
I'm not sympathetic to someone dropping $1,400 USD on a new laptop, and gets written off because "consumer _anything_ is hit or miss".
Like, half of the complaints come from devices like the XPS 13, which isn't some $300 cheap-o WallMart special, that's supposed to be their flagship top-of-the-line device. If Apple did the same to like, the MacBook Air or whatever, there would be months-long complaint threads all over HN about it.
[+] [-] bastawhiz|3 years ago|reply
This is the whole point of the site: don't buy products from companies whose priorities are elsewhere.
[+] [-] Beltalowda|3 years ago|reply
After about 1.5 to 2 years the battery started swelling up, and became essentially unusable. Turns out they even had a recall for this model, but who keeps track of that so he never knew. Tried to order a new battery from Dell: they don't deliver them any more, no way to buy it from Dell. Tried to order one from 3rd party: that one won't work because "not a genuine battery detected kthxfuckyoulol".
I don't care if it's "consumer" or "low end" or whatever, this is just ridiculous and in my opinion should quite literally be illegal (and perhaps it already is). If Dell doesn't want to manufacture batteries: fine. But let someone else do it so we don't have to throw away our laptops after 2 years.
[+] [-] fimbulvetr|3 years ago|reply
Today I have a 5490 (4 years old) which is a beast and puts up with tons of abuse, including drops. I've run linux on it since day 1 and never had a driver issue and is a solid workhorse.
I've always had dell latitudes, and will continue buying them as long as they last me 8 years each and run linux.
[+] [-] velcrovan|3 years ago|reply
Also their WD19TB docks have been terrible. The display ports randomly crap out, the power supply randomly craps out, the ethernet ports randomly crap out. Sometimes it requires driver updates, sometimes a dock firmware update, sometimes it actually is just the hardware. Such a bitch to troubleshoot.
I get the appeal of Dell for business use, but I would never tell anyone that they are “great” for any kind of customer. They are the Sears of laptops.
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|3 years ago|reply
I kind of agree with that philosophy.
I have friends who had bad customer experience with Bell for their cell, have switched to Rogers, and for the rest of their lives will yell that Bell is horrible and Rogers is awesome. But I also have friends who did exactly the opposite thing from Rogers to Bell.
I have friends who have had bad personal experience with TD Canada bank teller / customer service, and switched to CIBC, and will spend the rest of their lives telling everybody how TD is awful and CIBC is awesome. And I also have friends with exact opposite experience.
One of my friendships completely deteriorated when they warned me to NEVER EVER shop at Canadian Tire. Why? In 1978 her dad had a bad experience with a Canadian Tire car shop in Regina. I made a mistake of engaging and discussing there are over 500 stores with tens of thousands of employees and millions of different experiences, EVERY company will have statistical error rate, and "This one time at a bandcamp something bad happened" might not form the pinnacle of my decision making process (not that bluntly of course:), I got a look like I'm an alien being and what KIND of friend doesn't immediately take another person's word to not shop somehwere, no follow-up questions asked???!?!!!11
Anyway :).
Every company will have some percentage of bad customer experiences.
Stories, even reviews, are a poor and maybe even deceptive way for a person to decide how to weigh their risks.
I don't know of a perfect way because we don't have perfect information - what is Dell error rate compared to Lenovo compared to HP? I do agree that every company will have an error rate especially in their consumer stuff where we are explicitly not willing to pay for quality, and only pay, at best, for superficial specs or attributes.
Nothing on that website has shown me any statistics or argument that Dell is special. Like others, I've had good experience with Dell business models, just like with Lenovo business models and HP business models. And I've tended to have bad experience with plasticky crap of consumer models.
[+] [-] criddell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayindirh|3 years ago|reply
This is true for many generations we have. We also have servers from other usual big manufacturers, and while some are close, Dells are much better.
Ah, also they're much more silent w.r.t. other servers even when you don't enable acoustic management.
[+] [-] sf_rob|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelsolaar|3 years ago|reply
I discussed with the last contractor that came to repair my machine and he told me that a) he would never buy from Dell, b) that the pieces use for repair were often refurbished, c) they knew that there was an issue with my particular laptop model but was running the warranty expiring game.
With that being said, their onsite servicing is outstanding.
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iancmceachern|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jabroni_salad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowings97|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptaj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edmcnulty101|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayMMXXII|3 years ago|reply
* Dell European consumer division was centralized and controlled from Ireland (IIRC).
* Consumer models like Inspiron and Dimension had a noticable drop in build quality.
* Support agents were forced to adhere to strict scripts during support calls, rather than use their own brains.
* Support agents had to convince a certain percentage of customers to replace parts themselves, rather than getting the on-site service they paid for. Agents not fillin their daily quotas were disciplined.
* Exceptions to the scripts had to be escalated. In many cases, Dell would outright ignore local consumer laws when handling complaints.
I'm sure things might have changed since then. Personally, I'm not taking the chance and will never buy a Dell product again, if I'm given a choice.
[+] [-] tmerc|3 years ago|reply
This was circa 2005-2007. I was in the pilot program for chat support in America.
Dell did not directly manage agents. They give a call center average metrics and it's up to the call center to hit them. Call centers are terrible places and want to cut corners and make money. 1 in 10 agents on our floor could actually fix your computer without help. Level 2 agents walk the floor to help the level 1 agents.
We did not have scripts past a greeting and maybe a closing. I don't think it was required, but you just start doing it.
There's an internal support decision tree from Dell. Once you follow it enough, you learn the shortcuts. For example, if a customer says they swapped a part to a new system and the problem follows the part, we can skip troubleshooting and replace.
Parts are split into cru and fru (customer vs field replaceable units). We tried to get customers to work with crus. Crus wouldn't get on site service. It can happen but takes approval. I never heard of a quota around this.
Second tier escalations were handled in house. That was me for technical and sometimes the customers bad day. I don't remember if there was a third level of escalation that got you to dell if you were out of technical options. If you were out of warranty by more than a grace period, I was your last stop.
Consumer systems are not as good as business grade. That's why their standard warranty is shorter. Business systems are easier to work on.
There is a level of support above business if you spend enough money where we will have a part leave the warehouse in 4 hours (maybe less). Usually, these companies have their own company numbers and presumably better agents.
I only buy Dell Latitude and above, though would consider business products from other companies. I buy them for my "business" which doesn't need any kind of proof.
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgyo|3 years ago|reply
Dell XPS support is also fantastic, if you go though the business channel and pay for support.
That said, Dell XPS is no longer my recommendation as the "New" line is a serious downgrade. They removed the headphone jack and added a touch bar. The amount of disappointment I have is immense. They took their best line and decided to make it horrible.
[+] [-] louffoster|3 years ago|reply
1 month later, no replacement arrived. Many calls to support yielded no answers. I finally got them to refund my order and cancel the replacement.
A very bad experience for me and I will never buy a Dell again.
[+] [-] bogwog|3 years ago|reply
The broken hinge is also next to the power button, so when the screen is opened, the detached hinge section pushes the plastic of the chassis upwards. This has both cracked the plastic, and made it impossible to press the power button normally.
I fixed it by using some really strong adhesive I found (called “plastic cement” or something like that). The power button is permanently wobbly, but you can at least press it now.
But exactly a week later the other hinge broke in exactly the same way. So more hours of my life and more adhesive later, it’s somewhat salvageable, but I am very gentle when opening and closing the lid.
Maybe I got unlucky with a shitty unit, or you got lucky with a non-shitty unit. Either way, I think our anecdotes cancel each other out.
[+] [-] gnufied|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thegeomaster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spikej|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamalek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|3 years ago|reply
Pretty paperweight after nine months of torture.
[+] [-] tipamuga|3 years ago|reply
That said, there's plenty of customer complaints that appear to point towards poor QA/QC by Dell. In particular, there's a very specific hardware defect with keyboards in the XPS line.
Just search for "XPS tilde (~), F1, F2 not working". You'll quickly see this is an issue plaguing various models of XPS.
[+] [-] commitpizza|3 years ago|reply
She called Dell and they sent a new one so she could transfer her work over to the new machine and picked up the other one a few days after. All and all it was a good customer experience.
In my view, it seems like it has good build quality (in general, stuff can happen) and good customer support. Although she will never run linux on it. This website reads like a frustrated developer who decided to take matters into his own hands. I am very doubtful that this is the common experience, at least if you order directly from them. Sure it may have driver issues but at least they have an option to ship it with linux and without paying the windows tax, most companies don't even do that.
I personally use a Thinkpad t460p from 2013 that runs Ubuntu and still works great honestly, even the battery life. I will soon upgrade to a desktop instead of a laptop so that I can run more heavy duty stuff like training models.
[+] [-] philliphaydon|3 years ago|reply
The last 2 laptops I’ve had. In 2020 work provided a brand new dell XPS 15.
I opened it up. Logged in. The fans sat at 100% while idle in windows desktop. I ended up just giving it back.
Current job I got a 2022 dell XPS 15. It has an annoying whine when the fans spin up. It gets HOT! And it’s the first time ive experienced audio issues. And I’m not alone on the audio issues. Everyone at work with the same laptop has audio issues which is always resolved by restarting the laptop… for example today I connected my Bluetooth headphones. It connected but didn’t appear as an audio device so I couldn’t hear anything. This also caused the speakers on the laptop to stop working.
[+] [-] krauses|3 years ago|reply
2 XPS-13’s in the past few years. 1 with camera’s positioned at the bottom of the screen, which was the absolute worst design ever, unless you enjoyed showing off your nose hairs.
1 with the screen flicker and an issue with an internal fan that failed to start consistently which resulted an a blaring alarm. It would go off in the middle of the night.
The last one was replaced by a Dell XPS-15 (by my employer) which has worked fine.
I also own a personal XPS-15 that was my first Dell purchase ~3-4 years ago. It’s never had an issue and I do some heavy compute and web scraping.
I have a refurbished Dell Precision T-5600 with 128GB of RAM and 16 core processor 4TB SSD + 2TB SSD. It’s a beast, I’ve had it for 3 years. Run it daily for large scrape jobs, store and process a lot of data. It has never let me down.
[+] [-] Belphemur|3 years ago|reply
Who thought it's a good idea to put a Intel power hungry heat generator in a laptop with no airflow or proper cooling for enterprise product ?
I had a coworker that nearly burn his leg when having the laptop on them and coding with Spotify in the background.
The thing would thermal throttle like crazy and turn into an helicopter because it has only one 50mm fan to try to cool down the machine...
We had to buy stands to help with the airflow because if you put it on a desk it would block the intake.
It cost the same price than a MacBook M1 Pro with worse performance, worse thermal and it's so loud.
I'll never want a Dell laptop ever again.
Also don't get me started on their power delivery circuit that overheat when the laptop is used while charging or the proprietary batteries.
[+] [-] funvill|3 years ago|reply
DELL wanted me to do an insurance claim with the shipper. The shipper wanted me to do the insurance claim with DELL. Took two months to figure out. In the meantime, I just went to a brick-and-mortar place and bought a monitor.
In the end DELL credited me the money for the missing monitor and would not provide a cash refund. I ended up selling the DELL credits to the next person who had an equally horrible experience with them.
Don't buy DELL
[+] [-] patates|3 years ago|reply
Audio driver stops working randomly, I have a bookmark named "fix driver" on my bookmarks bar. Its update crapware interrupts me constantly, it rejects sleeping often, external display working is a lottery, sometimes the battery doesn't charge and sometimes windows gives warnings on low voltage adapter while I'm using the one it came with, screen backlight has weird gradients and bright points, the hinge makes weird sounds so I think it won't live too long, the fans are noisy, keyboard lighting leaks through key edges like a 10$ keyboard from AliExpress, fans are too noisy (yes I know I already mentioned this but seriously, they are noisy), battery optimized mode makes this laptop a slug and it sometimes takes a couple of minutes to wake up from sleep if you managed to make it sleep by luck.
But yeah, other than that it's a great business laptop.
[+] [-] bluedino|3 years ago|reply
Lenovo is my laptop manufacturer of choice, but only the T, X and P Thinkpads.
They are doing their best to water down and trash the lineup. Along with the Thinkpad, there's the Thinkbook, Ideapad, Yoga, Legion, Lenovo Slim, and just the plain Lenovo.
But buying a 'Thinkpad' isn't a guarantee of quality. It used to be the T series was the standard laptop, X was thin and light, and the P series was a workstation.
Now they have the E series which is "affordable and stylish". The L series in "entry-level". Why do you need two lines of cheap junk? The Z is "is engineered sustainably from recycled vegan leather and recycled aluminum, then boxed in rapid-renewable, compostable packaging".
[+] [-] halefx|3 years ago|reply
This is not the first time I've had this experience with Lenovo.
I have never bought a Mac before, but my next computer purchase will be one unless Framework fixes their battery issues first.
[+] [-] bovermyer|3 years ago|reply
1. When I was a computer technician back in the mid 00s, I hated working on Dells most. Their internal architecture was very dense. I often marveled at how little airflow there was.
2. I have an Alienware R11 that I bought a couple years ago. It's still doing fine. The only oddity is the result of a brief power outage a couple months ago; now it always tries to PXE boot on startup for some reason.
[+] [-] serf|3 years ago|reply
linux isn't linux isn't linux. distribution and wm/de matter a lot with regards to power management, and many distributions/DEs have strong opinions about defaults in many different directions.
I wouldn't expect a lot of laptop specific tweaks in a performance or desktop-flavored distribution, just as I wouldn't expect a high performance/risk file-system or IO scheduler on a user-friendly consumer-centric laptop-oriented distribution -- thus I think it's an unfair assessment when someone judges the other end of the field from the wrong side.
All that said, I own a current gen XPS15, i've ran just about every major flavor of OS on the thing. The compatibility is exactly what i'd expect out of a generic Intel 'ultrabook', ubiquitous.
[+] [-] antiterra|3 years ago|reply
Did you miss the detail that having Linux pre-installed by Dell was one of the primary selling points of the laptop model in question?
[+] [-] sys32768|3 years ago|reply
While everything is lighter and cheaper in terms of build quality, stability is still rock solid overall unless you get cursed with a "known issue". I have had Dell replace almost every part of one system over weeks even after I proved the issue was their driver.
When I have needed support in the last few years, I have found that the once-hallowed Dell Pro Support now is just "low-level offshore workers moved onshore", hence the creation of Dell Pro Support Plus, which once was Pro Support.
One of the bummers too is if you have a sales rep you don't like, you can't get rid of them (at least in the SMB sector). You have to just ignore them from 60 days at which point you can get a new one.
The way they name models now is baffling. We were buying OptiPlex 7090 towers but they were recently discontinued. So I figured that meant we'd be seeing OptiPlex 8000s. Nope, the replacement PC is the OptiPlex 7000.
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|3 years ago|reply
I don't even know why they bother selling laptops to consumers at all (as opposed to to businesses) if it's so unimportant to them that their website doesn't even work.
My Dell G5 5515 gaming laptop has this weird issue where every 15 minutes or so, the trackpad will start lagging consistently for about 5 minutes, then switch back to working normally. Upgrading from Windows 11 to a fresh install of Windows 10 didn't even fix it. The power cable also falls out easily.
They really need to consolidate their laptop lineup.
[+] [-] rendall|3 years ago|reply
I generally disagree with the opinions of the article, which is to say, my experience is different. I have used XPS 15s exclusively as my dev laptops since 2016. None of the 3 I've used since then ever let me down. My oldest still works marvelously and I use as my primary dev platform with Linux, and my newest from 2021 as my backup/gaming machine with Windows 10. They do require opening and cleaning occasionally.
That said,
1) the Dell website experience when accessed from outside the US is so terrible that it's clear Dell does not feel that they actually need it to generate revenue
2) my experience with 3 laptops is a lot, but still anecdotal. I'll keep my eyes open for another dev-friendly option.
[+] [-] bogwog|3 years ago|reply
The only exception to that rule is Dell. Don’t buy Dell at all, since it’s always going to be a piece of shit.
[+] [-] bravura|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vladms|3 years ago|reply
My experience with Dell was great. I have a Dell Latitude (business line) that works without issue for more than 10 years (ofc, now it's only for browsing). And I also have a more recent Dell XPS 15 that got a full glass of water on it, and still keeps working - with the exception of the GPU - but considering it was soaked and out of warranty I am still happy with that.
Not sure what I would buy next, but would definitely consider Dell. In fact the most annoying thing for me is the pattern below the keyboard on the XPS, but esthetics is a personal choice anyhow.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|3 years ago|reply
Definitely. I expect that, were they to try the same experiment with other manufacturer brands, the resulting text would be roughly the same.
[+] [-] cookiengineer|3 years ago|reply
Little did I know how shitty Dell laptops were afterwards. My excourse had gone through the 300/310 Touch Ultrabook series, the XPS13 and XPS15 series, and the Dell Precision series. Bought 5 laptops from Dell, all broken within under a year of lifetime.
It was so bad that in the Ultrabook the GPU literally melted, and they claimed this laptop is working totally fine by just using the internal display with more artifacts than actual pixels.
And now, here I am in 2022, using my Thinkpad from 2012...because it keeps working.
I don't even know what to buy after the Thinkpad dies, so I have one other as a spare parts donator.
[+] [-] dinamic|3 years ago|reply
2-in-1 functionality turned out to be useless and annoying in Ubuntu environment, so I almost never used it.
1 year after the purchase, WiFi signal on this laptop started to weaken rapidly. After disassembling the machine I discovered that the cable connecting WiFi module (behind the keyboard) and WiFi antenna (behind the screen) was torn apart as a result of lid movement. It was almost impossible to fix without complete disassembly of the laptop.
I was amazed how bad that design was. It was absolutely not suitable for frequent 360 degree movement of the lid.
It's ridiculous how easily they traded visual appearance (metal casing) for operational stability.
[+] [-] bionade24|3 years ago|reply
Build quality is very good, except for the standoffs, the silicon is getting loose 2 years later. This was much better on Precision devices I had before.
I think this website is a rant by a disappointed customer, but does have lots of valid criticism listed.