Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

I got my first Dell laptop, the XPS15, 5 years ago. Prior to that I had a good 25 years as a Thinkpad die-hard. The XPS has been ... ok. I've had some issues with it resetting for no apparent reason over its life. Frequency varies, but sometimes it'll just blank the screens and then the BIOS comes up on the display, a few times a week, then it'll be good for a month or more.

I had one issue where I needed to ship it back: it would reset and then it was running off the battery, and no matter what port I plugged a charger/docking station into it wouldn't charge until I powered it off and back on again. I got them to do a replacement under warranty a couple years ago.

Around a month ago it was doing the reset fairly frequently and then wouldn't power on sometimes, and I noticed the wrist rest was a little bowed. I replaced the battery pack (kind of a pain, but not the worst I've done), and it was good for around a month, but now it has that "won't charge the battery" issue again. I believe when they did the previous repair they replaced the motherboard, but now I'm out of warranty.

For my next laptop I kind of want a Framework, so I can replace the mobo if I need to. My work likes us to replace hardware no more frequently than every 5-6 years, but we get a warranty for way less than that (my laptop I pushed to get a 4 year).

Meanwhile my previous Thinkpad T470s is still going strong, though the screen just developed a line through it. That's ~10 year old now.

My personal 4 year old Macbook has been a real workhorse, never had any hardware issues with it. My son's macbook has been another story, he's had that in for service 4-5 times in the 3 years he's had it. But, I suspect that is more him than the hardware. I don't baby my MBP, but he is just terrible with things. He's lucky if a pair of glasses can last 6 months, ditto with a phone (usually broken screens), so I'm not sure I can blame the MB Air...

I recently got a new Thinkpad for work, can't recall which model. I think L series?

The build quality is nicer than my T530. The bottom cover doesn't have access panels anymore, but it's got just a few captive(!!) screws and the whole bottom comes off. Everything is neatly exposed and you don't need to access the top of the board at all. The bottom cover has plastic clips along with the screws, but they're spring loaded! They aren't simply molded in and cannot snap off. It's some incredible attention to detail.

I've noticed that most recent laptops have the vent behind the screen hinge where it's completely blocked if the screen is closed. Thinkpad has the vent fully exposed. In fact, it exposes more vent when the screen is closed.

Too bad the CPU is a lemon. One of the new AMD chips with a built in NPU. The NPU is slower than the integrated graphics for inference. Not a discrete card, just the GPU baked into the chip.

In contrast, I got a hand-me-down Dell XPS-something from 2020 when I first started this job. It idles IDLES! at 100°C. I tried to re-paste the CPU, but the heat pipes were so small and thin that I crushed one between my fingers. Even with massive airflow through the case from external fans, it never drops below 100C. Absolutely inexcusable.

Looks to me like Lenovo still has it. At least if you're paying real money for a professional level machine. This new Thinkpad is now my #1 most repairable and maintainable machine. T530 is a close second. Absolutely every other laptop I've ever used is tied for last place in the garbage.

I am resisting the urge to detail my insane story with my most recent Dell XPS purchase. Long story short, I will never again buy a Dell laptop. I went months without my machine during a critical time. I kept getting it back in worse shape than it was before I sent it for repair. After months of pure insanity, I just accepted that I'll never have a properly function touchpad again. At least they finally got a working motherboard put in it. I'm feeling waves of rage and anger just thinking back to what they put me through. Never again. I won't even accept a Dell as a work laptop again. Never.

I miss so much the first generation of the Dell XPS 13 dev edition. I think that we were almost at the top of the curve in term of quality/price. Only a few things could have been fixed (like the webcam at the bottom of the screen) and it would have been perfect.

But, sadly, next generations went deep shit instead.

Nowadays, I have a very hard time selecting a laptop that would fit my needs, even disregarding the price. One of the worst feature in term of offender is the keyboard: Manufacturers are going on with this totally stupid unergonomic trend of having "half size" enter keys, removing page-up/page-down keys, and hiding directional arrows behind over keys needing to use the "FN+other_key" to be able to use the arrow.

The move to USB-C is actually great for compatibility across machines. Europe has a directive for companies to implement USB-C to reduce e-waste from chargers.

> I'd prefer a "low-end" workstation with 32GB memory, but because of the price point I can only afford a 16GB non-workstation one. I don't do gaming any more but I still prefer a good integrated video card.

I started buying 4x4 mini PCs. They're exactly what you describe. For $600 I got an 8 core AMD Ryzen 7 8745H with 96GB of RAM from Minisforum. The graphics aren't half bad and the overall system has been really good. It's even got better thermal performance than the Intel 4x4 I had previously and generally runs 10C cooler for the same workloads.

If you don't absolutely need a "backpack portable" computer I can only highly recommend them.

Yes, it's a race to the bottom for most. Lots of plastic and soldered, non-upgradeable components, and a lack of ports. The used market is tricky to navigate thanks to the proliferation of model names and numbers, so little to no salvation there either. Spend a bit more for something that will last a bit longer (MacBook) and/or be upgradeable (frame.work), or accept a cheaper model (e.g. Dell Pro) that will likely need to be replaced in a couple years.

I would say yes. Having been a big fan of Dell and having used it's laptops for both professional and personal uses over many years, I have moved off it to Acer. Couple of reasons - the first is that there is a price premium which I cannot seem to justify and second is the teething / niggling issues which I have had to face in pretty much every Dell I have owned. Sometime, it will be too long a time to wake up from sleep or a random crash which requires me to fetch bitlocker key from my account so that I can boot it up again to driver update issues to the fan continuously running for no reason etc. I had, by chance, a good experience with Acer in the past and since then have purchased a couple fo them more and the experience has been seamless and pleasant. I do hope Dell ups its game as it was an iconic and innovative brand but there is less now to differentiate it from competition and so no reason for the premium to be charged.

I have a 2017 Dell XPS13 that's been hammered as a developer laptop and is still going great guns. It's on its third battery, and I've just replaced the screen. I bought a newer one in 2022 and sold it again a couple of months later because, although it had a faster processor and more RAM, it felt flimsier.

I'm also currently upgrading a refurbed Lenovo X270 for my granddaughter who's starting high school, and I am thoroughly impressed. Newer Lenovos are slimmer and slicker, but this thing will still be trucking after the cockroach apocalypse.

I just bought a Thinkpad T14s a couple of months ago. It’s lightweight, has great build quality. I installed Ubuntu and it almost ran out of the box but I ended up having to tinker with it to get My Dell docking station and i3 window manager to work. But that is something I was willing to live with. So far, I have had no complaints. If you’re using Linux, the sleep and standby performance aren’t good. But much better than my previous laptop.

Coming to my previous laptop which I still have with me, I bought a Thinkpad L480 in 2018. It was then a dirt cheap version of a Thinkpad. But it did the job with no complaints. I had to replace the battery after 4 years but that wasn’t an issue. It did everything a daily driver is supposed to do, reliable and never threw a fit. I only had to change it as I felt I needed a better screen and performance. The Intel processor was showing its age.

I have only minor complaints running Thinkpad with Ubuntu. But if you start moving away from popular distros, then you have to accept you will occasionally have to tinker to get things work.

As someone also trying to get out of (or at least less dependent on) the Apple ecosystem, the laptop market sucks! Everyone but Apple is making the same garbage-tier, shoddy, plastic laptops with bottom of the barrel components that I'm sure are engineered to just barely work enough to avoid immediate product returns.

I'm starting to accept that if I want a development workstation class machine, I need to build a tower from components.

Are you really complaining about old battery packs and USB C ports as bad engineering? I think you should try the framework laptop because then you have no excuses about the trivial things.