We have XPS in our office and the 15 inch ones with 45W chips and nvidia graphics are a disaster. Over half of them have/had various issues: overheating, constant power/thermal throttling, sleep issues, trackpad issues, charging issues, HDMI issues, keyboard issues. One had its board replaced three times!!!. And we don't even stress them, just windows, IDEs and terminals, no rendering, no gaming.

The warranty experience was great as a tech would always come to our office to perform replacements but I don't get how Dell makes any money on those with so much RMAs.

If their QA is so bad on their most premium line, I shudder to think what the experience must be like with their cheaper devices.

What laptops don’t have issues?

Many people seem to think MacBooks have exceptionally high build quality and they have m̶o̶s̶t̶ all of the types of issue you listed:

• Overheating https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2020/06/24/apple-mac...

• thermal throttling

• sleep issues (IIRC they’re hard to keep awake while trying to use them closed and docked to an external monitor in “clamshell mode”)

• trackpad issues (subjective and they do seem to have the largest trackpad fanbase, but some have complained they’re too large and easy to brush while typing; perhaps the palm rejection isn’t good enough for everybody)

• charging issues (they charge differently through ports on one side vs. the other and some have complained they build up charges that can be felt when picking them up)

• HDMI issues

• keyboard issues (butterfly keyboards destroyed by dust, Apple delayed addressing this for years IIRC).

Plus staingate. Plus actively anti-repair design and a user hostile OS.

Edits: bullets and paragraph separation, found the last type of issue (overheating)

> "clamshell mode"

Yeah, that particular phrase kind of irks me. Most people who don't use Apple products simply call that 'with the lid closed.'

Interesting, I was on the fence between my MBA and a XPS. I did not expect the XPS to have these issues. Would you happen to know if you use the proprietary or open source Nvidia drivers?

He's very likely talking about older generation devices, but I'm not sure.

what year/model are those XPS? They seem to have improved a lot in the past year or two.

XPS are great but I would caution about poor thermal management, even after reseating the GPU and CPU cores it doesn't take much to hit the CPU temp limits with full fans.

Yea, I've always had trouble with XPS thermals. I've had two personal ones with thermal and battery issues and decided I wouldn't get another ... and then I got one for work and it has a lot of the same quirks. Not the best Linux machines honestly.