Business laptops have the following advantages over consumer laptops: - they're much more reliable - better support - a lot fewer problems with drivers and other incompatibilities - they are designed for work, which means you will have fewer problems with things like virtualization - generally speaking, the keyboard and the track-pad will be better

And the good thing is that some of the disadvantages of business laptops like size and bulkiness have also disappeared. You can now find business ultra-books that look good and work well.

It amazes me that it's 2016 and none of the windows based laptop makes have come out with anything that approaches the macbook pro. Microsoft seem closest with their surface book line, but that seems beset by driver issues, and Razer might have something with their Blade series, but that doesn't seem to be available in the UK 3 or 4 years on from launch. ASUS also seem close but again beset by a few odd build quality issues.

If I knew anything at all about this kind of thing i'd be tempted to do a kickstarter to fund the development of a quality developer laptop that was windows/*nix based that aped the macbook pro as much as possible.

Deal-breaker, right there. I had a hard enough time with a previous dell/ubuntu combo pulling this trick and roasting itself alive in my bag, and I've no desire to repeat.

I have to use a very expensive HP Z-Book for work with a power adapter that has a loud coil whine. I've fixed it by not using the power adapter and only plugging it in when I'm away for lunch or on the toilet.

I think that moving forwards an Apple laptop is going to be a hard requirement before I work for an organisation. It's not that other companies don't make good laptops, it's that Apple doesn't make bad laptops, so I know if the company has a policy of buying them I'm guaranteed to get something good, instead of the POS Lenovo that the IT department bought.

Building a computer to play with and learn from is great. But when you have to get work done, it pays to get the best. Spending time fooling around with problems that shouldn't be there in the first place is a time & money waste.

The touchpad/clickpad/whatever drivers have been a challenge since day one. I've learned how to customize the Windows registry settings to make it mostly cooperate with what I want and they were mostly fixed by the time Windows 10 was released.

I've actually thought the device itself has been a pretty good performer, battery life is not awful but not great, and mechanically it's pretty durable. The screen is pretty amazing (I have the first slightly less than 4k IGZO panel which I run at 1920x1080).

My biggest complaint is the lack of dedicated home/end/pgup/pgdn keys. But this is a problem on pretty much every laptop made with chicklet style keyboard and it is SO STUPID.

I was considering the new XPS 15 since mine is now three years old and I have the screen glitch, but the fact that they haven't fixed the coil whine problem shows me they just don't care. (That said I've read that not everyone reports this problem.)

I've generally had good luck with the Dell Latitudes though screen quality can be a big variable from model to model and year to year. I've also looked hard at their Precision line from time to time.

I do nearly all my programming on a desktop with a real keyboard. My biggest gripe using a laptop for programming is the lack of the home/end/pgup/pgdn keys and numpad on most models.

Another issue is the crappy broadcom wifi card that shipped with it. Wifi connection would just randomly disappear and only return after multiple retry/reboot combinations. Replaced it with an intel card and haven't had any problems since.

I do like the laptop but do not believe these problems should exist on a laptop with such a high pricetag.

Yes, you can get something with the exact same hardware specs for cheaper, but when you also consider size, weight, battery life, high-quality trackpad and other components, there are very few products that compare - and those that do are at the same or higher price level.

1) Constant problems with Broadcom wireles. Supposedly they employ someone to work on Linux drivers but I never heard back from them.

2) As has been mentioned HiDpi support in Linux is not good, I ended up using 1920x1080 anyways.

3) Defects. I did not have coil buzz, but accidentally shaking the laptop too hard (e.g. in one's bag, or tapping the bottom) would cause screen/gpu to glitch and require a hard restart.

4) Dual video support on Linux is also quite poor. In practice running Bumblebee gave only marginal improvements.

Compared to a MacBook Pro: build quality is worse, it is heavier, battery is worse, wifi problems as mentioned. I would stay away from any Dell products in the future.

In general I have found that laptops are generally 'fast enough' for the dev I'm doing and creature comforts such as battery life, keyboard, screen, and case quality are far more important.

[1] http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/Laptops/spectre-x360-211501--1...!

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...

I am using a previous generation model (Precision M3800) and am quite happy with it so far. I get ~4 hours of battery on Linux. This includes a lot of browsing, watching a few videos. I also have the ability to get a higher capacity battery (from 60Whr to 90Whr) in the future. It is also quite easy to take apart and upgrade any internals you want.

What I did so far:

  - updated all the firmware to the latest (thunderbolt has a separate firmware)
  - bumblebee automatically disables the nvidia gpu on startup (i don't need the extra power or power draw)

I used to have the first XPS13 model with linux support officially from dell and this laptop is just as good and even better due to better hardware. Slightly larger and heavier but not an issue for me.

Palm detection support is ass and might have to look into it more as it's driving me crazy. There is also some firmware bug where the screen won't start after sleep.

With proper hidpi support and remaining firmware fixes from dell this will be a nice laptop even with linux.

The only minor annoyance was the lack of driver support for the Alps touchpad hardware. Thankfully, after poking and prodding enough people I was able to get specifications and implement driver support. I do wish that Dell, et al would be more proactive in pushing their vendors to merge driver support but oh well.

All-in-all, I'm very pleased with the machine.

FFWD to today, I have a quiet laptop. Doesn't flicker on white background when dimmed 30%. Doesn't squeak anywhere. Doesn't wake up randomly. The keyboard is fine. Is easy to open. Fans are not spinning when charging. No coil whine, this shit still happens? Only thing in four years that broke was the battery. Bought a new one for €40.

Thanks for sharing the experience though, seems like I still have to stick to Apple for a while for my mobile computing. Unfortunately it comes with this horrible window manager and dumbed down desktop. That said, the cons list of the XPS15 is more than enough reason to cope with OSX.

But it failed at future-proofing, no USB Type C connector. At the price range £750-800 I would expect a premium laptop to have one. Seeing cheaper sub £500 laptops are equip with them.

I plug into Ethernet and need to expand at work, but this is where it stopped for me.

I've had two past terrible experiences with Dell so I beg myself not to make the same mistake when I see something irresistible or too good to be true. Still searching for good dev machine. I may wait a while until Lenovo announces their new line up for 7th Gen Intel but that could be nearer to 2017.

So, earlier my laptops have typically been with me for nearly 6 years each, these days, with the constant upgrades it feels like Iam buying a mobile phone that is sealed shut and demands an upgrade every 2 years. I've now stopped updating OSes as a result of the slowdowns I see everytime I upgrade the OS.

It's a big laptop, you'll use it on a desk, so the battery life is fine.

I use my XPS 9550 for work and carry around a MBP13 for email / reading / surfing.

The biggest problem with the 9550 by far is the keyboard. The MBP keyboard is amazing in comparison. However it is a laptop keyboard, I have yet to encounter a good one (old Thinkpads come the closest). Just buy a decent mechanical keyboard and plug it in.

Do people really notice coil whine that much? When I built my PC last year with a 970 GTX every review I read mentioned the horrible coil whine. I don't notice it at all. I also helped build my roommates computer with the same 970 GTX and I didn't notice the coil whine at all on that one either. It's possible that both those cards were "lucky" but it seems like literally every single 970 GTX review mentioned coil whine and I have yet to notice it.

I confirm there's sometimes a slight squeak when I press the left of the spacebar but it's hardly a dealbreaker.

So overall I'm very happy with it: gorgeous 4k screen, reasonably powerful dedicated GPU, firm keyboard with enough key travel.

Hot summer's day, arrive at a customer meeting. My previously fully charged Dell laptop has been running since I was on the hot and stuffy underground whilst shoved in to its laptop bag. It's now a nuclear ball of fire, with just 15% battery left and how it didn't suffer a complete meltdown is a strong testament to the quality of the hardware.

This happened a bunch of times. Add to this random BSODs, keyboards that would break far too easily, the sheer weight of the thing and more inconveniences I'm surprised I stuck with it for as long as I did.

5 years ago I switched to Apple MacBooks and will never go back.

Luckily, it's easy to disable all wake up events in Windows. But for average user this is a deal-breaker!

Right, but "the best" is completely subjective. I've wasted more time trying to get OS X and Macs to do what I want than I've ever spent building my own desktop machines or getting Windows to do what I want.

That's the reason why the vast majority of businesses don't run OS X too. It's not the best for them. Not even close.

If I had to use OS X daily, it would be death by a thousand cuts for me since it's missing so many features. The things that it's missing are really stupid and simple too, like the ability to just disable a monitor without having to unplug it. I can't spend all day hunting down third party solutions to every problem in OS X. There are too many. Nevermind the fact that the software that many businesses run wouldn't work on a Mac unless you virtualized it.

Using Mac hardware without OS X turns that nice hardware into crap, so that's exactly what Mac hardware is worth to me. I need to buy it to test stuff for iOS though, so I always buy refurbished desktop Macs since Apple won't let you upgrade their laptops.

IMO all laptops suck anyway. I don't get why people buy them. All my work is done at a nice fat PC desktop with 32 GB of RAM, a fast CPU and multiple SSDs which was thrown together from commodity parts...for cheap...which is easily upgradeable...and which also smokes the refurb Mac Pro (Mid-2012) that I also bought.

(When I go to a meeting I bring my Dell XPS or my Surface Pro, both of which are over 5 years old and still working very reliably with no problems - meanwhile my old 2008 MBP will not be able to run macOS sierra next year.)

Which is a shame because the XPS 15 looks neat--way smaller footprint than the rMBP 15".

It's the most impressive laptop I've ever used. Great 3:2 screen, excellent build quality, a real touchscreen (i.e., multitouch, pen support with pressure, etc), MacBook-tier trackpad. Convertible tablet mode is far more useful than I anticipated and is nice for showing off. The new Linux subsystem is still a bit buggy but is very impressive (I was able to compile and run emacs with a GUI as if I was running Ubuntu natively, for example).