I second this. I've been a long-time fan of Lenovo (the X1 carbons are particularly good), but recently got a Dell XPS 13. Aside from the camera (which looks up your nose), they are really great machines.

I really want to buy a surface book. But it seems like everyone on /r/surface is having the same recurring issues: battery drain/overheating during sleep, tablet failing to undock, computer mistakenly thinking tablet is undocked, graphics driver crashes, slow SSD writes, etc.

It's also ridiculously expensive. The cheapest option with 16GB of memory costs $200 more than a 15" Retina MBP.

I'd like to buy Microsoft Surface Book or Microsoft Surface Pro 4 but after a glance at https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/ it seems like people who dual boot may be having trouble with Ubuntu failing to boot after system updates (either Windows or Linux updates, anything which re-runs GRUB or whatever the Windows equivalent of that is; there are work-arounds eg https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/43an26/repair... but i'm scared of them because i don't understand them well enough to know if future system updates will break it again), and with getting either of the touchscreen or the cameras to work at all. I may be wrong, though, I didn't read too closely.

My XPS 13 with Ubuntu (dual booted) is a nice machine but still has problems (track pad, wifi, kernel panic waking from sleep).

Worthless battery life for such costly machines. I would've bought the XPS 13 with Ubuntu otherwise.

Edit: I read reviews like this http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/dell-xps-13-is-a-major-dis... cannot find the other ones though. It is better than I remember; I thought it was worse. Still; 6 hours is not really usable in my book.

I googled around and found this:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/dell-xps-13-2015-review-batter...

which gives a rated battery life of 18 hours and a real-world use battery life of 9-10 hours

http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/dell-xps-13-battery-life-f...

This article suggests a battery life of 12 hours.

What kind of battery life are you expecting?

Ah my bad; I read somewhere it was much much less. Maybe that's outdated information. But when people say 9 hours, basically I get 3-4 out of them... Usually.

What are you doing, compiling a kernel or rendering graphics?

Probably not an atypical use case on here :)

It depends a lot on screen brightness and the power settings. The XPS13 has a bright screen....

I probably get 6 hours on arch Linux full back light. Battery life seems better on Windows (my friend's machine)

Just one more thing to add to the list of things Apple do well - quote realistic battery life figures.

My XPS 13 on Debian lasts around 8 to 10 hours without difficulties for long trips.

Is this with Jessie on the XPS 13 9343? I'm only getting around 6 hours on mine.

No. Sid

My XPS 13 with Arch Linux lasts 10+ hours of continuous use on a single charge. Mine is the non-HD non-touch model though. I suspect the model with the beefier resolution and touch screen wouldn't do as well.