I never understood how people can deal with multiple rounds of RMAing (or whatever) a defective product and still turn around and recommend it to other people. If a company can't consistently deliver their products intact and functional, why should I waste hours of my time (which effectively increases the price of the product by hundreds of dollars) picking up their mess?
The fact that this is still a thing kinda says to me that PC laptop OEMs still aren't ready to go toe to toe with Apple in the customer experience department, despite the overall improved quality of their offerings.
And as I said, `but this could also be because of Amazon's shitty packaging where the laptop was in a box with only some brown paper crumpled in` - I'm not even sure if the issue was because of improper shipping or factory defect. If you're all that worried about wasting your time, go to the nearest retail store and test your unit as you buy it.
I also forgot to mention, I bought the defective models through Amazon Warehouse Deals - so it could very well have been a return due to the said defects.
If we're talking about MBP replacements, Purism also has an interesting one: https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-13, but they're much smaller than Dell.
How do you install OS X on this machine ? Any tutorial you can recommend ?
Please tell us more! What card am I supposed to replace it with, and is it anything involving soldering or just sockets and switches?
There are numerous guides on replacing the wifi card in the dell, ifixit has guides. And because this isn't apple, the laptop has a upgrade/repair/owner's manual (online).
Do you mean Iris Graphics 540? I think Iris Pro Graphics 550 included on-chip eDRAM and isn't available on any of their 15W Skylake CPUs, it's a 28W only part.
I thought only Pro SKUs get EDRAM but turns out I was wrong.
For Skylake they switched it up so that Iris 540 and Iris 550 are both GT3e, and Iris Pro 580 is GT4e. All with eDRAM. My comment above is incorrect, Iris 550 is not the "pro" version, Iris Pro 580 is.
I've been using a Retina MacBook Pro 13" (early 15) and 15" (mid 15) and just picked up the xps 13 9350 with iris pro.
There are definitely some quality control issues but once you get a working model with no faults (I had one that wouldn't reboot and had terrible coil whine, one that had loose trackpad and yellow tint on screen but this could also be because of Amazon's shitty packaging where the laptop was in a box with only some brown paper crumpled in) - atleast they took them back no questions asked. I'm amazed how far windows laptops have come along.
The only real downsides are that it power throttles (and thermal too, but I placed my own aftermarket thermal paste and it doesn't cross 66 C on full load now) due to the iris GPU itself consuming 18W at it's rated turbo boost with the SoC's TDP being 15W (long turbo) and 25W (short turbo). Perhaps go with the i5 model that has the HD 520 or the new 9360 that has kabylake with better thermal and power consumption (HD 620 is roughly similar to HD 540 but won't throttle). You can also use Intel's XTU to undervolt and better battery life and throttling if you're going to use windows.
Linux runs flawlessly, infact so does OS X if you can replace the wifi card. AMA