And yet, here I am, three keyboards later, with no end in sight given that I couldn't possibly baby mine more than I do without locking it up in an argon-filled clean room.
History won't look at this era of Apple laptops favorably. It really makes one wonder how they missed this one.
It's also an indictment of this era of both hardware and software that nobody else produces a more compelling option.
They were way ahead of other laptop makers in basically every way but upgradeability, so they could afford to screw up like 1/2 of all the things about their laptop (all at once, which is pretty crazy), badly, and still be way ahead on the other 1/2, such that switching isn't an unequivocal win.
Meanwhile, I still have a Dell Latitude 10+ years old that's chugging along on its original battery (now down to about 30 min battery life), an HP consumer convertible laptop (early precursor to the tablet laptop era) that's almost as old and still chugging along. Keyboards on both still work great and have survived pizza, crumbs, and numerous spills--and both still infinitely more comfortable than the punishingly thin keyboards on their Apple counterparts of the time and since. My Surface Pro 3 has survived being dropped multiple times from heights that have killed my coworkers' iWhatevers.
Oh... and the real kicker? Each of these laptops cost several hundred dollars less than comparable Apple laptops with the same or better specs. Pretty much the only category Apple had them beat was in (subjective) appearance.
Well, people keep on buying the darn things even though they know what they're getting into.
I don't recall the exact wording, something like "noise emissions level is under some required threshold" (I don't have the link at hand but I think I can rescue at least one from Dell support forum). The thing is, to me the fan noise when it turns on is less annoying than the high pitched whine.
I have an old XPS 13 model (9333 I think, the battery is still going strong tho) and with the keyboard backlight turned off (I won't use it anyway) and no USB peripherals attached is dead silent. Otherwise, If I plug a mouse or an USB hub/network adapter there is the continuous whine.
To be honest, I can only hear it in silent rooms in my home with window closed, in an office environment it's droned out.
The whine is the only gripe I have with the HW as Debian has worked flawlessly with it.
My screen stopped working for a week and started working again for absolutely no reason.
It's a known problem : https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-13-9350-Black-Screen/
And none of the mentioned fixes worked more than a day for me.
Mine's quiet as a mouse.
Sample size 1, maybe I was just lucky. But happy people don't tend to be as loud as angry people.
But whatever, I am not gonna leave my macbook behind just because of that. By comparison, my Macbook is still better than my work Dell Latitude (which costs the same) that sounds like a jet engine because the fan keeps coming on, battery lasts for less than 5 hours, wireless keeps dropping, and I occasionally gets the BSOD...
Nothing's perfect, that's just life.