I got a refurb XPS 13 9370 that still seems to be doing fine after a year (I run Fedora on it). I'd previously owned a latitude and while I thought it was a good machine, I wanted something lighter - the quad-core U-series CPUs finally convinced me to try an ultrabook :)

I have heard the XPS 15s tend to have more "issues."

I was about to disagree before I realized with my Precision 5520 (analogous to XPS 15) the left hinge is broken and my battery is dead, and they both broke after about a year.

I don't know about the battery but the hinge was certainly a problem with the line in general, since it was a flimsy plastic thing unable to hold the weight of the 4k screen it came with...I'd be a bit surprised if that hasn't been fixed in the around 2.5 years since I bought it though.

My 5520 has been flawless and is also just over 2 years old. I have the 1080p matte screen though. Only other laptop I had that has come as close to nirvana as the 5520 was a Thinkpad T42 and 2012 mbp 15.

dead battery might have been my fault, I opened up the laptop to take a look at the hinge and may have shorted something...I think I used a screwdriver or metal tool to push in the connections when reassembling

I've been a fan of XPS for a long time, and I'd say Dell is repeating mistakes of Apple. The moment XPS got popular, they started penny pinching, and each subsequent model from 9343 got worse and worse from that.

I saw companies repeating the same mistake times and times again. I'd call it a "Mercedes disease." Mercedes 600 series used to be a supercar of the time, but the moment Mercedes management saw that Americans are OK with it being a regular consumer level car, they made Mercedes the reputation it has in US now "expensive and disposable."

S classe is still a luxury car, but under the skin there is nothing really special about it, and it could've easily sold for half the price if not for Mercedes logo on it. Most of clientele for S600 are the people who are just fine with paying extra $50k for the badge, and there are a whack a lot of them in the US.

I'd say the overoptimisation and product management are the issue. Quoting myself:

> See, a first reduction from ~64Wh to 62Wh might've not been even visible and been a valid "product management" decision, and not impacted the sales.

> A second cut from 62 to 56 might've only deterred few power users, and could also be validated from the same standpoint, if evaluated without knowledge of the context.

> But the third cut from 56 to 52 will blow up, despite the rest of the product getting the biggest year on year improvement ever.

A decision to cut the battery a tiny little bit to save some pennies might've made sense business-wise every single time, but it did cut deep into the positive image of the product.

Same here. One morning I came downstairs and found laptops vents working on full. I left it on the table in sleep mode the previous evening. Laptop was extremely hot, luckily there weren't any papers underneath. After that the fans were constantly on full, often the CPU even locked itself on 0.78GHz and needed to be restarted to stop the throttling. They then replaced the mainboard, CPU, but it seems it's still overheating.

Yeah, new XPS 15 here. Would be a beautiful machine, if it weren't for the constant thermal issues..

You have given good reasons to think about avoiding that model.

Lack of touchbar is not one of those good reasons.