In June I got a new XPS13 (without the touchbar), preloaded with linux. Upon arrival, the camera and fingerprint reader did not work. The battery lasted about 2 hours and the screen literally fell out. After 2 days of frustrating tech support calls, they finally agreed to ship me a replacement.

1 month later, no replacement arrived. Many calls to support yielded no answers. I finally got them to refund my order and cancel the replacement.

A very bad experience for me and I will never buy a Dell again.

Your review right now helped me avoid them in the future.

Interestingly, your comment is now in the article itself.

I have an XPS 13 also that I'll probably be replacing in another year or two. What is your new go-to I should look into?

I have a fairly expensive Thinkpad X1 that I bought for myself and cheap MacBook Air M1 series for my kids. The M1 blows the X1 out of the water: faster, better screen, better screen aspect ratio, much better battery life. The only thing the X1 has going for it is a marginally better keyboard.

Well that and Windows. Not starting any OS debates, but would an M1 achieve the same performance and battery life if constantly running Windows in Parallels? If so, then that would put it ahead of the X1.

The HP Dev One is apparently very out of character for HP (which is a good thing). It's primarily Linux.

Build quality on Dell XPS has slipped dramatically. I had one whose case would flex when you would touch it (let alone pick it up or use it in a laptop). This caused all kinds of issues, from the touchpad to being unusable to the entire system freezing.

Pretty paperweight after nine months of torture.

I have a XPS 13 with a broken hinge. The hinge broke after about ~3 years for apparently no reason.

The broken hinge is also next to the power button, so when the screen is opened, the detached hinge section pushes the plastic of the chassis upwards. This has both cracked the plastic, and made it impossible to press the power button normally.

I fixed it by using some really strong adhesive I found (called “plastic cement” or something like that). The power button is permanently wobbly, but you can at least press it now.

But exactly a week later the other hinge broke in exactly the same way. So more hours of my life and more adhesive later, it’s somewhat salvageable, but I am very gentle when opening and closing the lid.

Maybe I got unlucky with a shitty unit, or you got lucky with a non-shitty unit. Either way, I think our anecdotes cancel each other out.

Yeah, that broken hinge issue is fairly well known. The repair is to semi-dismantle the screen and use cotton balls and superglue (or epoxy for an even more permanent fix) to bond the plastic clamshell to the hinges as the plastic they used for those models is such low-grade crappy plastic that was never meant to be used for a load bearing part that no matter what else you do it will re-break.

Even with that fix, it can and will re-break, just in a different location so you have to be forever careful with this $1,200 laptop.

Oof. I was blaming myself for broking the hinge on mine (XPS 13 9350 (2016)). Didn't know this was so common.

I fixed mine by gluing it with epoxy, and filled another part that was broken off with epoxy paste (it has a consistency like playdough).

The article mentions about 40% of users have issues. You must be part of the 60%. Such are the dangers of anecdotes.

60% of the time it works every time.

I think for XPS line Dell has always prioritized form over function. My wife(then GF) bought top of the line XPS13 somewhere in 2011-2012. It was red, thin and looked pretty amazing, except it had crippling overheating issues that required motherboard replacement 2 times (in India). The trend continues to this day ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZpwCpubr_0 ) and hence I wouldn't touch XPS line with a 10 feet stick, if I can help it.

I got a 1200€ XPS 13 Developer Edition (with Linux) a few years ago. Sleep did not work well from the start and it would randomly drain battery while sleeping. About 9 months in, the battery swelled up and outright died, and was replaced under warranty with a week+ wait. 9 months after that, so just after the 1.5yrs warranty expired, the motherboard died. 500€ to replace. Got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon for about the same price instead and never looked back - will not buy Dell again.