A new, thinner XPS 13 is also coming later this year.
Ha, I thought a 1Hz display was a typo until I read the article - that’s the minimum display update, not the maximum: for situations when nothing’s changing on the screen to save battery life.
On phones and tablets, variable refresh rates make an “always on” display feasible in terms of battery budget, where you can have something like a lock screen turned on at all times without burning through too much power.
On laptops, this might open up some possibilities of the lock screen or some kind of static or slideshow screensaver staying on longer while idle, before turning off the display.
With enough pitch black on the lock screen background, you should be able to keep it going for quite a bit longer, since this apparently has OLED. I think for phones, always on is usually a black background with text and stuff on it, isn’t it?
These fuckers have no USB-A ports but has a headphone jack?
Buy a Framework, I have 4 slots that can be everything from USB-A to C to RJ45 to card readers when I need it, and I can charge the thing from any port.
The correct way, really
I miss my clitmouse XD
Build quality for Dell is down over the past few years
Hijacking top comment to report that: This is true across the industry for (most) OEMs
The Secret is to buy “Enterprise level”
Check out the LATITUDE line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Latitude
Those are enterprise fleet laptops … the ones they have to support for 5-10 years.
You know which line they don’t discontinue parts for? You know which line has repair manuals and driver updates available? wanna take a wild guess which line is usually more modular and powerful at the expense of being less sleek looking and thin?
And the best part is that you can usually buy them fairly cheap if you find them used.
I prefer Dell Latitude to HP Elitebook, Thinkpads are OK too but they’ve gone down in quality a lot since they got bought by Lenovo
TL;DR = Buy an enterprise level laptop, consumer line laptops are all trash,
Tbf I took “build quality for Dell is down” to mean the Latitude lineup because their non-enterprise lineups… eh… I’ve never seen one with any build quality.
Top tip, buy a used enterprise laptop. You can get one hell of a deal when big companies throw their entire lineup out after a few years and flood the market. Some have a few scuffs here and there, but others are mint after sitting plugged to a dock for the last three years in a row.
Might need a new battery though, so research how easy it’s to swap and calculate that in the cost just in case.I got a couple of latitudes and found they had soldered ram so I couldn’t upgrade them later 😭
Unfortunately soldered ram and non replaceable batteries are becoming more common on the ultralights … Thanks Apple
It’s not JUST because they’re copying Apple, it’s because there’s no SO-DIMM LPDDR and LPDDR uses less power (Low Power DDR).
With CAMM2 being an actual standardized thing that is fairly thin (though the modules do take up more area than SO-DIMMs) AND supports LPDDR (in slightly smaller modules than regular DDR CAMM2), we might yet get back our user-replaceable RAM. As for batteries - never have they been truly non-replaceable, but of course quick swaps aren’t a thing for many laptops these days. Almost not a bad thing if you consider how often the battery latch fails on laptops with quickly replaceable batteries.
Lenovo has been making thinkpads for 20 years. The complaint that their quality is still less than how laptops were manufactured 2 decades ago feels rather dated.
Oh my god this post made me feel ancient, I was still thinking that was like 10 years tops. 💀
The Latitudes are balls in the worst way. Including the new “Pro” models. I’ve had i7 and i9 Latitudes that are slower than my i5 XPS 13, and yeah that thing sucks too but at least it sucks predictably.
Replying to my own comment to give yall one more tidbit.
The latitude product nomenclature is still standard
- 2 first digits of the model number are the “class” the higher the laptop the more high end
- last 2 digits of the model number are the generation (we are current in 60)
So for example the Latitude 9460 is the very high end laptop that came out at the beginning of this year while the 3540 was the entry level economy latitude that came out in 2023
My 6430 is chugging along as a nas on its 8 th year+ after being discontinued as daily workhorse. Running 24/7.
Shiiizzz i got a T32 with dual touchpad and thumbmouse… like 15 years old and still runs like a champ.
Yes , quality has gone down
The enterprise ones are shit too.
That’s why I got a thinkpad. Built like a tank.
Not the capacitive touch bar!
Replacing the function keys with a capacitive bar was the stupidest thing they have ever done. So silly that even Apple walked back on that design choice.
Any serious laptop buyer would rule out a laptop just for that. And any casual buyer looking to spend XPS money on a laptop is going to buy a MacBook.
I’m glad the XPS line is back but unfortunately for Dell Windows is worse than ever.
And the worst part is, Apple has a lot more influence over software on MacOS than Dell does over software on Windows. Meaning Apple was able to influence at least some (though not most by any measure) 3rd party developers to make the touchbar context aware. I somehow doubt Dell had any such luck, so it would’ve been even worse than the Apple touchbar which was already shit.
In fact, had Apple included it in their whole lineup for a few years, it could’ve actually been useful. But Airs and 2 TBT3 13" Pros never got it, neither did the ubercrappy 12". A huge issue was the lack of adoption by developers (because to make it truly useful, they’d have to customize the touchbar for their application), but why would the developers have been motivated to do it if the thing wasn’t even on every new device sold.
The touch bar worked well for me on a Macbook. Most of the hotkeys there use cmd+something instead of the f-keys, so I needed the f-keys with only a couple apps, namely Double Commander. But what’s better, there are apps to put custom controls into the touch bar. The most useful one for me was the button to hand off the Bluetooth headphones from the laptop to the phone or vice versa (via a bash script of mine). Plus I could also have app-specific custom buttons.
My work gave me a Mac with this. I absolutely hated it - constantly triggering random things I didn’t want or need and apparently something about the wiring caused the physical keyboard to fail prematurely.
Fortunately we’ve moved on from those dark days. I still have to use a Mac, but at least there’s no touch bar.
I’m a fan of unusual control surfaces and this thing has had me salivating for years. Sadly they’re pretty difficult to procure so I haven’t had the chance of owning one (and probably realizing they’re not all that great irl)
The touch bar is pretty good if a) most everyday shortcuts you use are on the modifiers and the alphanumeric keyboard instead of the f-keys, and b) you can put custom controls in the touch bar. Both of these are true with Macbook: there’s a third-party app for controlling the touch bar. E.g. I’ve put in it a button to handoff the Bluetooth headphones from the laptop to the phone or the other way around.
Also helps if you’re using an external keyboard, while the laptop is sitting on a stand. This way the touch bar is just an additional control surface.
But, if you use laptop as a stationary machine, you can just buy an external touch control. Though they’re probably pricey due to the small specialist market.
My dream was to get an external one as an additional surface but when I looked it was almost impossible to find one. That was some years ago so the market may have cleared since.
Also Lenovo, who were the first ones to give than nonsense a whirl (X1 Carbon Gen 2, 2014).
Lenovo’s was present for just that single generation. Apple kept it for 6 generations over 7 years. Dell 4 generations, 3 years.
Can’t say I’ll miss any of them.
I feel like it doesn’t have to be either or? I’d like a touch bar in addition to fn keys. Too bad nobody is making that option.
I don’t see anything wrong with touch bar+proper control keys either. There isn’t anything inherently bad about a touch bar in itself.
But replacing your function keys with a touch bar is a bad idea. It’s not standard.
Sticking to standards plus giving other alternative control methods are fine. Kind of like how Asus implements a numpad into the toucpad. I think it’s a gimmick but it doesn’t hurt anyone.
It was dumb. Forced you to always look at your keyboard.
Seems like the new naming scheme didn’t work out after all, eh?
Wondering the same. Did they ditch the iphone like naming?
Sure hope so
I’ll never buy an xps again. Last one needed pretty much everything replacing, and within 3 years dell stopped manufacturing the battery!!
$2k on a laptop that’s a brick within 3 years?
Framework 13 all the way
I cancelled my framework 16 order because of their “big tent” policy meaning they give funding to Hyperland and Omarchy, I will not give my money to people who fund racists
What’s wrong with Omarchy?
Omarchy
DHH is pretty fucking racist, white replacement theory is right up there with the worst of racist beliefs
I thought I might move there one day. That was then. Now, I wouldn’t dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it’s no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third.
Eh, I get it, but you can’t win every battle.
I have a 16 and a 13. I bought them both before that thread.
I am not expecting my single cancellation to make the slightest difference to their policy, they already made it clear that they are quite happy funding racists when multiple people have challenged them over it, and with one of their larger pots of cash they give out as well.
What I am getting out of is knowing I am not (indirectly) funding racists myself, rather than knowingly funding racists. I do not see it any different from buying products from Musk, if you did it ages ago then fine, but after, thats something else entirely.
I get it, but also if I stopped buying everything from every racist / racist supporter, I would have no real options for laptops generally speaking.
Michael Dell is a complete and total Trump supporter. Should I buy an XPS?
Tim Cook designed and delivered a custom award to Trump. Knowing this, should I buy an Apple?
I understand wanting to vote with your dollars but in practice there are few or no ethical options for many things that you can buy.
Tim Cook designed and delivered a custom award to Trump.
Which looked like a gold-plated plastic turd, but Trump likely can’t recognize that with his absence of taste. Apple so obviously could make something better-looking that I’ve had a solid chuckle seeing that shit, and my opinion of Apple hadn’t moved. In exchange for that piece of crap they’ve gotten Trump to lay his mitts off tariffs on what Apple needed, so sounds like a job well done to me. It’s not Apple’s business to topple an idiot that stupid USian public elected.
The turd was just the icing on top of the shit cake dude. They gave that jack off millions of dollars.
I’ve had a solid chuckle seeing that shit, and my opinion of Apple hadn’t moved.
Welp, then I guess you’re the type of customer they fully deserve.
I wouldn’t buy a Dell because I wouldn’t trust the hardware, his position is just the icing. Whole reason I wanted the framework was because I wanted something to last a very long time, I simply do not trust Dell to provide support or parts long term.
The Tim Apple situation hurt, as I really liked the apple silicon for build quality and I had an old Intel Macbook that did indeed last a very long time (still boots even now). However their RAM/Storage pricing for what is an essential amount of storage for me mean even without Timmys boot licking making them a non starter.
I wont buy Nvidia because of their shitty Linux support, Huang being an absolute womble
Lenovo is about as good as you getting for a mainstream brand, and they are ultimately owned by the CCP so meh.
I think with Framework it particularly hurts as at least with Dell or Apple they are quite openly rimming Trump because it will give them competitive advantage and tax cuts while they never really pretended to be for the public good.
WTF do Framework get by supporting Hyperland or Omarchy? Its literary supporting your racist uncle who makes moonshine for half a dozen people when you set yourself up to be an ethical alternative whose current market is more likely to be ethical seeking. Imagine if Oxfam or Doctors without Borders started supporting Trump? World of difference from the NRA supporting Trump due to the starting position.
Lenovo is about as good as you getting for a mainstream brand, and they are ultimately owned by the CCP so meh.
In addition to being owned by the CCP, they purposely installed rootkits on consumer hardware for intense data gathering, and it ended up getting compromised.
Yeah, the whole situation sucks. I totally agree and wish that framework would reconsider their position on the matter.
The country is basically unrecognizable at this point IMO. The capitulation that has occurred so quickly in the second Trump term was stunning to behold. For a vast array of industries (computers being one of them), every reasonably ethical option feels like it flew out the window.
Thank you for your position. While I appreciate the framework idea, and stated mission — in reality I don’t trust them, so I don’t mix the mission with them, the mission is valuable, them, I wouldn’t be so sure — I feel the same. I don’t want to support them now. It’s a complicated situation we’re in, regarding the state of the tech, but I don’t like this ‘we have to help them, just because we can unscrew their backpanel easily.’ The modules isn’t something I’m impressed with, I think that’s overthinking. I’d rather have a tiny laptop with nothing and a huge laptop with everything. Looks like Apple got this.
I do not trust them either, not after this.
The apple silicon looks amazing, it would be my choice if I didn’t really dislike Tim Apple, and Apples excessive price gouging with storage and RAM pushing what would be a usable model for my requirements up significantly.
Equipping the base laptop with 256Gb of storage in the current year then charging how much to jump to even 512Gb, which is still pretty small amount, is a piss take.
They are are bad for RAM upgrade pricing, at least the base model has 16Gb. With both storage and RAM being soldered on, you are stuck either using external drives or cloud storage.
Second hand would be my pick, that way Apple do not see a penny of the money.
Yes, but jokes aside, it seems like you can find whatever you need for MacBooks from circa 2010 to 2012. At least, when I needed something, I could find it without issues.
I prefer my to buy computers from companies that aren’t actively combating repairability efforts for their products and purposefully making them prematurely obsolete.
And those are…
Framework for one, but just about any other computer maker is better by that metric.
While I agree, I’d like Apple (and others) to make repairability better (or even exist), but as an owner of quite a lot of Apple tech, it’s very well made, usually. Until it breaks, obviously, but it breaks less than a random cheap brand. At least for me. Any other computer maker is rather unable to lock down the devices the same way. I bet they’d happily do so, if given the opportunity. Plenty of modern laptops with non-swappable memory and even SSDs.
I’m a little miffed with framework actually.
I had a order with them that they chose to cancel because they just randomly charged the account one day months after I had pre-ordered something, and there wasn’t enough money in the account because I didn’t know when they were going to charge for it. They didn’t contact me or anything, they just cancelled the order. Thanks guys.
Edit: Deleted an extra word
I never ordered a Framework before but I’m planning to do this year. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Last time I visited their site it was written that you pay a reserve price at the time of order, then they charge your card later with the remainig price before they ship it.
Right but who has like three grand just sitting in a checking account, that shit in a savings account because I’m not Bill Gates and I need every penny I can get from the interest? If they’re not going to tell you at the time that you pre-order when they’re going to bill you, then they need to contact you ahead of time or that’s going to keep happening.
Since when are there savings accounts with interest rates worth even calculating? The interest rate on my savings account is down at 0.01%.
Right but who has like three grand just sitting in a checking account, that shit in a savings account because I’m not Bill Gates and I need every penny I can get from the interest?
Dude use a credit card.
I mean, I have that in my account. But I’m also paranoid about bounced checks and don’t see the appeal of getting a nickel a month in exchange for worrying about something suddenly eating my float and causing bounced checks.
The interest rate on the checking account tied to my checking is not great…
Excuse me everybody, I just wanted to intercept and say that if that was written as Bill fucking Gates, that would be so much funnier :)
Literally no one does it like that…no one. You place an order for something that’s backordered, they also don’t charge you until it’s shipped, and you won’t get notified beforehand either.
Notify me would literally be an email they couldn’t even be bothered to do that.
You would have thought they actually wanted the three grand, like contacting me cost cost them nothing and they didn’t do it they just cancelled the order.
I cannot express this part enough, the time between the pre-order and them charging me was like 5 months. I’m not going to keep massive amounts of money in a personal account for months on end just so they can randomly charge for it on a arbitrary Wednesday afternoon that’s ridiculous.
That sucks. I’ve also had mixed experiences with their support arm but the hardware and designs are pretty top notch. It really is nice to buy a laptop that isn’t inevitably headed for the landfill in five years.
What are you on about? I’ve been running a 9370 for 7 years, only replaced the battery last year and now I’m back at 8 hours. I changed the cooling paste just the other week. Best laptop I’ve ever owned, the only thing I’d want is a larger trackpad. There’s just a small amount of coil whine so I might replace the fans if it gets worse.
Keeping in mind I’ve abused this thing, was in my backback on my two major falls on my eboard. Only bending one of the corners slightly. This thing is a tank and a powerhouse.
Um, I was just sharing my experience with an xps. You have different experience, with a different xps model I’d guess. I’m glad you’re happy with it!
I didn’t even share the worst part of my experience: when it died it just died, refused to turn on. Immediate brick, no warning. This has happened to quite a few people I found, from frantic searching at the time.
I’ve bought dell for 20 years but their quality has been falling for the last decade, in my opinion and based on having bought about a dozen (for various people).
Yeah I’d be mad as hell too, I’ve heard their customer service is pretty terrible as well. I haven’t really noticed the quality issues though.
Cool story
Enlightening comment, what you want? Proof?
1 Hz display option: like an e-Ink display?
(it says 120Hz in the article)
They might mean down to 1hz like some smart phones do, to save battery.
There’s a 1920 x 1200 non-touch display option, which will surely get you better battery life than OLED. But what’s most interesting about it is the 1-120 Hz variable refresh rate, which Dell says is a first to for this model. That extremely low refresh should help save power when static images or text is on the screen.
Ah yeah, I should have read the rest of the article. I didn’t know about that feature though, that’s cool
Oh boy, always on oled displays are so in now.
Feel the burn-in
Probably not as bad as you might think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbEgQrigiLc
but yeah not sure how much worse it would be if always on…
There’s a lighter band at the top of the screen on my phone, corresponding to the darker header area in the RedReader app for Reddit. Just from using that app every day. Though that seems to be kinda reverse burn-in, in that the rest of the screen became darker since I use the light colorscheme.
On the desktop, the taskbar alone would definitely burn in with my usage patterns. And probably also the tabs and the status bar in the editor.
Might also depend on the model and if it does any sort of burn in protection processes such as pixel orbiting. My partner has been using a Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED for productivity about 4hrs a day for about the past 3 years and it doesn’t have any noticeable burn in yet(lots of other really annoying software UI issues though, because Samsung… 😅)
That’s slower than a car blinker. An impractical refresh rate for OLED; did you mean 1 fps?
Edit: turns out OLEDs, like LCDs, use TFT technology to stay on between refreshes so it’s fine.
And yes, smartphones have refrained from redrawing unchanged display areas for years. You can enable “Show surface updates” in Android developer settings (flashing lights warning) to get an idea. Usually, the display gets divided into vertical areas: status bar, main app, keyboard, navbar, and each only updates if there is a change.
1 Hz is 1 fps. Hertz = cycles per second
I know what hertz is, I’m en electrotechnician. The display’s refresh rate is measured in hertz, and has to be at least 40 Hz or you suffer from headaches and some from photosensitive epilepsy. (edit: only applies if the screen goes black between refreshes, which I just learned OLED, unlike CRTs, doesn’t.) Ideally 100 Hz or more. But the image (frames per second) does not have to change that often. For example, movies are 24 fps but 35mm film projectors are 72 Hz: they flash each frame 3x before advancing (using a three-blade shutter) because 24 Hz is seizure-inducing but using a unique picture for each refresh (72 fps) is expensive. Similarly, your OLED TV is 144 Hz when gaming at 144 fps (if you can afford that), when watching a 60fps gaming video or 24fps movie: the screen controller works the same all the time but the picture it’s fed changes more or less frequently.
If an OLED screen refreshed at 1 Hz,
you’d see a line going down the displayedit: I learned about TFT OLEDs which don’t do that. So it never goes below 60 Hz. However, the phone can reduce animation fps when the CPU can’t keep up or to save battery. 1 fps is extremely choppy though, I don’t know where OP got that. I did once use a phone capped to that framerate (via adbcontrol pre-Lollipop where the screenshot is transmitted over USB) and it was awfully non-responsive.That’s some pretty confidently incorrect posting. Most gaming displays these days have some flavor of adaptive sync available that adjusts the refresh rate to the content being displayed, and even before that there were film modes that set the refresh rate to the ~24 fps(or a multiple if it) that film content is at to avoid stuttering/tearing.
This is likely the bottom of the adaptive sync window and will only be used if the machine is idle
I edited it, I thought all OLEDs worked like this little one where the pixels turn off between refreshes (in fact, in this passive matrix, only 1 line is on at a time, even the high-speed camera has an overly long shutter). Turns out there are TFTs that keep them on. Thanks for teaching me this.
What you’re describing is AMOLED. Nobody calls them TFT OLEDs.
It’s pretty silly to through around credentials.
Here’s a video of an OLED TV updating in slow motion. The pixels are on in between updates so it really doesn’t matter how fast it’s updating it’s not going to cause headaches or any of the problems that we used to associate with strobing style displays. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54E3uUEryZM
It’s pretty silly to through around credentials.
What’s the deal with Lemmy being so abrasive all the time. Sometimes I think some of us should be put in time out with just hacker news for a month to teach us some manners…
Do you disagree with me thinking it’s silly to through around credentials on the internet or just how I communicated it?
I did edit after posting to tone it down some but perhaps not enough?
Well, on some they aren’t.
But yes, TIL that some OLEDs do in fact work continuously thanks to TFTs
That display is using BFI (black frame insertion) which is usually optional to reduce blur.
No, I meant what I said. The article says “hz” and so do other phone manufacturers offering the same feature. It may be marketing wank or technically incorrect but that’s what it’s referred to as.
But, hz of a monitor is not like a car blinker or CRT televisions where it’s off in between the updates. It is on in between the updates, it’s just not the new image. In which case it doesn’t matter how slow your performing the updates because the pixels are just on with a static picture in between the updates.
hz of a monitor is not like a car blinker or CRT televisions where it’s off in between the updates. It is on in between the updates
Yes, it is on OLED, unless they’ve added active storage like TFT LCDs. In which case, that’s cool technology they’ve invented.
It says 1-120 Hz in the article (for battery saving and e.g. ehen there’s static images on the display).
deleted by creator
1 Hz display option
Btw, is there something like Adaptive Sync for display servers? Although most devices’ drivers only allow for 30 or 20 Hz minimum, automatic change from energy saving (reading static text) to high refresh (scrolling text, playing video) would be neat.
And while we’re on it: recalculating all 4 million pixels just because you moved the cursor is kinda a clutch, no? Not to mention 30+ times in the second just because.
I was confused when I read that part of the title, I thought they accidentally typed it instead of 120. A 1hz display for all functions would be a hilarious thing to play with for a minute or two.
Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was ‘compressed screen updates’, which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.
Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn’t easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.
Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.
Jesus fuck were those connections bad. I’ve got at least three dead Dell mobos in the parts bin because of them. it’s like the engineer’s thought the little smd USB/power ports would be enough to “hold it”.
what the fuck is a 1 HZ display option
It says in the article: Energy saving and for static images
it does WHAT
it Hertzes
Ouch my bones!
Guessing: when the image is not being updated (you’re reading an article and not scrolling, you’re looking at a photo, etc), the display will change the referral refresh rate to 1 frame per second, which will drastically reduce power consumption.
That’s how it works on other devices that have this feature, at least.
Some Android phones do it too!
It dynamically regulates the refresh rate down to 1hz to save energy, it’s like an LTPO panel on a phone
Good Lord, they’re copying that hideous notch design from the macbooks.
On one hand, its not that bad on a Mac… but that’s because the OS is designed in such a way where there’s nothing there and it sorta gets lost. Windows isn’t like that at all.
On the other hand, At least its not right above the keyboard like some of the ones we have at work… the “up the nose” cam is not flattering.
Just give me a bezel, I want a machine not a fashion accessory.
I hate the notch, and I used to say I’d rather have a bezel, but after going back to one of my pre-notch laptops, not having a bezel is nice. I still hate the notch though. I wish I could opt for just not having a built in webcam. It’s not like they use it for faceid, and I use an external webcam for work meetings anyway. Plus the iPhone seamlessly works as a webcam.
The pessimist sees the notch as wasted space, the optimist sees it as extra screen.
For xps price, they need to stick it under the screen. I hard pass on needless bezel and always on notch.
They literally had the small bezel and the camers on top in a previous XPS model.
Yeah, but no notch, so the bezel wasn’t excessive or needless. I still passed on it, though. But that’s a personal choice.
I realize my tone could be misinterpreted, my intention was to support your comment on the new model and how it can look like a step backward compared to previous models.
My intention was not to refute your comment. :)
but that’s because the OS is designed in such a way where there’s nothing there
This is not true. There are multiple third party apps that help you avoid having menu icons disappear behind the notch. I don’t use those though, and instead blindly drag my menu icons behind the notch repeatedly until the one I want pops out from behind it.
Yikes, just apple things I guess
but that’s because the OS is designed in such a way where there’s nothing there
Ehh OSX uses the top of the screen as a menu bar so for apps which have a lot of menu bar options, those are gone. A lot of third party apps also let you place helpful widgets on the menu bar so that’s kinda not a thing anymore either.
You don’t use macOS do you? Any apps that have that many items on the menu bar are simply pushed to the right of the notch. There is 2” of blank menu bar in 99% of all use cases.
And if you still don’t like it, you bump the uninterrupted menu bar under the notch fully and everything above it (to the left and right of the notch) black as if there’s a bezel.
If the app menu spills over to the other side of the notch it hides all your utility icons with no good way to access them. Even Windows XP handled that situation better, I don’t understand why MacOS still sucks at it.
It doesn’t look like a notch. The picture with the lock screen doesn’t show the image going up around the camera.
No clit-mouse, no deal.
(There are dozens of us. Dozens!)
that limits you to power books, no?
Lenovo Thinkpads are the only reliable choice pretty much and even then it’s a bit of a crapshoot whether they include them or not. HP Elitebooks used to have them too but it seems like they also stopped in 2021. Apple’s never had them as far as I know. There’s a few other one-off small-run options here and there too but they’re few and far between.
I realize I’m in a very significant minority, but personally, having access to the mouse pointer for short jogs here and clicks there without my hands leaving the keyboard home row is a gamechanger and a non-negotiable feature to me. I’d never claim it’s a great way to move the mouse, but it has extremely high utility due to its convenient positioning, it’s always available even in tight quarters, and anytime space permits it pairs well with a secondary, traditional mouse for movements that are more numerous or complex or need more precision, it works very well with a text-heavy workflow.
It’s a mouse for people who would rather minimize their mouse usage, and I guess that’s me, or at least that’s the workflow I’ve gravitated to all my life. It’s not an ideology thing, it’s simply the fact that it’s deep muscle memory now, and whenever I try to use any computer without one I struggle so much, and I’ve actively tried more than once to wean myself off it, I can’t, it becomes a constant irritation that any other mouse feels so disconnected from my typing.
Touchpads are just insanely frustrating to use, I have no idea how some people tolerate using them daily unless it’s all they’ve ever known, and touchscreens are even worse in some ways since your fingers block the screen exactly where you’re trying to press, not to mention getting fingerprint smudges all over it even with the best techno-magic coatings. I loathe them both.
I probably got a lemon but regardless my XPS (~3 years old) is the worst computer I’ve ever owned. Touchy WiFi, battery that goes from 30 to 3℅ in a matter of seconds, randomly doesn’t detect the keyboard, randomly freezes, randomly doesn’t acknowledge it’s plugged in. Some days I just put it in timeout and use my 10yo netbook instead.
You never contacted dell for a warranty? That definitely sounds like a lemon to me
Why would you put up with that? Why wouldn’t you demand a replacement.
Have the put the cord for the port replicator and the USB port on the laptop on the right side to plug it into the laptop without having to route it around itself yet?
