I’ve been using a Dell XPS 15 for a week, and this is my review (from a developer’s point of view):
Pros:
- Display: It has a nice 15" display with a resolution of 3200 x 1800 (higher DPI than the MacBook Retina Display).
- Weight: It is a light notebook, of about 2 kilos.
- It is very fast. And it boots in a just a few seconds.
- It doesn’t come with crapware
- The keyboard is Ok. I like that you can toggle the Functions keys by pressing Fn + Esc.
- Great unboxing experience, but who cares?
Cons:
- Did I mention that it has a 3200 x 1800 display ? That is great. But the problem is that a lot of programs are not ready to run in High-DPI mode. All Qt and GTK based applications look horrible; even some Microsoft applications like Skype don’t look OK; the YouTube flash player looks too small; Havok Anarchy is unusable on this notebook; Eclipse icons are too small; and so on.
- adb doesn’t recognize my Nexus 7. I’m not sure why yet.
- It comes with Windows 8.1, instead of Windows 8.1 Pro
- The display is “touch”. Why do I need one? I cannot clean the display with my fingers. Is there a way to disable this feature? Although I found it useful to play 10000000.
- The touchpad is OKish, not great, but not terrible either. But I was expecting something of higher quality, given that this is a top-end notebook.
Overall:
- I was looking for a MacBook Retina Display-like notebook for Windows. And although it is not as polished as the MB, it is good-enough as long as your favorite applications works OK on High-DPI machines. Visual Studio works great, so no major issues for me.
