SNIP
BTW never buy a Dell precision 5550. Horrid horrid thing. They tried to copy Apple at every stage and fucked it up massively. I’d be really pissed off if I’d paid for it.
Personally I always thought that Dell was a shit show anyway, I don't think that from all the computers I've had the pleasure of working (as in repairing), none have been such bad performers as Dell's. I have been given a Dell Dimension 5520 tower that currently sits under my desk/bench that I was supposed to be returning into a games machine to play my many games that need windoze XP or 7 to run on. The thing it is still sitting there 2 years later, I can't be arsed to do it because it will be a disappointment I'm sure.
The old precision desktops were fairly good but the consumer desktops were vile bits of crap. As were the laptops. This carries through.
My specific complaints are as follows so you can see what a shitty job they did, mostly comparing to a MacBook Pro.
1. It’s packed like an Apple machine ie nearly with plastic pull tab to get it out. However the box liner is made of shit plastic and when you pull the plastic tab the laptop gets stuck in the box because it warps.
2. When you eventually tip the box upside down to get it out all the other crap falls out onto the floor.
3. Everything is covered with self adhesive plastic which leaves residue on the charger. Apple only put the glue on bits that stick to other bits of wrapper.
4. The charger runs hotter than Satan’s bollocks. New Apple M1’s run cold.
5. The entire laptop weighs a whole Kg more than a 15” MacBook Pro. It’s close to my massive HP Elitebook from the dark ages.
6. It arrived dead in the box and needed charging right away for ten minutes before it would even boot. This was a custom build.
7. The power button isn’t even marked on it and is shared with the finger print reader.
8. Half the edit keys require hitting the Fn meta keys which make it hell for programming on.
9. The entire palm rest area is made of the shittiest plastic they could muster. It feels horrible like a chalk board.
10. Only 2/3 of the space bar actually can be pressed.
11. The trackpad has really poor palm rejection meaning you have to constantly hold your hands like a spider legging it.
12. It’s impossible to reliably right click on it because they copied Apple’s tap two fingers and did a terrible job of it.
13. You can’t press to click on the top inch of the touchpad at all and you have varying pressure across the rest of it which makes reliably clicking difficult.
14. The thing is loud. When I’ve got the dryer going in the next room I can hear the laptop over it.
15. SD card reader isn’t a latching one so the card sticks out while it’s being used.
16. Battery life is abysmal. I got 2 hours out of it doing normal software dev work.
It’s a complete failure of a machine from end to end. Hence its being parked on the desk and used as a network access desktop via RDP. At the same time I’m going to get them to order a replacement thinkpad which is definitely going to be better than this turd.
Honestly at this point if this is what people think is decent on the PC side of things, which is possible as this thing actually has positive reviews (?!??!?) then the whole market just needs to curl up and die.