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Please help me justify $800 difference between MBP and XPS M1530

I had a 1530 for about 4 days, and sent it back. Bought the MBP, and have been nothing but happy.

Ive been running Macs for the past 3 yrs. I decided to give dell a try again, since thats what i had before the "Mac Age" in my house. The 1530 arrived, and seemed terribly slow with maxxed specs. Vista did its indexing thing and finished in a few days or so, and it just got slower, and slower.

The main reason i sent it back: the 1680x1050 display. I got a dud, it had a coating of "dust" looking on the LCD all over, it was absolutely unbearable. Dell offered to exchange the unit. I simply asked: "why would you send this out in the first place? You can have the laptop back, and ill take my business elsewhere". Too many people jump on replacements and dont go with another brand. Thats why companies make consumers jump through hoops so much, they are willing to.

I wasnt.
 
1. Its not a Dell
2. It doesnt run on Windows
3. It looks better
4. OS X
5. Its made by Apple

All of those are good enough reasons alone to buy the Macbook Pro imo.:apple:
 
resale value -- 5 year old computers like the powerbook g4 still go for $600
they last longer -- I know many with 5 year old laptops that are still peppy
apple support (especially with apple care)
stability of OSX and compatability of windows via bootcamp

mosx said:
[snip]

Printers and scanners? Uh.. with every printer and scanner I have purchased in the past for XP, all I had to do was run the CD it came with and connect the USB cable when the installation software asked for it. With Vista, its just like OS X. Connect it and it works.
Click to expand...

haha your kidding right? half of my hardware became 'obsolete' with vista. i didn't even recognise my ipod at times and said it was corrupted. with windows, setting up wireless is not as easy as you make it seem. the stupid limited or no connectivity message pops up and it tells me to connect a network cable when i'm trying to set up wifi!
 
a few things off the top of my head that make a hardware difference between the apple and the dell, for what it's worth:

- 32-bit windows can't read 4 gigs of ram, so you're stuck with being able to use 3.3, nor can it take full advantage of the 64-bit architecture it's running on.
- the case is thinner on the mbp, and better designed
- the mbp is slightly lighter
- you pay a slight premium for the metal enclosure, which has its ups and downs (not as brittle as plastic, but more easily dented).
- the build quality of the mbp only really becomes apparent once you are able to hold one in your hands, so visit an apple store and take a look.
 
Apple:
Build quality
Customer support
Apple stores
OSX
Re-sale value

Dell:
save ~$450-550

Up to you ultimately. If it was me, I would take the Apple, and this is from someone who recently switched from windows primarily for 15 years.
I have no problem paying a bit more for a well designed machine with good customer support. Its the same reason I bought an Audi over a Honda.

Don't get me wrong, I've used a friends XPS and it was a nice little unit, but the build quality on some parts was below par, not to mention having to use vista/xp on it.
 
Remember...

You should remember, the only reason it seems like there are loads of problems with Apple products from reading this forum is that this is a HELP forum.

Think about it, people only really post here if they have an issue or problem, so these kinds of comments far outweigh the positive posts.

For me, nothing compares to Apple, but if money is tight, you may want to think about your options:)
 
Its like this...when I tell people I'm a Mac user they always say something to down talk Macs or they'll defend PC's. I could care less what people choose to use, use what makes you happy. Having been a long time PC user, I immediately saw the Difference and Value in Macs after a few months of use. The point is, if you've never used or owned a Mac its hard to explain or justify the price difference. In a nutshell, you'll find most Mac users are not just happy but love their Macs.

That is what you are really paying for.
 
elmz said:
Its like this...when I tell people I'm a Mac user they always say something to down talk Macs or they'll defend PC's. I could care less what people choose to use, use what makes you happy. Having been a long time PC user, I immediately saw the Difference and Value in Macs after a few months of use. The point is, if you've never used or owned a Mac its hard to explain or justify the price difference. In a nutshell, you'll find most Mac users are not just happy but love their Macs.

That is what you are really paying for.
Click to expand...



I tend to agree. It's hard to justify if you only look at price and specifications, but the real value is in the relatively fun and stable user experience, no viruses yet and really good support. Apple seems to have a lot of hardware quality control issues these days, but I'd still say that the average mac user experience is infinitely better than the average windows user experience.
 
OS X. if you want OS X, you're stuck with the MBP unless you feel like messing with the x86 hackery project.

not much else there is too it.

also, whats wrong with used machines?

if these questions were answered earlier, i apologize, no way in hell am i reading all this crap...
 
akadmon said:
I'm a dad (with a college bound daughter), and I own/use a mac. I'm sorry if some people find this offensive, but I too find myself questioning the Apple premium.
Click to expand...


Economics 101, if people will buy it at that price why wouldnt apple sell it at that price? If sales drop the price will drop.
 
Comp Sci vs Everything else

akadmon said:
I'm a dad (with a college bound daughter), and I own/use a mac. I'm sorry if some people find this offensive, but I too find myself questioning the Apple premium.
Click to expand...

Compsci majors are the only people who should by winblows machines because you will need the training in Computer Science to keep it running well.

If you just want to use the tool, then get a mac.

If you don't mind spending time dealing with computer issues, get winblows.

Nuff said.
 
Recent NPR story

NPR recently ran a story about people being shown a Apple symbol (the white apple logo) and IBM and other symbols. Just being shown the symbol actually increased the person's creativity.

$500 for a 25% bump in creativity? sounds cheap to me.

I think this get's at the larger picture. You are comparing apples to oranges and want to see how much juice each will produce. If all you care about is the level in the glass, get the Dell, but if you care about how it tastes and what it really means, re-examine what you do and see if there is any reason that you need all the junk that comes with owning a Windows machine. A lot has already been covered, but I think it comes down to:

1) Many macs run fine for YEARS without any anti-virus programs because Macs just don't get targeted much.

2) Dell's are cheaper partially because they will come with tons of crapware which will require HOURS to remove. At $15/hr (not a bad wage) you will probably put in around $200 in time removing all the "helpful" programs that are installed automatically on your computer. I just repaired a Sony that started with 104 programs running.... out of the box it had 104 processes. It hugged through Firefox and took 30 seconds to open Word because it was using 80% of it's memory just trying to manage all the bloatware that Sony was so nice to include free of charge.

the Moral: don't ask mac forums for mac vs other advise
 
I find it quite amazing going to a forum and asking strangers buying advice on your consumer electronics.
 
If you're looking for justification, just get the XPS. If you have justify a purchase obviously there is not reason to buy it.

If you want a OS X, get the MBP. Other wise why bother?
 
If you're on a budget then go for the M1530. I bought a couple M1330's last year and still have one left that I need to get sold as soon as it comes back from Dell depot getting a repair. I'll tell you right away though that the build quality of the XPS's don't compare to a MBP whatsoever. Certain parts of them feels very plastic and cheap and the lid feels like you could just easily snap it in half with not much force. You just can't compare plastic to brushed aluminum.

I'm not sure how the current screens available for the M1530 will compare to the LED screen in the MBP. I just looked and it appears they have a couple of different available options including a hi-def 1920x1200 screen which sounds pretty nice for a 15.4". You should probably check the Dell forum on some place like notebookreview.com to find out which is the best screen. The keyboards also aren't nearly as nice on any of the Dell notebooks. I've owned a few recent Lenovo ThinkPads as well and even with them the keyboards don't feel as soft and as nice to type on as the MBP.

One of the biggest caveats will be your decision between OS X and Vista. Vista isn't as horrible as some people make it out to seem and a whole lot of people, especially gamers, are running it now but it does have it's flaws. OS X is a lot lighter and easier to do simple tasks in. It's not as easily customizable as Windows is though. It's kind of like a stripped down OS that just gives you what you really need and leaves out certain advanced user stuff.

Go to Best Buy and try out both machines and see which one you like the most. That's pretty easy to do and it will give you a feel of what I was talking about in some of my points.
 
thejadedmonkey said:
If I could do it again, I'd get an XPS1330 with dedicated graphics.
Click to expand...

Do you still want one? I've got one in likenew condition as soon as it comes back from the Dell depot getting it's flimsy plastic touch button strip replaced lol. Speaking of that Dell apparently has the slowest depot repair in the world cause I sent that thing in back before Easter in March.
 
Xps 1530

I've got a bit of a laptop addiction and I've bought Macbook, Lenovo tablet (for work/travel) and a XPS 1530 in the last 15 months and have another Dell 9300 I bought 3 years ago. The most serious problem I had with any of them is that the Macbooks combo dvd/cd drive broke a few weeks after my warranty expired.

The most recent is a refurbished XPS 1530 from Dell with 2.6ghz core 2 duo 256mb nvidia 8600GT card, 3 GB RAM and 7200 rpm 160 GB drive and 1680x1050 screen, Vista Home premium and a Blu-Ray burner/player and after tax the total was $1460 with a 15% off refurbs coupon Dell had last week. The other option, which I'd been considering for a few months, was a refurbished Macbook Pro with very similar specs (2.6/256mb card, 1680x1050 screen) which was going to run me right about $2000 ($1860 or so +tax) and not have the Blu Ray player/burner.

In just a few days of use I've been really impressed by the 1530. It's really fast, plays COD4 and Crysis well and I've hooked it up to my HDTV and watched Blu-Ray movies which look fantastic. I already had some software that made up for the lack of iLife which helped to sway me too. (I had bought an XPS 420 desktop in December that came with an Adobe suite of Photoshop/Elements/Soundbooth and I got a free copy of Ultimate Office 2007 for participating in a program with them.

My Macbook core 2 duo 1.83 ghz I bought early last year has been great, my iPod on steriods as I've upped it to 2GB RAM and a 250 GB hard drive I like it, and have an iPhone as well but I didn't drink the Kool Aid. In another year and a half, once the Nehalem processor Macbook Pros have hit the refurb store I may well pick one up to replace my Macbook.

But weighing what I could get refurb-wise from both Dell and Apple the added bonus of the Blu Ray drive on the Dell in addition to paying $550 less for the same speed processor, video card, resolution screen, and the fact I already had some pretty nice software to make up for the lack of iLife made the decision easier.
 
to those people bashing Vista, i think that Vista runs find on xps m1530... since its new, i believe all its drivers are available for Vista, its just instaling XP on m1530 might be a problem(need to collect drivers etc.)

havent gotten spyware/viruses on my PC for like 6 years, the last time i did was b/c i was naive and went to bad sites :p [Nod32 is probably the best AV package, lightweight n fast]

Dell XPS Support is great, from what i heard... and i've seen many reviews praising Dell for their 'new' design, though it seems like a ripoff from Sony.... the problem with hte 'dusty' m1530 screen is the screen quality(seems like Samsung screens are to blame.....not Dell's manufacturing fault... u can return it or ask dell to replace it-> http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=215595 )

m1530 = T9300, nVidia 8600, 4GB ram, 4 yr warranty+accidental damage = $1450 @ Dell EPP
MBP >$1500 from what i heard

OSX? hackintosh (/me runs away from mac EULA)


don't get me wrong, i'm still stuck between choosing
Macbook vs XPS m1330 <-- portability
MBP vs XPS m1530 <-- power

but i'm 70% choosing dell
 
paperwastage said:
to those people bashing Vista, i think that Vista runs find on xps m1530... since its new, i believe all its drivers are available for Vista, its just instaling XP on m1530 might be a problem(need to collect drivers etc.)

havent gotten spyware/viruses on my PC for like 6 years, the last time i did was b/c i was naive and went to bad sites :p [Nod32 is probably the best AV package, lightweight n fast]

Dell XPS Support is great, from what i heard... and i've seen many reviews praising Dell for their 'new' design, though it seems like a ripoff from Sony.... the problem with hte 'dusty' m1530 screen is the screen quality(seems like Samsung screens are to blame.....not Dell's manufacturing fault... u can return it or ask dell to replace it-> http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=215595 )

m1530 = T9300, nVidia 8600, 4GB ram, 4 yr warranty+accidental damage = $1450 @ Dell EPP
MBP >$1500 from what i heard

OSX? hackintosh (/me runs away from mac EULA)


don't get me wrong, i'm still stuck between choosing
Macbook vs XPS m1330 <-- portability
MBP vs XPS m1530 <-- power

but i'm 70% choosing dell
Click to expand...

Go for MBP.

Until a few months ago I was completely in the Windows camp. Windows worked fine. I was used to it. OK, so I had to reinstall it from scratch every 9-12 months to clean out whatever spyware/garbage accumulated on it (and I run McAfee on it always) but that was OK.

Bought an MBA. Hated the fans. Ended up with a credit not a refund. Struggled with how the hell do I justify paying $2,500 for a computer. Since I was stuck with the credit got a base level MBP but upgraded the hard disk to 250GB for $50. So I paid $2050 for it. Thought I would just run windows in bootcamp or parallels/fusion.

I am now hooked on Mac and I'm not sure I can explain factually why. Things just work easier. The MBP is silent, thin enough, reasonably fast.

There is about a 3 week learning curve on Mac OS where you find all the features that you could easily do in windows and then boom, it just works. I cleared off my Bootcamp partition, I have Parallels with Office, etc, but I hardly ever use windows.

I can never go back; will be forced to overpay for a laptop forever now. Don't care! Don't know why.

Maybe look at it this way. DON'T try a mac. You'll get hooked if you do.
 
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