The new Macbook Pro 15z... I mean Dell...

[InsanelyApple]

You really need 1080p on a 15" screen?

Wow.

If resolution independence was on the OS.

 

[getz76]

If resolution independence was on the OS.

Well put.

 

[Mackilroy]

First of all even firewire 800 tops out at 800Mbs (100MB/s), which is *still* slower than a lot of new drives, and second of all... point me to a nice selection of firewire thumbdrives, please? yeah, I thought so.

Firewire 800 was Apple's design. Thunderbolt is not. Come Ivy Bridge, both USB3 and TB are going to be on the chipset.

Thunderbolt is going to have similar adoption problems to firewire I suspect, though I'd love to be proven wrong. But even if I am wrong it will never have market coverage in certain areas that USB3's bandwidth will be a boon to consumers (like thumbdrives - it's nice, and rather essential considering how people use them, if your thumbdrive can work, albiet at slower speeds, on computers older than "brand new").

Perhaps it will, but we'll see. Consumers will get by either way. And yes, I like my thumb drive too – but it's up to the people who make them to choose what port they'll use. Maybe we'll see both TB and USB3 thumb drives. Maybe we won't.

Lastly your comment was that USB3 was clearly unnecessary for a consumer, I gave you examples where it's useful, and you gave me wharrgarbl that really didn't justify your original position, care to rethink?

No, I don't care to rethink. When is the average consumer transferring more than a few hundred megabytes at once (with the exception of an initial backup)? I can count on one hand the number of times in the past seven years that anyone I knew – no matter their background –*transferred more than fifty megabytes at once on a flash drive. I see people using CDs or the Internet to transfer files far more often, and even then they're still not usually above a few dozen megabytes.

If I replaced USB3 and USB with Thunderbolt and Firewire, your argument would sound exactly the same. USB's only advantage was market penetration, and with Intel putting Thunderbolt on the chipset, we'll see more products being made to use it.

BTW, the next Apple machines *will* have USB3, no doubt about it, since Intel is including USB3 native in all it's chipsets for it's next gen chips (Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge's die shrink). Will you applaud USB3 when Apple has it?

Also, gotta say, this reminds me of the firewire/USB2 debate on Apple boards and lists back when we had FW400 and USB1.1 and people were saying "why would you need USB2, we have firewire!"

Remarkably, I've also heard of Sandy Bridge, and I also know that USB3 will be included on the chipset (as I said above). Amazing, huh? And no, I won't be applauding Apple once USB3 is on the chipset.

I remember those days as well. I wish Firewire had replaced USB, but it didn't, and so here we are today.

I used to manage a Dell based cluster for my Uni, I have worked with Dell on a number of projects, and I've owned lots of Dell hardware. I've found their support to be generally quite good (and their business support excellent!).

I wonder what the difference is, as my university mostly used Dell laptops – not so much clusters. They would return laptops we'd sent to them for repair in poor condition – bad batteries, missing parts, and so on – and while they did get better at it over time, they never matched any of the other PC manufacturers we used.

 

[iTootyFrooty]

I have the normal XPS 15 (Dad wouldn't justify paying more than £900 for a laptop, but at least I have an iPad) and can honestly say it is a great system. The Speakers are the best in the business,so too is its performance and the trackpad comes quite close to the MBP's. The only things I can say that they need to improve on are the screen (I didnt get the Full HD screen, which I hear is as good if not better than the MBPs), the battery life (you can get nine cell, but sticks out and still isnt as good as MBP), thickness and the cooling system. The XPS 15z is said to have 8.5 hrs of battery life (I find dells estimates accurate, I achieve the 3 hours that dell say the XPS15 gets with normal use) and is also a lot thinner. If they kept the rest the same, then I'd have to say it does contend to some extent with the Macbook Pro's.