Teardown nerds delve into Dell's new XPS 15 laptop to find – fancy that – screws and user-serviceable parts
- Reference: 1594997954
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/17/ifixit_dell_xps_15/
- Source link:
That's a good thing, as Reg readers will know. This discovery puts the equivalent [1]MacBook Pro in an ever dimmer light. Apple's laptop fare is known for having traditionally upgradable components – like the battery, RAM, and storage – permanently affixed with plenty of solder and glue. Collectively, these are all components that are liable to fail or otherwise degrade during the lifetime of a machine, forcing punters to fork out for expensive Applecare or out-of-warranty repairs. And if that isn't an option, users are forced to replace the machine entirely.
[2]Youtube Video
Meanwhile, the Dell XPS 15 uses conventional NVMe M.2 storage, which can be dislodged with a standard Phillips screwdriver. The battery is affixed with screws and a bit of tape. Meanwhile, the RAM is standard DDR4 SO-DIMM.
iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple? [3]READ MORE
Moreover, the fans and heatsink on the Dell XPS 15 are easily removed. This matters because laptops tend to run hotter as they get older. Fans get clogged with dust and debris, and thermal paste solidifies and becomes brittle. Adventurous techies can easily solve this by giving the fan a solid blast with compressed air, and applying a new blob of thermal paste.
iFixit did have a few complaints: firstly, the keyboard is intrinsically attached to the upper-case, making replacements potentially costlier. Compare that to various models of the Lenovo Thinkpad, where it's attached by two screws and easily slides out.
Although the SD card slot sits on a daughterboard, the USB-C ports are part of the logic board. If you bend or break these, you could be looking at an arse-clenchingly expensive motherboard replacement.
But in the grand scheme of things, the Dell XPS 15 sits as an eminently repairable bit of kit, despite having similar dimensions to the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Indeed, it surpasses the [4]latest 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop in many areas – including a battery that's easy to remove.
iFixit gave the XPS 15 a grand repairability score of 9 out of 10. ®
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[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Pro_16%22_2019
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4IUfNevmCU
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/17/ifixit_slaps_apples_pricey_mac_air_with_a_repairability_score_of_9/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/24/surface_laptop_3_teardown/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Not too hard to beat Apple on anything than esthetics.
Don't believe me? Check out Louis Rossman's channel out on Youtube.
It was compared to MS too, but perhaps the price point, aesthetic design and specification most closely matches the compared Apple product.
Or maybe Apple are just renowned for doing their best to stop you repairing your own property.
Well done Dell
And well done the industrial design team behind this.
HP Microserver Gen8/Gen9 and their failiing NAND chips used for iLO system monitoring.
It's not always the obvious things like soldered SSD's that cause built in obsolence, a less obvious issue that's coming to light more and more is the onboard failure of NAND chips used to storage health monitoring info / diagnostic data where servers have remote management chips+small amount of NAND (4Mb) combined storage for the firmware/realtime data.
HP Microservers Gen8/Gen9 have a dedicated iLO management chip. the onboard NAND chips that store this data can wear out pretty quick if the controler gets into a race condition and keeps reporting the same fault repeatedly, continually writing to the NAND chip, until it's failure, you don't always find out until you upgrade the firmware which can be several months down the line.
HP released modified firmware so that the new firmware supposedly now caps the number of writes per day to the firmware, but it doesn't help consumers using these for development work where the NAND has failed prematurely, or where the firmware hasn't been updated to deal with this issue, before the NAND failed, (most people only find out about the issue once the NAND chip fails).
HP should really come clean and offer replacement boards for those suffering from this issue, as it's clearly a design fault present on the board from the word go, and we're supposed to be covered for upto 6 years in these circumstances under consumer law in the UK, but doing that is easier said than done with HP's support's warren of dead ends to nowhere.
Weird to compare only to Apple. Are they the ones to beat?