After ~4 years without a laptop upgrade, I wanted a full size laptop with decent performance, thin bezels and a professional look, mostly for software development work. After some research and review reading and watching, I opted for the new Dell XPS 15 model for 2019, with 9th Gen i7 processor (6 cores), 16GB RAM, GeForce 1650 and a full HD LCD screen for battery life. You probably all know the good, so here they are from my perspective in 1 sentence:
materials, build quality, professional look, trackpad, I/O, fingerprint reader in power button, battery
And now here are the reasons I returned the laptop after 2 weeks of use, ranked from the most important:
The keyboard
this is subjective, but the keyboard feels "mushy" even compared to my old Zenbook UX303UA
the keys are a bit far from each other and small-ish side, which felt uncomfortable
the arrow keys (yes, these are important) are so tiny I think they may be the reason my wrist started to hurt
no dedicated properties key, no numpad, despite a lot of free space
The noise (i.e. thermals)
The really are not good. Especially the left side of the laptop gets quite hot under mild loads
The professional feel kind of goes away if the fans are on-and-off all the time when doing even something mild
The weight and size
It is categorized as "thin and light" but it is 2.1 kg (with not the smallest adapter), which is not that light in 2019
The side and top bezels are thin, but the bottom bezel (a.k.a the chin) is really tall, decreasing the screen-to-body ratio
The state out of the box
After spending ~2000 USD on a laptop, I expect it to work well out of the box. Instead,
The wifi kept disconnecting pretty much every minute, until I manually found and updated the Killer drivers
The fans were on and loud almost constantly. Not sure what fixed that, it might have been the BIOS update or disabling turbo boost in BIOS.
Anyways, out of the box the machine was pretty much unusable.
So, those are my reasons for returning it, hopefully this helps someone. I definitely recommend to go to a shop and physically try to type a bit on the keyboard, if typing is important to you. I now switched back to my old Zenbook UX303UA and liked the keyboard instantly. Will keeping looking for a good replacement though, any tips are welcome.
