New Dell XPS Battery Only Rated for 300 Cycles

[Blade of Grass]

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-Dell-XPS-15-s-battery-is-rated-for-300-cycles-and-apparently-that-s-ok.466422.0.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
 

Quote

The 9500 has 2 choices of battery: a 3-cell 56 watt-hour (Wh) and a 6-cell 86Wh pack. Digging into their fields on the PC's spec list reveals that they are both rated for 300 charge/discharge cycles. By contrast, Apple incorporates batteries in its MacBooks - its 2019 16-inch and 2020 13-inch variants included - with 1000 such cycles.

 

Wild, I saw some people claiming that this is the new normal for prosumer laptops from HP and Lenovo too.
 

With Apple introducing the new keyboard and cooling with the 2019 MacBook Pro, it looks like they’ve been making the right choices to dominate the prosumer market. 

[The_russian]

I hope they have a different definition of a cycle, otherwise this is really disappointing, especially coming from the XPS lineup and not some cheap Chinese laptop.

[leadeater]

48 minutes ago, Blade of Grass said:

I saw some people claiming that this is the new normal for prosumer laptops from HP

Probably, we had a bunch of HP EliteBook 840/850 G4 (or G5) batteries swell and die. HP blamed the use of their own Docking Stations for these laptops and recommended removing the battery when using them long term. Problem, the battery is internal so not exactly 'removable'.

[Ashleyyyy]

i can't wait for Apple to be the manufacturer people on this forum will recommend for prosumers lol, if other OEM's start doing things like this it's only a matter of time. 

[TetraSky]

300 cycles? So... About a little more than a year of use I guess?

[dalekphalm]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Probably, we had a bunch of HP EliteBook 840/850 G4 (or G5) batteries swell and die. HP blamed the use of their own Docking Stations for these laptops and recommended removing the battery when using them long term. Problem, the battery is internal so not exactly 'removable'.

We've had a massive amount of HP batteries swell in the last year. A bunch of ProBook X360's, and a bunch of Z-Book G5's.

 

And my personal Spectre X360 13" is showing signs of a bulging battery. Fortunately the battery life is still good on it, but I'm well aware that it's just a matter of time before I'll need to replace it.

 

I also had to replace my work laptop's battery just a few weeks ago: Zbook G5.

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

We've had a massive amount of HP batteries swell in the last year. A bunch of ProBook X360's, and a bunch of Z-Book G5's.

 

And my personal Spectre X360 13" is showing signs of a bulging battery. Fortunately the battery life is still good on it, but I'm well aware that it's just a matter of time before I'll need to replace it.

 

I also had to replace my work laptop's battery just a few weeks ago: Zbook G5.

How is it with all the technology advancements in materials science, electrochemistry and manufacturing that we are making worse batteries than in the late 2000's to early 2010's?

[manikyath]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Probably, we had a bunch of HP EliteBook 840/850 G4 (or G5) batteries swell and die. HP blamed the use of their own Docking Stations for these laptops and recommended removing the battery when using them long term. Problem, the battery is internal so not exactly 'removable'.

the place i work at has quite a bunch of EliteBook 850 ranging G1-G6 (if i recall G6 recently came out..) living on docking stations, and the only cases with battery issues have also been laptops which ended their life under the back tyre of a car, to set the tone of the user's "careful behavior"...

 

we did have a microsoft surface go thermonuclear in the middle of a meeting.

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, manikyath said:

the place i work at has quite a bunch of EliteBook 850 ranging G1-G6 (if i recall G6 recently came out..) living on docking stations, and the only cases with battery issues have also been laptops which ended their life under the back tyre of a car, to set the tone of the user's "careful behavior"...

 

we did have a microsoft surface go thermonuclear in the middle of a meeting.

HP has had to issue multiple recalls on batteries and laptops recently (over 100,000). The replacement batteries were fine so I think it was just a batch of them or something, sadly not that uncommon problem recently.

[hishnash]

10 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Probably, we had a bunch of HP EliteBook 840/850 G4 (or G5) batteries swell and die. HP blamed the use of their own Docking Stations for these laptops and recommended removing the battery when using them long term. Problem, the battery is internal so not exactly 'removable'.

Asking someone to remove the battery when you use it at your desk is ridiculous, could they not build charging systems that mean they just dont pipe the power through the battery once it hits 95% charge? 

 

6 minutes ago, Ashley said:

i can't wait for Apple to be the manufacturer people on this forum will recommend for prosumers lol, if other OEM's start doing things like this it's only a matter of time. 

The 16" MBP is a very nice machine, for its form factor it has killer thermal performance (it is very different from the 2019/2018/2017 15" models) if you are a pro-sumer in that formfactor there are a lot of things that the 16" MBP gets right:

<100W charger = usable on trains and plains (most power sockets on these devices cut out if your draw more than 100W)
GPU performance on battery is the same as connected to the wall,

GPU (when on battery) seems to be faster any other laptop on the market, it seems all of the other prosumer laptops this last year just cant provide enough W from the battery to run the gpu.
Outstanding touchpad and good keyboard

Good screen at a reasonable PPI

Also on the battery point with the next version of macOS 10.15.5 will include the same `smart` charging systems in the iPhone were the laptop will intentionally not charge to 100%, this will massively extend the battery for users who spend most of thier time attached to charers.
 

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, Ashley said:

i can't wait for Apple to be the manufacturer people on this forum will recommend for prosumers lol, if other OEM's start doing things like this it's only a matter of time. 

I've had a teacher bring me a MacBook Pro where the battery swelled and push then entire trackpad out and bent the entire chassis, complete write off lol

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

HP has had to issue multiple recalls on batteries and laptops recently (over 100,000). The replacement batteries were fine so I think it was just a batch of them or something, sadly not that uncommon problem recently.

i've been handling the past few recalls we've come into contact with, and so far we've yet to see our first positive hit on an affected serial number.. so we may just be lucky to get the good batches over here

 

(and yes, the amount of recalls where 'premium' devices are affected, but for some reason the pavilions arent, is worrysome..)

[TomvanWijnen]

16 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

300 cycles? So... About a little more than a year of use I guess?

Exactly....  I bought this laptop with the intention of using it for at least the next 5 years, and at least another 5 after that (perhaps as a secondary device if I'd need something more then)....

 

16 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

We've had a massive amount of HP batteries swell in the last year. A bunch of ProBook X360's, and a bunch of Z-Book G5's.

 

I also had to replace my work laptop's battery just a few weeks ago: Zbook G5.

Well that's just great, I have a G5 Zbook X360 as well. Already on my 4th motherboard, 3rd keyboard, 2nd monitor, and some other parts too... And those three parts I just mentioned need to be replaced again soon.  Should just ask them to throw in a battery as well...

[hishnash]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

HP has had to issue multiple recalls on batteries and laptops recently (over 100,000)

HP have issues with handling these recalls if your based outside of the North american continent.  They expected out IT team to ship them to the US then they shipped things back to us but since that was a international shipment the customs officer took one look at it and put a nice 20% sales import tax on our replacements  just perfect!

but the more annoying part of both Dell and HP is if you go to their website it seems that only the US (and EU) markets get the new laptops, down here in NZ we need to wait at least 6 months if not 1 year before we can buy them from the NZ websites, otherwise we need to handle importing them from the US (and therefore not getting the consumer protection that we get in NZ).

[TetraSky]

2 minutes ago, TomvanWijnen said:

Exactly....  I bought this laptop with the intention of using it for at least the next 5 years, and at least another 5 after that (perhaps as a secondary device if I'd need something more then)....

But to be honest, this sort of crap would explain why in most of my laptops over the years (including some Dell ones), the battery was essentially half dead within a year of use. The number of cycles batteries are rated for is something that should be on every spec sheets.

[Kilrah]

17 minutes ago, leadeater said:

How is it with all the technology advancements in materials science, electrochemistry and manufacturing that we are making worse batteries than in the late 2000's to early 2010's?

The constant quest for thin/light...pushing battery tech not towards longevity but aesthetics.

 

 

[hishnash]

1 minute ago, TetraSky said:

But to be honest, this sort of crap would explain why in most of my laptops over the years (including some Dell ones), the battery was essentially half dead within a year of use. The number of cycles batteries are rated for is something that should be on every spec sheets.

I think things used to be better, I have a 15" MBP Mid 2015 that i have been using full time since i got it in 2015. It is currently at 1626 Cycles and yes the battery performance has reduced, it reports battery health at 58%. But that is after 5 Years of use. I wonder how much battery i would have left if the battery on this thing were only rated for 300 cycles.

[suicidalfranco]

What a piece of trash

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, hishnash said:

HP have issues with handling these recalls if your based outside of the North american continent.  They expected out IT team to ship them to the US then they shipped things back to us but since that was a international shipment the customs officer took one look at it and put a nice 20% sales import tax on our replacements  just perfect!

but the more annoying part of both Dell and HP is if you go to their website it seems that only the US (and EU) markets get the new laptops, down here in NZ we need to wait at least 6 months if not 1 year before we can buy them from the NZ websites, otherwise we need to handle importing them from the US (and therefore not getting the consumer protection that we get in NZ).

That's odd because for us they sent techs onsite for any and all repairs or replacements. And in my previous job HP did that for all the school Tela laptops as well and all the business desktops etc, I've basically spent the majority of my career supporting HP products and the support has been nothing but great.

 

The only complaint I've had is when we got a shipment of 300 EliteDesk 8200's with bad motherboards, all of them. They would fail after a few months and HP didn't want to outright replace all of them and made us replace as fail. Then about a month after that HP issued a global product fault for the EliteDesk 8200 series and offered replacement, literally based on us as we were among the very first batch of those in the world. Jerks.

[Kilrah]

Note that the rating doesn't necessarily mean much towards actual results...

 

39 minutes ago, leadeater said:

HP blamed the use of their own Docking Stations for these laptops and recommended removing the battery when using them long term. Problem, the battery is internal so not exactly 'removable'.

Don't the laptops have a BIOS setting to limit charging to a certain percentage for that purpose? Many have that nowadays, Lenovo seemed to have it a few years before it trickled to maintream on their professional line, saw it back in 2016 or so on a machine I set up for someone

[hishnash]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

That's odd because for us they sent techs onsite for any and all repairs or replacements.

So at this time we did not have a biz rep agreement with HP. We were still small and had just purchased them (like an avg consumer). That is what was the most annoying part we knew that there were people in NZ could fix them, people who were paid by HP..

 

[hishnash]

5 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Don't the laptops have a BIOS setting to limit charging to a certain percentage for that purpose? Many have that nowadays, Lenovo seemed to have it a few years before it trickled to maintream on their professional line, saw it back in 2016 or so on a machine I set up for someone

Depends on how the laptop is wired up, some laptops don't have the ability to stop charging the battery they just pipe power into the battery and then pull it out to use the laptop. So even if it is at 100% the laptop is always drawing power from the battery and then re-charging it. 

This is the worst thing you can do to a battery, it is much better to let the battery empty then recharge it to 100% than to keep it at 100% constantly topping it up from 99%!

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Don't the laptops have a BIOS setting to limit charging to a certain percentage for that purpose? Many have that nowadays, Lenovo seemed to have it a few years before it trickled to maintream on their professional line, saw it back in 2016 or so on a machine I set up for someone

They do but I think it was the charger turning on and off a lot from slow battery drain and charge state checking. Not sure but since the replacements didn't have a problem it must have just been bad batteries.

[Kilrah]

Yeah most likely. But if that feature was there it kinda means their excuse for the dock is BS, they should have at least mentioned/ tried to blame the lack of use of that function...

[hishnash]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

Yeah most likely. But if that feature was there it kinda means their excuse for the dock is BS, they should have at least mentioned/ tried to blame the lack of use of that function...

Or they could have detected that the dock was connected and turn on the feature.