Dell Precision M3800 - 2013!

Sweet! I guess I will just get K2100M if it is available in M3800.

 

Exactly. Dell HAS to release a product like this because this is the future of most laptops. At companies like Google and Cisco, people are picking the rMBP over other choices because they want a portable workstation, not a laptop that can be used as a bulletproof shield in a gunfight, with David using the power brick to slay Goliath. I work for a pretty big company and there are more than a few people who are fine with running Windows in a VM on a rMBP rather than carrying around an M4x00 or W5x0. People are switching to the rMBP when it's time for them to upgrade.

Dell has to release something like the M3800, otherwise people are going to buy something else from a competitor. They need to be in the space of thin and light workstations. If you need something with 4 DIMM slots, multiple drives, a docking station, a dedicated Ethernet port, etc they have the M4x00 and M6x00.

Some people might find it disgusting, but Dell has no choice.

 

Has the MBP ever offered a Quadro option?
I don't follow their products, but to my knowledge they only offered 'consumer grade' NVidia GPU options and are rumored to drop dGPUs for Iris Pro 5200.

The philosophical question is what defines a 'Precision' laptop?
It seems for the M3800 Dell is offering a Quadro dGPU for differentiation to competitors and their other own laptop lines.
Otherwise Dell could offer an XPS or Latitude to compete with the rMBP

Have you had good experiences with hosted virtual GPU environments while traveling and using apps which utilize Quado / FireGL capabilities?
Ideally the Iris Pro 5200 would be "good enough" on the road but Dell supposedly chose a FCPGA946 Haswell for the M3800 instead of soldered FCBGA1364 CPUs, even though a nearly identical 37W FCBGA i7-4702HQ is now listed versus the i7-4702MQ.
What I have seen of SPECviewperf results for the Iris Pro 5200, the CAD performance was poor, but I don't know what driver release that was on or the settings, so take it with a grain of salt.
If the Iris Pro 5200 ever has respectable CAD performance I would personally want to try one out in M3800 style laptop, dropping the Quadro dGPU and fitting 32GB of ram - maybe next year.

I wish our company allowed us to chose laptop brands or BYOD, but we are locked into Dell due to purchasing agreements and we also have 3 year depreciation, so we try to get the most out of every order.

 

Some would say that its the hardware and the ISV certification which the M3800 certainly has. Personally, I would add looks and docking capabilities as something that the Precision should have, but that is just me. You won't find me saying that the M3800 isn't a Precision, but I can still complain about the looks and lack of docking capabilities.

If the cooling ends up being decent, I won't hesitate to recommend it to those wanting a thin and light workstation. I'll still mourn the XPS like look, to me it really feels like Dell took a XPS chassis changed it only a little and accommodated Precision hardware in it. I'm not saying that it is what they did, just what it feels like they did.

If the next line of XPS ends up looking different, that would make me somewhat happy as it would still announce that its not some consumer notebook.

 

Fantastic build quality and cooling.
Good business-style look (obviously subjective).
Fantastic display.
The most computing power you can cram in there. (Obviously you'll be able to fit more in a M6800 than a M3800 so expectations should be set appropriately.)
Flexibility (docking, easy repair/maintenance/upgrades).
ISV certification.

We'll see if the M3800 lives up to the "Precision" name when we get more details.

As for it looking like an XPS, it doesn't surprise me that they took a design from elsewhere for a first-generation product. Weren't the original Precisions rather similar to the Inspirons of the day?

Obviously, one goal of this thing is to take a stab at the Retina MacBook Pro market. People who would consider this against the MacBook probably don't care quite as much as we do about 4 DIMMs, multiple drives, and all of the extra ports. Whether or not it finds a market will be interesting to see.

 

It's interesting that Razer and MSI have a 47 watt Haswell + 60-65 watt GTX 765M in their 17" thin and light gaming laptops, the MSI with 16GB of ram even.
Wonder what their cooling is like? And battery life. And noise.
In a thin chassis does going to 17" really gain you 25+ watts, is Dell being conservative with the K1100M, or is it battery life and cooling driving the choices?
One would think that the configurable TDP of the CPU would allow some flexibility but only offering a 37 watt option seems to indicate a concern.

 

historically(huh this word sound so funny ), inspiron and vostro shared chassis, latitude and precision had same chassis. Thinkpad workstation and pro line share chassis. Some Elitebook do aswell iirc.

 

Glad someone brought those up: Why not offer a thin & light 17-inch machine similar to those, without the gamers' gimmicks, but with a workstation-class GPU and docking capabilities instead? Maybe it's just me, but I really value the big screen, and planform area isn't as much of an issue as thickness and weight. To tell you the truth, if the rMBP would be 17", I'd look at it with a lot more interest...

 

Same for me: Light 17", 16:10 screen, 32GB RAM, one or two 2,5", same for mSata (would give 3TB SSD storage), GPU can be entry level or Intel integrated only, backlit keyboard, 5h+ on battery. That would be my favorite VM and dev machine.

 

I'm interested in this because I'm more mobile than I used to be and when I'm away from my desk, I'm doing things that still require a workstation type computer with a high performance processor, and a good bit of ram, but doesn't have a high of a graphics requirement. Dealing with large local databases, and virtual machines make up more of my workload when I'm mobile.

Truth be told, I run all of my CAD on a M4700 with a k2000m, and probably don't tax it that much. We do assemblies with hundreds of components vs thousands so if the k1100m is in the neighborhood of the k2000m I could probably do all of my CAD work on this computer.

If this doesn't review well, I'll probably end up with a next generation rMBP, which I'd rather avoid, because I would end up running boot camp, which would be a waste. Not to mention all of the crazy ribbing that I gave my Apple using buddies that I would have to take, haha.

Even if this is well reviewed, if Apple comes back and the haswell rMBP is even thinner and has very good battery life, I might go that way anyway.