Dell Precision M4700 and M6700 - Preliminary Info

I thought I read somewhere on the dell blog, someone (the author) said while apple mbpr is impressive, wait till you see the new precision. I certainly have very high expectation on this new machine since I've skipped 2 generations.

Sent from my GT-N7000

 

Dear Company Representative:

Did Dell change or improve(keyboard flex) their keyboard?

Sincerely,

Dirtnap

 

I was one of those obsessed by rMBP before it came out. I used one for a few days and the bottom line is - no go. Glossy screen with mediocre gamut destroys it for me. High res is nice but it's an overkill for a 15", too much eye strain if you go above FHD. As for the thickness and weight, it's still a 15" machine with limited mobility. You can't really compare it to 13" 1kg utrabooks. Also, its upgradebility is pretty much zilt and if one of the internal components ever fails, you'll have to replace the mobo.

 

I though that had already been addressed via an upgrade to the current model? For someone like me who can sometimes have to type extremely long word documents, keyboard flex is unacceptable.

These minor interface annoyances show a marked lack of sufficient planning. At this point, these are the types of things that should always be working properly right out of the box.

 

What flex are you guys talking about? I have seen a bunch of M6600's over the last year and there was no flex at all. Some systems had poorly seated keyboards but after an easy fix, everything was ok. I wonder if the M4600 has any flex?

 

Exactly. The last thing I read said it had already been fixed.

 

I remember reading that the non-backlit version of the keyboard had more flex? Most systems ship with the backlit version but it's sometimes possible to miss out on it if you aren't paying attention when you place the order, depending on how you order exactly.

 

I agree that laptops need better displays and I wish people would quit ragging on the issue of button/fonts being too small. A properly designed modern app should recognize the resolution and display properly sized buttons and text.

The problem is that Microsoft defines a high DPI display as anything above 96dpi and typically these displays only go up to 140dpi or so. Therefore the automatic scaling for legacy apps that are not DPI aware introduces blurriness. If the DPI were to increase to multiples of 96dpi e.g. 4x at 384dpi then the automatic scaling could using simple pixel doubling and give a good result on older applications. If the DPI was not an exact multiple then you could still use pixel doubling and the app would just be a little smaller than normal, e.g. at 400dpi 384/400 = 96% of original size and no one would recognize the difference.

Regarding the keyboard, I wish laptop makers would consider using some of the unused deck area on a laptop. A touch screen for hardware functions (replace the blue Fn keys) could be used as an auxiliary keyboard plus a lot of other custom uses. I'd rather have that than waste space on speakers.

 

The future is obviously going to be very high resolution displays, with fully scaled UI's. Should be cool.

 

IMHO, it's not the DPI scaling issue, but the usefulness of such a screen. If everything is going to be scaled to pretty much the same size we have now (albeit a bit sharper), then what's the point of having such screen for general usage (e.g. I can see it being useful for graphic design maybe), apart from making the screens rather more expensive? Also, I've read of some performance issues - if the new variant of Mac OS doesn't run that Retina screen smoothly in all situations (at least, that's the impression I got from the Anandtech review), I wonder how would it run on Windows then..