Latitude 7480

We've had this exchange before, but, I too am a fan of the 15" screens, but the lack of a centered keyboard on the latitude E5550/E5570 was a deal-breaker. I also like that the battery of the E7450 is easily removable, like the older machines.

The shift to a keyboard without dedicated Home/End key changed my habits, I have incorporated Fn + Shift + left arrow or right arrow into my workflow, but have lost out on a lot of my shortcuts using the dedicated Home/End keys. Perhaps, in due time, I'll remap those in my brain.

Let's not forget the loss of dedicated physical wifi switch that was seen last on the E7440. The current button to disable wifi is a Fn combo button, to its right, lies the sleep key.

Just the small stuff that used to be so good on the Dell's seems to be going away.

 

Yeah, I'm not a fan of off-center keyboards, but for example when I was doing some freelance IT for my dad's company helping them choose replacement laptops, they specifically wanted a built-in number pad since they're an accounting firm and the USB 10-key things just weren't the same, so they're actually thrilled with the E5550 I chose for them.

I suspect if I used my XPS 15's built-in keyboard enough, getting used to the Fn key for Home/End would be ok. It seems to throw me mostly when I'm trying to use shift to highlight a line of text. I'm sure it also doesn't help that on my E7440 where I do in fact use the built-in keyboard quite a bit, not only are there dedicated keys but they're on the top row, so on several occasions I've reached up to that corner on the XPS 15 only to find nothing.

As for the hardware WiFi switch, every single time I've hit that it's been by accident, and on several of those occasions it led to a bunch of troubleshooting in vain until I discovered the inadvertent switch flip, which of course only compounded my frustration. (One of the curses of being in IT is that you assume that if YOU'RE the one having an issue, the cause must be something complicated, so you immediately skip over the simple/obvious stuff you would check first if someone else came to you reporting the same issue.) So I'm perfectly fine not having a hardware switch, especially since on Win10 you can toggle Airplane Mode just by clicking the notification icon in the system tray.

 

Add a decent set of indicator lights to the list of useful features which have disappeared without good reason (presumably to save a few cents in manufacturing cost).

The single light on the front of the 5510 and 7370 only shines when the battery is charging and stays off otherwise. Sensibly it should blink if the notebook is closed and sleeping (which wouldn't add anything to the manufacturing cost). A return of the other indicator lights would be welcome but is unlikely.

John

 

I agree. My wife's XPS 13 9350 behaves this way (no sleep indication) and my XPS 15 9530 has no exterior indicators except the battery level LEDs, so when the lid is closed there's no indication of sleep or even on/off. My guess on the systems with the front-mounted light is that Dell figured that it would be awkward design language to have a light be off while the system was on and then pop on to pulse while the system was asleep, though that's of course debatable. I like the pinpoint-style LEDs on my E7440 that don't light up a dark room like the front-mounted LED. Electronics with LEDs that large/bright (and especially when they're front-facing) can cause people who have any such devices in their bedrooms to have to cover them up at night, or permanently.

 

I do like the number pads, no doubt, I use it whenever I'm on the desktop, and I understand their need in a business machine, but I just can't get used to the off center keyboard. If only they were sold as an option..

Highlighting a complete line is actually one of the better use cases for this new layout,

Fn + Right Arrow (End), then Fn + Shift + Left Arrow (Home). The new layout has broken some of my other favorites though.

Funnily enough, for me, I never did have an issue with a hardware wifi switch, but the new layout has caused me to hit the sleep shortcut so many times while trying to toggle wifi!

Absolutely agreed about the indicator lights. I love the way they are laid out on the E7450, inside and outside. They changed that on the E7470 too I believe, where they're at the front, which is harder to glance at.

 

Keyboard layout option would be interesting, but I'm not optimistic. When I read the datasheets for a given model, I'm amazed at the number of options some of these systems already have -- and that's just for the US! Keyboards in particular (and therefore the palmrest assembly) are already a component that has so variations due to different countries having different layouts that I doubt Dell will want to double what must already be a huge number of variants for a given model. It's encouraging to see Dell bringing more configuration flexibility back even to non-Premier customers though; for a while that had all but disappeared.

As for highlighting text, I still don't find the Fn key mechanism better than having dedicated keys, partly because it involves 3 keys rather than 2 and also because pressing Shift just requires me to use my left pinky finger (and then quickly tap Home/End with my right middle), whereas pressing Fn+Shift has me moving my entire left hand away from keyboard resting position to use my index and middle fingers to press the keys, and then I have to keep it there until I move my whole right hand down to the cursor area to press Home/End, all of which takes a lot more time. My accuracy-adjusted WPM is 140+ on a good keyboard and I use lots of keyboard shortcuts to use the mouse as little as possible, so I notice things like that.

I can definitely see why having the Airplane key next to Sleep could be hazardous placement for people used to activating those functions with those keys, however. I just use the Notification area for Airplane Mode and the WinKey+X menu for Sleep, though I grant that neither is as fast as dedicated keys. That inefficiency is probably a subconscious choice I made in favor of a slower but reliably available action sequence instead of a faster sequence that doesn't work the same way on all laptop models.

 

No doubt the keyboard option would be a big cost for Dell, that was some wishful thinking.

I would prefer the dedicated keys myself, but I was pleasantly surprised that I actually got some use out of the new overloaded Fn Home/End keys after my initial struggle with muscle memory. But overall I believe I lost more than I gained.

 

Funnily enough, I just did this and remembered that the screen brightness key is on the left of the wifi toggle key. So now, from time to time, I kill the wifi while trying to increase the screen brightness!

 

I got my 7480 last week and I am pretty happy with it so far. Ordered an i5-7300U, 8GB, 512GB NVMe, IR Camera, fingerprint, ThunderBolt3, backlit keyboard, 4 cell 60Wh battery, and 3 year ProSupport. Also ordered a couple of TB16 and already have a WD15 that I use with my 7370.

I upgraded from an E7470 and it is certainly smaller, lighter, etc.....surely due to not having the Dell dock connector any longer. I thought I was going to miss the dock, but the TB16 has been nice. I had an E-View stand at one location, so I pulled the dock out and it looks nearly the same on there. Running 2x external LCDs off the TB16 in both locations and never had an issue. Had read about disconnections but never had an issue with video, network, etc. I don't game, so can't comment on 7480 on that. The battery life is better than the E7470. The keybaord and trackpad seem better than the E7470. Trackpad is a bit more responsive and the keyboard just feels good. I think I type a little faster....but who knows.

Happier than I thought I would be. Best part was that I did a Veeam Endpoint backup of my E7470 and for kicks restored to the 7480. Removed the old drivers, ran Dell Command Update, and everything worked. Saved me a week of getting the machine 'just right.' Even running Windows 10 15055.

 

Can you check something for me? On both my Precision 5510 and Latitude 7370 I found that plugging anything into the USB-C ports resulted in an increased system power drain of 2.5W to 3W. I presume this is due to the Thunderbolt controller waking up, even if the connected device is a simple device such as a USB-C flash drive. This bug means that the fans on my 5510 spin up and using USB-C on battery severel hits the run time.

Has Kaby Lake fixed this? The easy way to check this is to run BatteryInfoView and see the difference in battery drain without / with something plugged into USB-C.

John