Latitude E7470: Your assessment of reliability at this point?

Hi friends, my daughter, an adult Mom with 2 businesses is about to take on either a E7470 that I picked up for her, or a MBA, early-2015 - a good year for those... more reliable than recent macs.
I have gone through the 7470, installing Win 10 Pro from scratch and configuring to run well and I see no issues with it though I've only used it for a half hour or so. This unit has the FHD panel, 8GB.

What is your take on reliability overall, especially if you have been using as your DD for a few years?

thank you
C

 

In my experience reliability probably comes down to plain old dumb more than anything else. In the aggregate a ThinkPad or Latitude is probably less likely to experience a problem and I'd pick either of those a Mac in terms of durability, but most notebooks will give faithful service for an extended period. I'd probably pick the OS she likes and make the best of it. A few things in favor for the Dell would be the FHD screen is most likely an IPS screen, which is better than what you'll get on the MBA. You can pull the bottom cover off on the Dell for easier service and upgrades. Aesthetically, the MBA is probably more pleasing. Unless you've got a specific need, it's probably a wash performance wise.

 

Can't comment on 7470 but my 7480 is a workhorse and my 7440 (pretty old now) is still beating away just fine. I use it as a vm-host permanently plugged in to my network. It has had 0 issues other than a faulty spinning disk (my last spinning disk i will ever own hopefully). but even that failed 3 years in so I can't hardly fault dell for that. Anyway just wanted to put in my 2 cents, if you don't get a lemon machine off the line, I feel like they will last a long time.

I've since moved to precision as my primary because they refuse to really modernize the latitude line in any meaningful sense.

/$.02

 

I'm running a E7240 still and a E6540 til this day. E6540 has been through some tough situations and is still working fine.

I always bought Latitude/Precision series when buying Dell and haven't had many issues.

The MBA is also nice but overall like said above, depends which OS.

I also have a 2013 Macbook Pro 15" running fine still so I guess you can say both machines should serve you well.