RMA'd my E6500 and got a new macbook pro.

I RMA'd my E6500 back to Dell after trying 2 units, the first came scratched and both of them suffered from the following defects:

1. Stuttering / crackling audio
2. Poor LCD screen (black around the corners)
3. Trackpad issues

I've had many Dell laptop's in the past for work, but none have been this bad.
I bought myself the new aluminum Macbook Pro and now i have both Leopard, and Vista installed - so i think i have the best of both worlds now.

The Macbook pro even scores a higher WEI number than the E6500 did.
My E6500 got 4.2 and the Macbook gets 5.3 - I know this is a superficial rating but it makes me happy never the less.

So far no problems what so ever with the macbook both in OSX or Vista.

 

Hopefully you don't get bit by being a beta tester for Apple. Rev A products usually have problems.

 

What are the specs of your new MBP and the specs of the E6500? W/ the new MBP, you have hardware not offered on the E6500, such as a graphics card heaps better with probably twice the performance of the Quadro in the E6500. No wonder the WEI is higher.

Good choice btw, the MBP is beautiful.

 

We have a bunch of E6500's here. They're actualy pretty nice machines.
Dell's factory install/config setup, not so much. You really need to do a proper fresh OS install/config to get the most out of them, including 5+ hrs on battery.

This of course doesn't exclude any hardware issues you might have had on your system, which Dell should/would have replaced (if not the whole unit when under 30 days).

While the MBP is a nice notebook as well, if you think you're out of the woods just because you got a Mac. We have a couple of users with both Macbooks and MBP that are having all kinds of issues from overheating, poor displays, unknown kernel panics etc. It happens.

Just have a look in the apple forum. Imagine that, they can suffer from the same issues that other notebooks do (if not worse in somecases). Who would thunk it ?

I also prefer Dell's onsite 3yrs vs Apples' 1yr instore. Most business users can't afford to lose their machines for a week to repair.
Have you ever dealt with applecare before ?

The grass is always greener on the other side.
Good luck and enjoy your MBP tho

 

That's funny. I sold my Penyrlyn 2.6GHz MacBook Pro and purchased a Dell M640 Covet instead, and couldn't be happier! We're just two ships passing in opposite directions in the night.