Dell XPS 13 2016 Expections ?

What are your expectations from the new Dell XPS 13 2016 ? Will this be worth the wait , Whats will be the major changes or optimizations due to intel tick-tock cycle ?

My laptop is almost 5 years but i postponed the upgrade due to windows 10 , dell's first attempt at this form factor . Next version will have lesser number of issues . I havent followed the owners thread but i am quite sure the 2015 version would not be free from issues .

 

Here's the secret behind every "should I wait?" question that people post on here:

If you need the laptop now, it is never worth waiting. If you don't need the laptop now, it is always worth waiting.

 

I have an envy 14 with a dead battery , i can still use this for a year . It needs a battery replacement , heats on ati , screen has marks from the keyboards.

My concern with Dell was SSD capacity to be at least 1tb . I can live with 512gb for now but within few years i will be running out of space . I dont think 8gb would be enough for daily normal use . The system runs of memory with chrome easily with 150 tabs and i dont have many programs or services running at startup.

 

For your envy 14, you can just get a replacement battery. I'm not Aure of the exact price of a replacement battery for that particular laptop, but OEM batteries usually cosy around $80-$100. That's not too bad to get another 1.5 years of use out of your machine.

As for SSD size... Always buy ssds aftermarket whenever possible. I have a 512GB SSD in my 1080p XPS (a configuration not available through Dell) by doing an aftermarket replacement.

 

After my return period is over, I'm tempted to purchase a Samsung EVO 850 500GB and Bigfoot Killer 1525 wireless card. Which 512GB SSD did you get? Did you notice a change in battery life?

 

I bought my Dell XPS 13 off of eBay, from someone else. He had put a Crucial MX200 512GB M.2 SSD in here. I wasn't able to test before / after battery life on this particular laptop... but I've been using SSDs in laptops for years. And I can tell you that there won't be a change in battery life when using different brands of SSDs (especially in the M.2 form factor). While there technically may be a difference in power draw between different brands models of SSDs, the difference is so small that it might as well be within a margin of error of overall laptop battery life. In real-world usage scenarios, you'll never notice the difference.

On a related note, skip the Bigfoot Killer NIC. Bigfoot network controllers are pretty useless... you will not see any real-world improvement at all, in any way, shape, or form by switching to a Bigfoot Killer NIC.

 

Ah, nice SSD and that's good to know I shouldn't see a difference in battery life. As for the NIC, I was looking at the Bigfoot Killer and Intel 7265. I've got an Intel 7260 in my gaming rig and it's super fast. The Broadcom's speeds are sporatic and I'm within 10 feet of the router.

 

It think they will stick to the design for some years and only update the internals like they used to do in the past

 

It would be great if the next revision could support a dual side m2 ssd . Ram usage is a problem with a chrome . 8gb is good but i frequently run out memory with chrome . Most heavy extensions are disabled with extensify . The envy 14 has served me well with 8gb +ssd + 1tb hdd . Ever since i switched from firefox to chrome my current laptop feels slow

 

You probably have too many Chrome extensions running... especially Chrome extensions that ping a server somewhere on the internet for login / authentication purposes.

Get rid of unnecessary Chrome extensions, and I promise you Chrome will run a lot faster.

 

^ have 25 of them enabled rest are all disabled . 16gb is a must for next laptop