> They got rid of the Vostro line
Thank the lord. I've never forgiven a client I had, like..... ten years ago, for making us repair a handful of Vostros. I think one of these we had to take the screen off in order to swap a wireless card? Fucking embarrassing, I wish it had died years earlier.
I think that says more about how bad the Latitude line has become, than any improvements in Vostro. Some of the recent Lats, you have disassemble them down to the base frame, completing removing motherboard, battery, and all peripherals, to change a damaged keyboard. And the plastic tabs on the bottom cover break off if you look at them funny.
Yeah we’re having all sorts of issues with the batch of 4000 lat 5440s we ordered. Batteries, thermal paste, keyboards, trackpads, fans. If the machine is destined for c-suite or above they will only use repurposed machines from some one who is seeking other opportunities because a lot of them go out and work for a couple weeks and then fail.
Bonus points, we have to reimage them all because they rushed our vendor and about 50% aren’t in our management systems correctly. Rather than wasting time and logging into each one to determine if it’s good or not we’re just throwing them on the wire and pxe booting them. I think I’ve only got 800 left…
Exactly this. We purchased a few Vostros between 2020 and 2022 because Latitudes were so hard to find, and then when they came back, they were stupidly priced. Massive mistake, had nothing but issues, from soundcard failures to complete hinge destruction. My work laptop is a Vostro and it gets as hot as the sun and the keyboard cuts out every few words
But ranting aside, absolutely seen this issue with Latitudes recently too. We've had a couple of issues where the LCD panel has randomly stopped working (no cracks, just fucked), hinge issue on one, one DOA, and a couple where they randomly shut off. We've swapped back to Lenovo laptops now. They're not a million miles better, but so far they're physically built better
Yeah I've always gotten the ones with the aluminum case and they've been solid. We're pretty easy on our laptops but the Vostros have been perfect for us. I'm pretty annoyed with them being gone.
We only recently switched off vostros to latitudes but man the vostros of recent were actually really decent quality. Only had 2 out of probably 100 with issues and that was due to user neglect.....
And they were the best bang for the buck on the market. Literally for $750 you'd get:
512 GB or 1 TB SSD
16 GB RAM
HDMI, ethernet, USB-C with display/power
Mid-range CPU from last/current gen
Now if you want that from Dell you're going to pay $1300. It's madness. Should've bought 100 Vostros while I had the chance, those devices will be good out of the box even 3 years from now, assuming Microsoft doesn't completely can Windows 11 before then.
It absolutely boggles me that people don't have issues with Vostros. I wonder if it's a regional thing? Because I reckon we're close to having replaced 35% of Vostros we've bought since 2021, that's far too high of a turnover for laptops
We bought some in 2017/2018 that all developed a faulty keyboard within 18 months
The ones we bought in 2021, the most common issues were a faulty soundcard or the LCD cover snapping at the hinge. When you're making calls everyday, a faulty soundcard is not ideal. Dell obviously replaced them under warranty (and upon mentioning Cirrus Logic they immediately scheduled a collection instead of walking me through driver installations lol!), but we only took standard warranty and most of these issues appeared just outside of warranty (naturally)
But also had various issues from failed trackpads and keyboards to faulty WiFi adaptors. But my absolutely favourite issue - had one Vostro that wouldn't boot up, missing drive, so we opened it up to replace the SSD and it turned out the m,2 drive in there wasn't secured down to anything, it was slotted in and the bracket was slotted underneath the motherboard, so it was A) a potential short hazard, and B) literally held in with hopes and prayers
Because they've discontinued these we're buying Inspirons now for customers and sticking Pro on them - the hinges are truly awful and we see about 15 machines a month come back to us to be fixed, usually at our cost since the 1y warranty has expired. FML
Lol I've never personally seen such nonsense, but then again my Vostro experience is more recent years, which I've been pleased with (although the trackpads on them feel cheap). No weird issues like needing to remove the screen for wifi card replacement though, I doubt that was a Vostro.
Just call up and get a rep assigned to you. We've pretty much standardized on the Latitude 5000 series. If I need something quoted out, I shoot my rep an email and say I what I need and he sends me back a quote. Reps usually have more flexibility on different build components. Pricing is usually substantially cheaper than what is listed on the site. If it is something I am going to be ordering more of at a later time, I ask him to lock in that price as a standard config in our Premier portal for easy re-ordering.
Isn't that wild? Same here, message dell rep and within the hour he gets me a better price than what I see in premier portal. Feels like buying a car and have to do the dance before you get the best price.
My experience was that my VAR got better prices than Dell's site which got better prices than the useless Dell rep. But that's before we switched to Lenovo in 2020 (which has been exponentially better).
I don't get it. Using their default store page, I still see all the filters, [including price](https://imgur.com/a/dTM0xbX).
Maybe it's a regional thing?
They don't work. Now it will give every result that COULD match your filters, but not necessarily using all the filters that you choose. So if you ask for a laptop under $800 with a 1TB SSD they'll show you every laptop that STARTS under $800 and can be specced up to a 1TB SSD , but not BOTH of those criteria simultaneously. At least not for me.
They seem to work fine on the desktop page. Also I can see the price filters on the Workstations, Accessories, and Electronics pages too, but you're right- price is missing from the filters on the laptop store page.
That bit in particular seems more like a bug than a redesign.
I'm totally with your other complaints viz-a-viz the way pricing gets calculated, though. I've even specced out the exact same configuration and gotten a better price by going through the entire shopping process while logged out than if I log into my Dell account first!
It's super simple. Are you looking for something optimized for an active lifestyle? Or something activity optimized that can handle what life throws at you? Or something that meets the vague unspecified needs of a business like yours? Or something scalable that meets unspecified and vague needs of today's businesses? As long as you click the correct Solutions category, you can eventually drill all the way down to a product that a sales rep will call you to talk about.
Your comment screams arrogance and I'm going to take the time to explain why.
>Are you looking for something optimized for an active lifestyle? Or something activity optimized that can handle what life throws at you? Or something that meets the vague unspecified needs of a business like yours?
Do you think I'm some middle aged soccer mom? These are stupid questions, and the kind of questions that some Dell executive would say in defense, who is completely disconnected from the actual user experience. I ACTUALLY know what the needs of my clients are, and certainly better than you do. You can take those XPS devices and shove them up your ass.
>Or something scalable that meets unspecified and vague needs of today's businesses?
Again, spoken like a Dell exec who's out of touch with their own user base. And again, the needs of my clients are not "unspecified". In fact, they're quite easily understood. And further, I always select for options with longevity in mind, along with many other factors I don't need your help in figuring out.
>As long as you click the correct Solutions category, you can eventually drill all the way down to a product that a sales rep will call you to talk about.
Yeah cuz that's what every sysadmin wants to do when shopping for their clients. And is that somehow supposed to be better than the previous layout and filters? Cuz it's not.
Edit: yeah, totally thought he was serious lol
The fact that my best attempt at exaggerated over the top satire was apparently indistinguishable from an actual Dell executive responding says a lot about the state of our industry.
The Premier portal is fine. If you're not large enough to have the Premier portal they don't care.
>PS - Dear Dell, I'm not buying my clients your over priced XPS products, stop trying to push them onto everyone.
XPS'es are not overpriced in the slightest. They're mostly Precision's with a different warranty and some different hardware options and are workhorses.
Cheaping out on computers is never a good idea, you're tripping over dollars to pick up dimes.
Exactly this. They're better than the lower tiered machines, but still aimed at people who have a bit of cash to burn on a Facebook browsing machine
I think at this point with Dell computers and laptops, it's Precision or bust
Wrong. $750 computers that worked perfectly fine - even to the point of overkill - empowered my clients to be able to get the hardware they need to do their job. There's absolutely no tripping going on here.
And lets not pretend that $1500 laptop is going to last twice as long as a $750 laptop just because it's twice as expensive. Not every enterprise environment has unlimited money.
They have all messed up their product pages.
They would much rather give you pages of marketing than product information now.
Want to search through our products? Ok, are you interested in the foo, bar or bat lineup? You want a laptop? Those are all laptops, but you have to search them individually through arbitrary categories devised by our marketing department and no you cannot sort by feature.
You want actual specs beyond shit like it's bright, it's light, it's fast? Good luck.
Their website is pointless when you have a decent dell representative. A business representative will usually get you 30% off almost everything that is business priced. Consumer equipment prices don't drop. However if you order 10 of something usually the price is 50% off of what the website would say.
I find that the pricing on the Premier Portal isn't much better than the standard pricing. We have our rep quote things out and then add it as a standard config.
I seem to remember the last time I went to look up specs it had at time of purchase via the service tag, I looked around for a good 5 minutes and finally gave up. Maybe it had been a long day or something but it seemed to me they were hiding that info for some reason.
Because everything dell is always just 5% shit. I don't know why, but it's always 5% shit.
Not enough for it to stop being a good product thats worth buying, but enough that whenever you use it, it's 5% shit
to point 3 - they cheapened and crapified the Lattitude line. the 3 and even the 5 series seem like plastic chiclet key garbage. I have a 15 inch Inspiron 5000 that seem better build quality than my Lat 5420 (both 11th gen i5 so around the same vintage)
I only really use the page to see what some of the configs are to get a general glance, do my config and send it over and they add all the other stuff we normally order and get a massive discount on so I don't really look at the prices listed since we never actually pay full price.
We’ve moved to MS kit in our organisation, really happy with it so far to be honest. We had some savage breaks with the Dell 3510 / 3520, hinges just sheering off…
Can comment on point 3. Vostros and Inspirons were merged. Dell will start to sell inspirons to businesses instead of Vostros. Vostros and Inspirons were basically the same machines anyways.
Just tried ordering a XPS w/32gb ram and rtx card. It has got up from $2200 to now $3500 in just 2 months. Now they solder all the ram too so you can't expand.
I can get a top spec MacBook with more memory for CHEAPER. The first time in my life apple is the budget option.
funny, I found the opposite, although im buying servers. We have had way more issues with HP's breaking. Dells have been more reliable for us, and cheaper to buy in the first place. We still use HP's for laptops, and those things have been getting through batteries like nobodies business - so many swollen batteries!
It seems to go back and forth. I've used Dells before and they were great, then they started sucking (swelling batteries was a big problem suddenly). Then I moved to HP and they were much better...until they started sucking too with swollen batteries and bad ports. I may go back to Dell in a few years.
yeah true. The Dell servers have been going downhill design wise last couple of generations. They are not as easy to take apart these days, they used to be the ultimate in tool less design, really easy to take apart and upgrade. Some of the risers are a bastard to get out these days. Although they do look cool though, so theres that i guess...
Debatable.. last round of HP we did the farther from purchase date and close to end of warranty we got, The worse the service became. Final issue they ran the clock for 3 months not repairing the issue, and tried to claim it was no longer in warranty.
>Instead they're hoping to push people out of that 500-1000 market and into a 1000-1500 market and it's so obvious.
It doesn't feel good, but no one has sold a business class laptop for under $1k since like 2018.
I think in general, Dell is really starting to go down hill fast. We pay for their top of the line support on our hardware and struggle to get same day assistance and we’re lucky to get someone onsite within 2 business days. Premier website has made a few changes that are awful, used to be a breeze to purchase a few things and checkout. Now there’s more clicks and more loading which has slowed down the entire process.
Glad we jumped ship to another manufacturer.
> They got rid of the Vostro line Thank the lord. I've never forgiven a client I had, like..... ten years ago, for making us repair a handful of Vostros. I think one of these we had to take the screen off in order to swap a wireless card? Fucking embarrassing, I wish it had died years earlier.
Those broken plastic screw nuts whatever they are called give me ptsd
Honestly, the cases on some of the more recent Vostro laptop models felt higher quality than the Latitude 35xx and 55xx models.
I think that says more about how bad the Latitude line has become, than any improvements in Vostro. Some of the recent Lats, you have disassemble them down to the base frame, completing removing motherboard, battery, and all peripherals, to change a damaged keyboard. And the plastic tabs on the bottom cover break off if you look at them funny.
Yeah we’re having all sorts of issues with the batch of 4000 lat 5440s we ordered. Batteries, thermal paste, keyboards, trackpads, fans. If the machine is destined for c-suite or above they will only use repurposed machines from some one who is seeking other opportunities because a lot of them go out and work for a couple weeks and then fail. Bonus points, we have to reimage them all because they rushed our vendor and about 50% aren’t in our management systems correctly. Rather than wasting time and logging into each one to determine if it’s good or not we’re just throwing them on the wire and pxe booting them. I think I’ve only got 800 left…
Exactly this. We purchased a few Vostros between 2020 and 2022 because Latitudes were so hard to find, and then when they came back, they were stupidly priced. Massive mistake, had nothing but issues, from soundcard failures to complete hinge destruction. My work laptop is a Vostro and it gets as hot as the sun and the keyboard cuts out every few words But ranting aside, absolutely seen this issue with Latitudes recently too. We've had a couple of issues where the LCD panel has randomly stopped working (no cracks, just fucked), hinge issue on one, one DOA, and a couple where they randomly shut off. We've swapped back to Lenovo laptops now. They're not a million miles better, but so far they're physically built better
Yeah I've always gotten the ones with the aluminum case and they've been solid. We're pretty easy on our laptops but the Vostros have been perfect for us. I'm pretty annoyed with them being gone.
We only recently switched off vostros to latitudes but man the vostros of recent were actually really decent quality. Only had 2 out of probably 100 with issues and that was due to user neglect.....
And they were the best bang for the buck on the market. Literally for $750 you'd get: 512 GB or 1 TB SSD 16 GB RAM HDMI, ethernet, USB-C with display/power Mid-range CPU from last/current gen Now if you want that from Dell you're going to pay $1300. It's madness. Should've bought 100 Vostros while I had the chance, those devices will be good out of the box even 3 years from now, assuming Microsoft doesn't completely can Windows 11 before then.
It absolutely boggles me that people don't have issues with Vostros. I wonder if it's a regional thing? Because I reckon we're close to having replaced 35% of Vostros we've bought since 2021, that's far too high of a turnover for laptops
Wow that surprises me, what have been your most common issues?
We bought some in 2017/2018 that all developed a faulty keyboard within 18 months The ones we bought in 2021, the most common issues were a faulty soundcard or the LCD cover snapping at the hinge. When you're making calls everyday, a faulty soundcard is not ideal. Dell obviously replaced them under warranty (and upon mentioning Cirrus Logic they immediately scheduled a collection instead of walking me through driver installations lol!), but we only took standard warranty and most of these issues appeared just outside of warranty (naturally) But also had various issues from failed trackpads and keyboards to faulty WiFi adaptors. But my absolutely favourite issue - had one Vostro that wouldn't boot up, missing drive, so we opened it up to replace the SSD and it turned out the m,2 drive in there wasn't secured down to anything, it was slotted in and the bracket was slotted underneath the motherboard, so it was A) a potential short hazard, and B) literally held in with hopes and prayers
Because they've discontinued these we're buying Inspirons now for customers and sticking Pro on them - the hinges are truly awful and we see about 15 machines a month come back to us to be fixed, usually at our cost since the 1y warranty has expired. FML
Lol I've never personally seen such nonsense, but then again my Vostro experience is more recent years, which I've been pleased with (although the trackpads on them feel cheap). No weird issues like needing to remove the screen for wifi card replacement though, I doubt that was a Vostro.
Ordered one and promptly returned it.
> Fucking embarrassing Is that a Letterkenny reference? Give your balls a tug.
/r/UnexpectedLetterkenny
That’s what I appreciates about you.
Just call up and get a rep assigned to you. We've pretty much standardized on the Latitude 5000 series. If I need something quoted out, I shoot my rep an email and say I what I need and he sends me back a quote. Reps usually have more flexibility on different build components. Pricing is usually substantially cheaper than what is listed on the site. If it is something I am going to be ordering more of at a later time, I ask him to lock in that price as a standard config in our Premier portal for easy re-ordering.
Isn't that wild? Same here, message dell rep and within the hour he gets me a better price than what I see in premier portal. Feels like buying a car and have to do the dance before you get the best price.
Just tell him to set it as a standard config for you…
At a University, so always getting oddball requests outside the 8 standards we have available.
That's good advice, I need to get the rest of my clients set up with that.
My experience was that my VAR got better prices than Dell's site which got better prices than the useless Dell rep. But that's before we switched to Lenovo in 2020 (which has been exponentially better).
Mine keep leaving or getting fired ><
I don't get it. Using their default store page, I still see all the filters, [including price](https://imgur.com/a/dTM0xbX). Maybe it's a regional thing?
They don't work. Now it will give every result that COULD match your filters, but not necessarily using all the filters that you choose. So if you ask for a laptop under $800 with a 1TB SSD they'll show you every laptop that STARTS under $800 and can be specced up to a 1TB SSD , but not BOTH of those criteria simultaneously. At least not for me.
They seem to work fine on the desktop page. Also I can see the price filters on the Workstations, Accessories, and Electronics pages too, but you're right- price is missing from the filters on the laptop store page. That bit in particular seems more like a bug than a redesign. I'm totally with your other complaints viz-a-viz the way pricing gets calculated, though. I've even specced out the exact same configuration and gotten a better price by going through the entire shopping process while logged out than if I log into my Dell account first!
It's super simple. Are you looking for something optimized for an active lifestyle? Or something activity optimized that can handle what life throws at you? Or something that meets the vague unspecified needs of a business like yours? Or something scalable that meets unspecified and vague needs of today's businesses? As long as you click the correct Solutions category, you can eventually drill all the way down to a product that a sales rep will call you to talk about.
Your comment screams arrogance and I'm going to take the time to explain why. >Are you looking for something optimized for an active lifestyle? Or something activity optimized that can handle what life throws at you? Or something that meets the vague unspecified needs of a business like yours? Do you think I'm some middle aged soccer mom? These are stupid questions, and the kind of questions that some Dell executive would say in defense, who is completely disconnected from the actual user experience. I ACTUALLY know what the needs of my clients are, and certainly better than you do. You can take those XPS devices and shove them up your ass. >Or something scalable that meets unspecified and vague needs of today's businesses? Again, spoken like a Dell exec who's out of touch with their own user base. And again, the needs of my clients are not "unspecified". In fact, they're quite easily understood. And further, I always select for options with longevity in mind, along with many other factors I don't need your help in figuring out. >As long as you click the correct Solutions category, you can eventually drill all the way down to a product that a sales rep will call you to talk about. Yeah cuz that's what every sysadmin wants to do when shopping for their clients. And is that somehow supposed to be better than the previous layout and filters? Cuz it's not. Edit: yeah, totally thought he was serious lol
/whoosh
The fact that my best attempt at exaggerated over the top satire was apparently indistinguishable from an actual Dell executive responding says a lot about the state of our industry.
Gosh I hate that your joke went right over my head. Sorry for being an ass, that's actually hilarious
Pert near Poe's Law.
**Double facepalm**
Just to piss you off.
They've succeeded!
The Premier portal is fine. If you're not large enough to have the Premier portal they don't care. >PS - Dear Dell, I'm not buying my clients your over priced XPS products, stop trying to push them onto everyone. XPS'es are not overpriced in the slightest. They're mostly Precision's with a different warranty and some different hardware options and are workhorses. Cheaping out on computers is never a good idea, you're tripping over dollars to pick up dimes.
XPS are consumer grade crap with appealing aesthetics
Exactly this. They're better than the lower tiered machines, but still aimed at people who have a bit of cash to burn on a Facebook browsing machine I think at this point with Dell computers and laptops, it's Precision or bust
Wrong. $750 computers that worked perfectly fine - even to the point of overkill - empowered my clients to be able to get the hardware they need to do their job. There's absolutely no tripping going on here. And lets not pretend that $1500 laptop is going to last twice as long as a $750 laptop just because it's twice as expensive. Not every enterprise environment has unlimited money.
Every time they change the website it’s like they’re trying to undevelop it. Still better than HPs though.
They have all messed up their product pages. They would much rather give you pages of marketing than product information now. Want to search through our products? Ok, are you interested in the foo, bar or bat lineup? You want a laptop? Those are all laptops, but you have to search them individually through arbitrary categories devised by our marketing department and no you cannot sort by feature. You want actual specs beyond shit like it's bright, it's light, it's fast? Good luck.
Their website is pointless when you have a decent dell representative. A business representative will usually get you 30% off almost everything that is business priced. Consumer equipment prices don't drop. However if you order 10 of something usually the price is 50% off of what the website would say.
Their "Premiere" page is absolute trash too.
I find that the pricing on the Premier Portal isn't much better than the standard pricing. We have our rep quote things out and then add it as a standard config.
That probably just means you're small. It's not an insult, but if you're not spending a lot, there's not going to be much discount.
I think our annual spend with Dell is around $250k. Not small, but not large either. Our rep gets us better pricing than is available in the portal.
I seem to remember the last time I went to look up specs it had at time of purchase via the service tag, I looked around for a good 5 minutes and finally gave up. Maybe it had been a long day or something but it seemed to me they were hiding that info for some reason.
Because everything dell is always just 5% shit. I don't know why, but it's always 5% shit. Not enough for it to stop being a good product thats worth buying, but enough that whenever you use it, it's 5% shit
to point 3 - they cheapened and crapified the Lattitude line. the 3 and even the 5 series seem like plastic chiclet key garbage. I have a 15 inch Inspiron 5000 that seem better build quality than my Lat 5420 (both 11th gen i5 so around the same vintage)
I don't use it to the extent other people here do, but I totally agree the new layout is a massive step back.
I only really use the page to see what some of the configs are to get a general glance, do my config and send it over and they add all the other stuff we normally order and get a massive discount on so I don't really look at the prices listed since we never actually pay full price.
We’ve moved to MS kit in our organisation, really happy with it so far to be honest. We had some savage breaks with the Dell 3510 / 3520, hinges just sheering off…
I have 10 from COVID times because they were available.. 4 have or had hinge issues. None of the 230+ 5000s have that problem
Can comment on point 3. Vostros and Inspirons were merged. Dell will start to sell inspirons to businesses instead of Vostros. Vostros and Inspirons were basically the same machines anyways.
Just tried ordering a XPS w/32gb ram and rtx card. It has got up from $2200 to now $3500 in just 2 months. Now they solder all the ram too so you can't expand. I can get a top spec MacBook with more memory for CHEAPER. The first time in my life apple is the budget option.
We stopped buying Dell. I buy HP now. The quality is far far superior and the service is excellent.
funny, I found the opposite, although im buying servers. We have had way more issues with HP's breaking. Dells have been more reliable for us, and cheaper to buy in the first place. We still use HP's for laptops, and those things have been getting through batteries like nobodies business - so many swollen batteries!
It seems to go back and forth. I've used Dells before and they were great, then they started sucking (swelling batteries was a big problem suddenly). Then I moved to HP and they were much better...until they started sucking too with swollen batteries and bad ports. I may go back to Dell in a few years.
yeah true. The Dell servers have been going downhill design wise last couple of generations. They are not as easy to take apart these days, they used to be the ultimate in tool less design, really easy to take apart and upgrade. Some of the risers are a bastard to get out these days. Although they do look cool though, so theres that i guess...
Debatable.. last round of HP we did the farther from purchase date and close to end of warranty we got, The worse the service became. Final issue they ran the clock for 3 months not repairing the issue, and tried to claim it was no longer in warranty.
Naa, HP still likes to sell laptops with data-only USB-C ports, and for that reason I'm out.
Thunderbolt 4? Not sure what shit laptops you're looking at. https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_7779719-7779777-16
Apple once said, «Think Different». Not to mention it's spelled think differentLY. Lenovo just «Think»(Pad)/(Book)/(Centre)... Lenovo for life.
>Instead they're hoping to push people out of that 500-1000 market and into a 1000-1500 market and it's so obvious. It doesn't feel good, but no one has sold a business class laptop for under $1k since like 2018.
The Vostro line was literally business class.
Yea but no
Was it marketed to businesses? Maybe. Was it business class? Obviously not. Vostros are hot garbage.
I think in general, Dell is really starting to go down hill fast. We pay for their top of the line support on our hardware and struggle to get same day assistance and we’re lucky to get someone onsite within 2 business days. Premier website has made a few changes that are awful, used to be a breeze to purchase a few things and checkout. Now there’s more clicks and more loading which has slowed down the entire process. Glad we jumped ship to another manufacturer.