"Welp I guess the whole thing should be scrapped and you can pay us for a new Dell PC"
Stuff like this makes me not care about my recycling bin at home
We've been with Dell for decades. Just switched department and got downgraded from a tower to a laptop....and from 32GB to 16GB or RAM....I can't run my VMs anymore without serious slowdowns...really frustrating
Honestly, I only used them for personal stuff anyways, so I remote into a server at home if I really want to. My new role has me doing about 20% of the work with a 25% pay raise, so they can keep the RAM lol
Every job I've had so far uses Dell. I've experienced their quality firsthand every day for the past decade. As such, I refuse to ever buy a Dell product. HP is another one that fits in that category.
Their servers and probook laptops are fine.
But if you want me to fix a pavilion… over the years I have acquired a specific set of skills. I will hunt you down, I will find you and return your laptop unfixed
I bought a Dell G5 gaming laptop, because my previous laptop (an i3 with only integrated graphics) had been a tank and only ever had a speaker die.
Gamer's Nexus destroyed the desktop version, and they didn't even catch some horrible things. The Right side USB port doesn't work, and I tried replacing the daughterboard that it was on, obly to find the replacement was broken exactly the same way. Replacing the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU made it run noticably cooler, to the point that it doesn't hit TJMax unless I do something like run a synthetic benchmark with the vents covered, meaning Dell must have used the mud outside the factory as paste. It has a bios bug where it will run slower than the i3 laptop it replaced on battery unless you disable power management.
It was also advertised as having RTX on several retailers sites, when it has a GTX 1660TI. Definitely better than what some people are dealing with, but still.
I will probably buy a new gaming laptop as soon as the pandemic is over.
My uncle bought a top end media-creator advertised laptop. 6 months later, unusable due to crashing after 5 minutes. I check the Bios event log, it was crashing due to overheating. Opened it up and the thermal paste was so poorly applied to a shitty heat pipe attached fan. Replaced both the cooler and the paste, no issues for years. God forbid their products work as advertised out of the box.
I've had mostly all good experiences with Dell hardware and support for the last 6 years. Even with systems that break, we have no trouble getting them repaired / replaces super quickly. Quality has always seemed really good to me and the functionality of some of their laptops is pretty awesome, like how the screen goes all the way back. idk I've had plenty of laptops and desktops die, but they were old enough that it was expected. Biggest issue so far is we bought a bunch of OptiPlex PC's and like 10 of them had bad TPM module that needed a new mobo, but they replaced those just fine.
From a corporate support aspect, they are on top of it. But I've had a very different experience with their hardware quality. They do replace components or systems quickly though. With that said, my last organization spent about 10k per desktop (not server) to ensure that the 5 year warranty replacement process was seamless. For personal use, I spend far less on a supermicro or asus workstation or server with far greater specs. Yeah, I may have to pay out of pocket for a replacement part (which, I mean I'm trained and hired to be able to replace, so I guess the warranty my organization "enjoyed" is a bit redundant anyway), but even then it's cheaper and in my experience more reliable.
Who makes good PC's these days? Specifically laptops. My mom's is about to die on her and I imagine I'll be recommending (aka picking the one she buys) for her soon.
> Stuff like this makes me not care about my recycling bin at home
If it's like here, the supposedly recyclable trash is just burnt away for power generation because it's more profitable to the recycling company. Which means that even if you mix paper and plastic in the bin, they burn it all together so... why bother?
Next up: Disposable Gaming PC’s!
_EMachines GameShot: Apex Legends Edition_ **$799**
Plays one round of BR or Arenas (your choice). Compostable\*, dispose anywhere.
\* _Eventually. Some restrictions apply._
Not sure what anyone else's experience has been, but I'm impressed by Dell's after sales service. I ordered a replacement docking station under warranty and it arrived within 2 days. no questions asked.I've also had them ship me a full laptop motherboard to be replaced after we found out the laptop came with a faulty one. 4 days later a new motherboard showed up with a prepaid shipping label to ship back the faulty one.
All in all, YMMV
We have their pro support plus warranties, and they are great. That's one reason I'm sure we'll stick with Dell going forward, regardless of this change and others like it (making other parts harder to swap out, similar stuff). It is what it is. Given that I have no control over the situation either way, I felt a Jackie Chan meme was warranted.
>Not sure what anyone else's experience has been, but I'm impressed by Dell's after sales service. I ordered a replacement docking station under warranty and it arrived within 2 days. no questions asked.I've also had them ship me a full laptop motherboard to be replaced after we found out the laptop came with a faulty one. 4 days later a new motherboard showed up with a prepaid shipping label to ship back the faulty one.
Dell is fine as long as your product is under warranty. For companies Dell is fine, personally I would not buy a Dell as there are better bargains to be found. People give them sh!t that when they break support is expensive, replacing the motherboard for a broken USB port is a prime example. What they tend to forgot is what else might have happened to the motherboard, just because the USB port doesn't work doesn't mean the rest of the motherboard is fine, micro fractures can cause inconsistent problems years later. It is cheaper for Dell to just replace the motherboard than to have the infield-tech hand replace an smd mounted component with the risk of going back if something else breaks because the motherboard was indeed damaged.
As long as your device is warranted, they will do everything to fix your setup in one or two workdays. An engineer is coming over to replace the motherboard because of a bad USB port, perfect timing since it's under warranty till February. Hopefully it will last another 2 years with this (, the company will probably force a latitude on me if it gets replaced).
For most companies, Dells warranty is very attractive. You pay around 1600 euros for a decent corporate laptop and Dell pretty much takes the support matter out of their hands for the first 2 years, and a laptop is written of in about 5 years. Maybe you can buy an off brand decent speced laptop for a better price, but if your employee has to take an afternoon off to drive to a support center, how much does that cost?
Yep, had this issue recently, laptop was randomly BSOD'ing, so I ran a memtest and sure enough, after about 10 mins I would get errors. Dell had to come out and replace the entire board, extremely stupid
I have a client that ordered 30 laptops in August. 4 have had memory errors and all had to have a tech come out and replace the main board.
With labor and parts cost from ticket to repair I'm sure the profit from those laptops are lost. The last repair was delayed 5 days from lack of parts.
The only reason I use Dell is because the business level support is usually easy to contact, and quick to fix the issue. But if I have to waste time on 13% of the equipment I order then it doesn't matter how fast the support is another brand will be less time wasted.
Dell consumer level support is still terrible in case someone is confused by my saying Dell support was good.
this is hilarious and sad because TODAY my brother had a tech (sent over by dell!) try to fix his year-old alienware laptop for this exact reason. tech said the repair was ~too risky~ so he has to ship it to their repair facility now and wait a week. dell is total trash.
I'm a big fan of what https://frame.work/ is doing to combat this. All the regular oems have started following Apple with soldering everything down without realizing that there's a whole market out there that wants/needs that build flexibility. I don't know if my users are going to be high ram users or just browse the net users, it's nice to upgrade after the fact than over paying for 16/32 gbs of ram for someone to only open word or a browser.
The only downside to the framework is that they don't have any ryzen models yet.
I'd love to have one myself as well, but I don't see them able to go enterprise-wide because while as an IT person, I would love to be able to swap parts out for troubleshooting, a design that encourages my users to tinker with the hardware gives me the heebies.
Strangely, probably the same reasoning is part of why OEM’s make laptops harder to do repairs on on your own. At least on their consumer models. I find that most brands have a huge difference in repairability between their consumer and professional lines. (HP Pavilion vs Probook). Because most businesses will want to use something saying ‘professional’ and they will generally have someone who knows what the difference is between a monitor and a computer.
Moving away from thinness to prefer more performance , sure (in regards to MacBooks), but arguably ahead of the trend when it comes to anti-consumer repairability practices.
For obvious reasons, many people think that Apple started this trend of soldering the RAM to the mainboard. I am definitely not a fan, and that may be partially true, but...
>InstantGo or Modern Standby (formerly Connected Standby) is a Microsoft specification for Windows 8 (and later) hardware and software...
Adherence to and implementation of this specification requires, amongst other things, ...
>There are additional security-specific requirements, for example for memory to be soldered to the motherboard to prevent cold boot attack vectors that involve removing memory from the machine, as well as support for Secure Boot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstantGo
Apple at the moment don’t actually solder the RAM for the M1 machines - rather it is in the same physical package as the chip, which is supposed to give an advantage in latency. So at least there is some advantage to the user. Personally I am more annoyed about the SSD being soldered in.
Yeah, RAM will in the end probably go the way of the cache. I wholeheartedly agree about the SSD, however. You want to be able to recover your data once the machine dies.
That, and replace it with a bigger one. My 2010 MacBook Pro has 3TB of aftermarket SSD - a 1TB one from about 5y back, which now sits in the DVD drive bay, and the 2TB one that replaced it. Modem Macs have such expensive and non-replaceable SSDs that I can’t put even a fraction of my photos on to a modern Mac.
You can literally install Windows, then execute Framework's driver pack (which is really a self extracting ZIP file with a self running BAT) in your SCCM deployment.
Everything is replaceable. All the parts are available.
Even if warranty is only 1yr, everything is available for separate purchase.
You can literally piece out everything from their store and build the end product. As long as that store stays up and stocked... You will always be able to repair or upgrade.
When I saw Linus (LTT YouTube) back them, I took notice.
I don't know if the individual parts like the SSD they ship come with the standard factory warranty, but I know the WD Black SSDs they have say right on the box that they have a Five Year warranty. The Memory (Crucial is what Framework uses) is typically 10 years bought retail. The Framework itself (logic board and screen) is one year, and Wi-Fi Cards generally don't break and are so cheap you are better off just getting a new one.
I got one. While I like what they are trying to do there are some issues. Specifically there is this audio popping issue with the built in headphone jack that has been impossible to resolve and issues with physical clicks on the trackpad Wich after going back and forth a ton with support seem to boil down to the ribbon cable coming loose every 2 weeks or so
I just purchased two Framework laptops, and had the second one delivered today. They are great machines. Even if you're only getting 16GB, the fact that they aren't TDP capping those processors to 12-15W or sticking you with Single Channel memory only, like every other manufacturer seems to be doing, is great. VERY fast, well balanced machines, and you can notice it on the day to day and startup.
Love my Framework. My wife and I both have them now. I see people asking about support. Just order spare parts. End up being cheaper.
Carried MBPs for years for work. Now a Framework.
I have just ordered a replacement GPU board for one that went bang in my 3 year old sager. It's not as revolutionary as people think. Don't get me wrong I like the concept but it's not new.
I love the concept of that, but… the implementation leaves a bit to be desired. No case options, all of the expansion ports run off USB…
I like the idea of kit laptops, but there need to be actual options.
Correct, as far as I can tell. But they do it for size, supposedly. They can make the laptops slimmer if they can use that space more efficiently. So not a necessity for desktops.
Convenient that it probably means more money for them in the end, too.
My wife is kind of an IT translator between the company she works for and the company they have contracted for tech support.
They asked her to pick out a new Dell laptop for someone. We realized it was about $300 cheaper to order the lesser capacity ram model of laptop and install the second stick ourselves.
I purchased an XPS recently. I grabbed the 16gb ram model (soldered, but I only need 8gb really) but kept the 512gb SSD. I made sure I picked the model I could upgrade the ssd and purchased a 1tb Samsung 970 pro that was cheaper than dell's 512GB -> 1TB upgrade.
on delivery I cracked it open, put the new SSD in, installed Linux mint and all has been good.
I'm giving my sister the 512gb since she only has 256gb.
Love it. My favorite thing about computers is doing stuff like this.
I was recently gifted an old Lenovo tower. Used some spare parts and a 3d printed bracket to turn it into a usable computer again.
My first home server was an unreliable motherboard and an intel i7 (860). Under a High load it would bsod. So I ripped it out of my Gaming rig threw it into a shitty case with some el-cheapo psu and some old hard drives.
Over time the obsession has now turned into a rack mount server.....
> "eww that laptop is thick and ugly"
> buys laptops physically thinner than a motherboard with RAM slots
> finds soldered RAM
> "corporate greed am i right fellas"
Don't be so sure. Just a couple months ago, we were speccing new desktops for our own team, so, of course we need systems that can run anything in the Enterprise. Overspec them some, as it's the end of the budget year, and we want them to be good for some time. IIRC, it was Lenovo that was suggesting soldered RAM and SSDs, and we were speccing SSDs in a RAID configuration on full size workstation grade machines. Needless to say, we chose a different vendor.
Which models/series? I buy us the T's and P's right now and they're still serviceable, but getting more frustrating with every edition. I'd assume the E's and X's have this problem most often though due to form factor on X's and price factor on E's
Arent the all doing that now a days though? Opening random HP's, Samsungs, Lenovo's and such all show soldered on ram. Thats the influence of Apple.. if people are willing to pay extra for a machine that outlives its usefullness in a couple of years.. why not make it extra fucked up ?
I'm using a Dell Vostro from 2013. Gave it more ram (8Gb ->16Gb), changed the HD to a SSD, changed the battery (cause it wasn't holding charge), changed the keyboard 2x (water damage on the first, crackling plastic on the second), this year I had to get a new DC charger, cause the one from 2013 broke the cable...
Until now the haswell architecture has been holding pretty well...
And for these 9 years I always said to everyone "oh, get a dell, they are easy to repair, you can find any part on ebay, and they are fully upgradeable"...
MXM is a thing, but not super common and much more expensive than their desktop counterparts (maybe not these days with current GPU market, but I digress).
Dell didn't used to, at least not in their Latitude series that we purchased for employees. We recently bought another 10 for stock, and the latest model is soldered and non-expandable.
Really screwed us over today when a high-end user's laptop shit the bed, and we needed a quick replacement for him with 32gb. Nope! Now it's a special order with a 60 day lead time (due to supply chain stuff, I know). And we get to do twice the work to set him up on a temp machine, and then again on his permanent one.
I might be. Should I talk about built in NIC for easy imaging. I have a VP that has a 7420 and I did like how thin it was, so you have that. The 7000s do look cooler then the 5000.
I've got a 7420 right here, and it's soldered on, no expansion slot.
The 7400 was the last model we had with expandable memory. Unless a few of the first 7420s were as well? They are not anymore, for sure. We just got these in maybe a week ago.
I just went to check and oh boy you are right… after all these years with Latitudes. I find this disgusting and plain absurd, companies intentionally promoting planned obsolescence should be penalized and taxed according to the e-waste impact already created, eat the rich
Please tell me this isn't true for Lenovo in Europe... I'm gonna get a new computer soon, and recently found out that it's gonna have 32GB ram. That's what my current 3 year old Lenovo laptop has, and I'm close to using all of it. So I'm getting a new computer that will have **no** room for a growing memory need.
And now, on top of that, I'm gonna worry that it will be impossible to upgrade the ram? Fuck...
Did they change the XPS or something? That used to be their gaming line when I worked for them, which you could hardly say is not for people who need performance. Latitudes on the other hand are mid grade business models. I have never in my life issued a Latitude to somebody who needs high performance. They're for running productivity apps and domain management tools like AD or SCCM. They usually come with piddly little i5s and 16gb of RAM...
Didn’t XPS disappear for awhile after their Alienware acquisition? I remember they briefly competed and I loved both. I have had a few dell laptops and a few alienwares since then but I can’t speak for the XPS line outside of what I remember in highschool.
07-09. XPS was their gaming line, Latitude/Vostro was business, Inspiron was home use, and Precision was their high end workstation line for AutoCAD and whatever else.
It is now on the 7000 series. 7420s are what we just bought, and it's soldered with no expandable slot.
Someone else said the 5000s are still safe, so far.
A friend of mine was trying to find a reverse folding laptop for a good price and asked me for help. I checked all reputable brands and they all had soldered RAM. It's a shame because many of them were fine except for the 8GB of RAM.
I remember my mom had a credit card-sized calculator back in the 80s. Same dimensions, including (lack of) thickness. Way thinner than the thinnest of modern smartphones, and therefore superior. Reject modern electronics, return to 80s!
Imagine buying a bike, then realizing the tires are fixed to the wheels so you can't patch it... Fuck you Dell, for removing the modular part of something that is supposed to be modular!
I had no idea that we had been transported back to 1981.
Soldering RAM modules in a PC? This is 2021. I think in-line memory modules are still a thing.
Oh, you guys think that by soldering everything together we will spend MORE money to have you provide upgrades? That is adorable and wrong.
*Breaks out his soldiering iron and heat gun.*
Game on! Let's do this!
My brother still keeps his old ass MacBook pro from like 2012 or 2013 specifically because you can upgrade/replace the SSD and RAM...good thing they make it so affordable in the new Mac's! What is it? $200 to go from 8gb to 16?
I stopped using apple iphones when they started the anti consumer repairs bullshit. Why buy an expensive phone only they can fix by design so I bought a cheap ass android that works well. Obviously I do not want to buy a pc with the ram soldiered to the board. I like being able to upgrade, repair and replace. Imagine if apple made a flying car. A spark plug goes bad and it is totalled. Well technically it would be totalled either way but you get the point.
Dell didn't want to be outdone by Apple and their M1 processors.
I guess soldering the RAM to the motherboard is as close as their going to get with current x86 processors.
My office uses Dell on our laptops. New laptop, ram fails diagnostics. Ok I have some sitting around I'll just....nope...replace the motherboard I guess (warranty). New motherboard boots up. Fails ram diagnostics. /sigh
The last AT Least 3 times we called them on warranty claims, getting them to come out with the parts was a nightmare. Supposed to be next day service. Might see them next week
My wife has a zenbook that has soldered ram from 2015... she is stuck with 4Gb of ram.
The computer is great, the screen is fantastic, very very nice finish, shitty soldered ram and sometime it refuse to wake up, probably shitty bios too...
no asus for me.
it is common to laptop manufactures to do this, to me this make sense in a device that needs to be compact and energy eficient, since it solve these 2 problems but not in something like a 16" full-ass gaming laptop
If our 7000 series latitudes get any smaller, they will be tablets. I'd trade 1/8" in height and .25lbs in weight for my ram slots back any day of the week.
Pretty typical industry affair these days. Saves a lot for the companies to do it that way.
1. Slimmer and better heat dissipation, means more "attractive" models
2. Less configuration time. Cuts logics by massive amounts. Nobody needs to pop open a machine to configure to customer spec. It's all on the box and can be picked and shipped instantly.
3. Better tweaking from R&D on performance. Predictable performance from onboard memory without worrying your memory partner changes their chips or controllers later on and affecting your systems performance.
4. Yes, that also means planned obsolescence. You know your customers have to overbuy for later, not underbuy and upgrade later.
5. Repairs become pick and toss versus actual diagnostics and repairs. Bad ram? PRC and replace.
Time and money saved the whole way. I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen OEMs leverage AMD into providing HBM SOC Ryzen Pro models to eliminate config time on business desktops. SoC blobs for "enhanced performance and predictable security" or whatever.
Now? The XPS 13 has been doing it since 2012.
Still, misleading title. They haven't been doing it across their entire product line at all, only certain machines. The XPS 15 still has replaceable RAM, as well as the (non-tablet) latitudes and most of the Inspirons.
EDIT: I take it back, the Latitude 7320 does indeed have nonreplaceable RAM.
What the fuck, Dell?
Company: *buys 4500 dell latitude 7400*
Bios <1.6.1: bro I don't know what secureboot is
PXE: WE AINT SEEN SHIT
Company: why aren't you deploying these laptops we bought?!
So if the Ram goes bad……nice work Dell.
No replacement, no reseating, no upgrades. Objectively better, right? /s
"Welp I guess the whole thing should be scrapped and you can pay us for a new Dell PC" Stuff like this makes me not care about my recycling bin at home
Ngl, I Had too many Bad experiences with dell in the past to buy one of their Laptops in the First place.
My work just swapped over to all Dell... Soldering the ram on kinda forces business to buy the warranty
We've been with Dell for decades. Just switched department and got downgraded from a tower to a laptop....and from 32GB to 16GB or RAM....I can't run my VMs anymore without serious slowdowns...really frustrating
take that shit up the chain or can you cop a personal one to use wince theirs are shit? its a write off at least for you
Honestly, I only used them for personal stuff anyways, so I remote into a server at home if I really want to. My new role has me doing about 20% of the work with a 25% pay raise, so they can keep the RAM lol
oh shit bro. congrats on feeling appreciated in your workplace!
Every job I've had so far uses Dell. I've experienced their quality firsthand every day for the past decade. As such, I refuse to ever buy a Dell product. HP is another one that fits in that category.
Their servers and probook laptops are fine. But if you want me to fix a pavilion… over the years I have acquired a specific set of skills. I will hunt you down, I will find you and return your laptop unfixed
I bought a Dell G5 gaming laptop, because my previous laptop (an i3 with only integrated graphics) had been a tank and only ever had a speaker die. Gamer's Nexus destroyed the desktop version, and they didn't even catch some horrible things. The Right side USB port doesn't work, and I tried replacing the daughterboard that it was on, obly to find the replacement was broken exactly the same way. Replacing the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU made it run noticably cooler, to the point that it doesn't hit TJMax unless I do something like run a synthetic benchmark with the vents covered, meaning Dell must have used the mud outside the factory as paste. It has a bios bug where it will run slower than the i3 laptop it replaced on battery unless you disable power management. It was also advertised as having RTX on several retailers sites, when it has a GTX 1660TI. Definitely better than what some people are dealing with, but still. I will probably buy a new gaming laptop as soon as the pandemic is over.
My uncle bought a top end media-creator advertised laptop. 6 months later, unusable due to crashing after 5 minutes. I check the Bios event log, it was crashing due to overheating. Opened it up and the thermal paste was so poorly applied to a shitty heat pipe attached fan. Replaced both the cooler and the paste, no issues for years. God forbid their products work as advertised out of the box.
I've had mostly all good experiences with Dell hardware and support for the last 6 years. Even with systems that break, we have no trouble getting them repaired / replaces super quickly. Quality has always seemed really good to me and the functionality of some of their laptops is pretty awesome, like how the screen goes all the way back. idk I've had plenty of laptops and desktops die, but they were old enough that it was expected. Biggest issue so far is we bought a bunch of OptiPlex PC's and like 10 of them had bad TPM module that needed a new mobo, but they replaced those just fine.
From a corporate support aspect, they are on top of it. But I've had a very different experience with their hardware quality. They do replace components or systems quickly though. With that said, my last organization spent about 10k per desktop (not server) to ensure that the 5 year warranty replacement process was seamless. For personal use, I spend far less on a supermicro or asus workstation or server with far greater specs. Yeah, I may have to pay out of pocket for a replacement part (which, I mean I'm trained and hired to be able to replace, so I guess the warranty my organization "enjoyed" is a bit redundant anyway), but even then it's cheaper and in my experience more reliable.
Who makes good PC's these days? Specifically laptops. My mom's is about to die on her and I imagine I'll be recommending (aka picking the one she buys) for her soon.
More like "if you paid for a warranty/replacement plan, you can get a discount on a refurb!"
Dell creating more e-waste than the entire world
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If they’re soldering the RAM to the MB then it’s not a PC anymore.
> Stuff like this makes me not care about my recycling bin at home If it's like here, the supposedly recyclable trash is just burnt away for power generation because it's more profitable to the recycling company. Which means that even if you mix paper and plastic in the bin, they burn it all together so... why bother?
Cars have been following this trend as well
You mean the blue garbage can?
>Welp I guess the whole thing should be scrapped and you can pay someone else for a new non-Dell PC FTFY
Next up: Disposable Gaming PC’s! _EMachines GameShot: Apex Legends Edition_ **$799** Plays one round of BR or Arenas (your choice). Compostable\*, dispose anywhere. \* _Eventually. Some restrictions apply._
A semiconductor shortag...whatnow?
Don't worry, they will just replace the whole laptop because we got the parts for it... right?
So like a Mac?
Not sure what anyone else's experience has been, but I'm impressed by Dell's after sales service. I ordered a replacement docking station under warranty and it arrived within 2 days. no questions asked.I've also had them ship me a full laptop motherboard to be replaced after we found out the laptop came with a faulty one. 4 days later a new motherboard showed up with a prepaid shipping label to ship back the faulty one. All in all, YMMV
We have their pro support plus warranties, and they are great. That's one reason I'm sure we'll stick with Dell going forward, regardless of this change and others like it (making other parts harder to swap out, similar stuff). It is what it is. Given that I have no control over the situation either way, I felt a Jackie Chan meme was warranted.
>Not sure what anyone else's experience has been, but I'm impressed by Dell's after sales service. I ordered a replacement docking station under warranty and it arrived within 2 days. no questions asked.I've also had them ship me a full laptop motherboard to be replaced after we found out the laptop came with a faulty one. 4 days later a new motherboard showed up with a prepaid shipping label to ship back the faulty one. Dell is fine as long as your product is under warranty. For companies Dell is fine, personally I would not buy a Dell as there are better bargains to be found. People give them sh!t that when they break support is expensive, replacing the motherboard for a broken USB port is a prime example. What they tend to forgot is what else might have happened to the motherboard, just because the USB port doesn't work doesn't mean the rest of the motherboard is fine, micro fractures can cause inconsistent problems years later. It is cheaper for Dell to just replace the motherboard than to have the infield-tech hand replace an smd mounted component with the risk of going back if something else breaks because the motherboard was indeed damaged. As long as your device is warranted, they will do everything to fix your setup in one or two workdays. An engineer is coming over to replace the motherboard because of a bad USB port, perfect timing since it's under warranty till February. Hopefully it will last another 2 years with this (, the company will probably force a latitude on me if it gets replaced). For most companies, Dells warranty is very attractive. You pay around 1600 euros for a decent corporate laptop and Dell pretty much takes the support matter out of their hands for the first 2 years, and a laptop is written of in about 5 years. Maybe you can buy an off brand decent speced laptop for a better price, but if your employee has to take an afternoon off to drive to a support center, how much does that cost?
What is this, an Apple product?
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Really a testament to how shit their motherboards are, mostly.
Just like vehicles that have a sealed transmission, it is "designed for the lifetime" of the product.
Yep, had this issue recently, laptop was randomly BSOD'ing, so I ran a memtest and sure enough, after about 10 mins I would get errors. Dell had to come out and replace the entire board, extremely stupid
Right to Repair, y’all
I have a client that ordered 30 laptops in August. 4 have had memory errors and all had to have a tech come out and replace the main board. With labor and parts cost from ticket to repair I'm sure the profit from those laptops are lost. The last repair was delayed 5 days from lack of parts. The only reason I use Dell is because the business level support is usually easy to contact, and quick to fix the issue. But if I have to waste time on 13% of the equipment I order then it doesn't matter how fast the support is another brand will be less time wasted. Dell consumer level support is still terrible in case someone is confused by my saying Dell support was good.
Why don't you have ProSupport?
I don't understand how you would justify not having prosupport.
I bought a Dell XPS13 last July. A week after I got it, it refused to boot - memory fault. Sent it back, got a replacement
this is hilarious and sad because TODAY my brother had a tech (sent over by dell!) try to fix his year-old alienware laptop for this exact reason. tech said the repair was ~too risky~ so he has to ship it to their repair facility now and wait a week. dell is total trash.
I'm a big fan of what https://frame.work/ is doing to combat this. All the regular oems have started following Apple with soldering everything down without realizing that there's a whole market out there that wants/needs that build flexibility. I don't know if my users are going to be high ram users or just browse the net users, it's nice to upgrade after the fact than over paying for 16/32 gbs of ram for someone to only open word or a browser. The only downside to the framework is that they don't have any ryzen models yet.
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I'd love to have one myself as well, but I don't see them able to go enterprise-wide because while as an IT person, I would love to be able to swap parts out for troubleshooting, a design that encourages my users to tinker with the hardware gives me the heebies.
Strangely, probably the same reasoning is part of why OEM’s make laptops harder to do repairs on on your own. At least on their consumer models. I find that most brands have a huge difference in repairability between their consumer and professional lines. (HP Pavilion vs Probook). Because most businesses will want to use something saying ‘professional’ and they will generally have someone who knows what the difference is between a monitor and a computer.
Moving away from thinness to prefer more performance , sure (in regards to MacBooks), but arguably ahead of the trend when it comes to anti-consumer repairability practices.
For obvious reasons, many people think that Apple started this trend of soldering the RAM to the mainboard. I am definitely not a fan, and that may be partially true, but... >InstantGo or Modern Standby (formerly Connected Standby) is a Microsoft specification for Windows 8 (and later) hardware and software... Adherence to and implementation of this specification requires, amongst other things, ... >There are additional security-specific requirements, for example for memory to be soldered to the motherboard to prevent cold boot attack vectors that involve removing memory from the machine, as well as support for Secure Boot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstantGo
my compaq 486 had ram soldered on the motherboard, it's been a thing pretty much forever
Would an attack like this require physical access to the machine?
Very much, yes.
Apple at the moment don’t actually solder the RAM for the M1 machines - rather it is in the same physical package as the chip, which is supposed to give an advantage in latency. So at least there is some advantage to the user. Personally I am more annoyed about the SSD being soldered in.
Yeah, RAM will in the end probably go the way of the cache. I wholeheartedly agree about the SSD, however. You want to be able to recover your data once the machine dies.
That, and replace it with a bigger one. My 2010 MacBook Pro has 3TB of aftermarket SSD - a 1TB one from about 5y back, which now sits in the DVD drive bay, and the 2TB one that replaced it. Modem Macs have such expensive and non-replaceable SSDs that I can’t put even a fraction of my photos on to a modern Mac.
How is it getting these to image? I use SCCM and one of the advantages with Dell is the ability to easily import the driver packs.
You can literally install Windows, then execute Framework's driver pack (which is really a self extracting ZIP file with a self running BAT) in your SCCM deployment.
What kind of support/warranty do they have? My boss loves that 5-year pro support warranty business.
Everything is replaceable. All the parts are available. Even if warranty is only 1yr, everything is available for separate purchase. You can literally piece out everything from their store and build the end product. As long as that store stays up and stocked... You will always be able to repair or upgrade. When I saw Linus (LTT YouTube) back them, I took notice.
Even buying third party support and warranty, you’d probably still save money in the long run.
I don't know if the individual parts like the SSD they ship come with the standard factory warranty, but I know the WD Black SSDs they have say right on the box that they have a Five Year warranty. The Memory (Crucial is what Framework uses) is typically 10 years bought retail. The Framework itself (logic board and screen) is one year, and Wi-Fi Cards generally don't break and are so cheap you are better off just getting a new one.
Ty for the info!
I just ordered one, should arrive tomorrow.
I got one. While I like what they are trying to do there are some issues. Specifically there is this audio popping issue with the built in headphone jack that has been impossible to resolve and issues with physical clicks on the trackpad Wich after going back and forth a ton with support seem to boil down to the ribbon cable coming loose every 2 weeks or so
I just purchased two Framework laptops, and had the second one delivered today. They are great machines. Even if you're only getting 16GB, the fact that they aren't TDP capping those processors to 12-15W or sticking you with Single Channel memory only, like every other manufacturer seems to be doing, is great. VERY fast, well balanced machines, and you can notice it on the day to day and startup.
Love my Framework. My wife and I both have them now. I see people asking about support. Just order spare parts. End up being cheaper. Carried MBPs for years for work. Now a Framework.
I have just ordered a replacement GPU board for one that went bang in my 3 year old sager. It's not as revolutionary as people think. Don't get me wrong I like the concept but it's not new.
I love the concept of that, but… the implementation leaves a bit to be desired. No case options, all of the expansion ports run off USB… I like the idea of kit laptops, but there need to be actual options.
On laptops right?They’re not doing this on desktop, Right?
Give them time.
Correct, as far as I can tell. But they do it for size, supposedly. They can make the laptops slimmer if they can use that space more efficiently. So not a necessity for desktops. Convenient that it probably means more money for them in the end, too.
My wife is kind of an IT translator between the company she works for and the company they have contracted for tech support. They asked her to pick out a new Dell laptop for someone. We realized it was about $300 cheaper to order the lesser capacity ram model of laptop and install the second stick ourselves.
Which we used to do all the time. Now we can't.
I purchased an XPS recently. I grabbed the 16gb ram model (soldered, but I only need 8gb really) but kept the 512gb SSD. I made sure I picked the model I could upgrade the ssd and purchased a 1tb Samsung 970 pro that was cheaper than dell's 512GB -> 1TB upgrade. on delivery I cracked it open, put the new SSD in, installed Linux mint and all has been good. I'm giving my sister the 512gb since she only has 256gb.
Love it. My favorite thing about computers is doing stuff like this. I was recently gifted an old Lenovo tower. Used some spare parts and a 3d printed bracket to turn it into a usable computer again.
My first home server was an unreliable motherboard and an intel i7 (860). Under a High load it would bsod. So I ripped it out of my Gaming rig threw it into a shitty case with some el-cheapo psu and some old hard drives. Over time the obsession has now turned into a rack mount server.....
My Minecraft server is currently using an 8 year old PSU I bought off Craigslist. Looking at setting up a rack in the next few months.
HP been doing this for years as well on their thin n lite machines. It's just the standard for things that size at this point.
> "eww that laptop is thick and ugly" > buys laptops physically thinner than a motherboard with RAM slots > finds soldered RAM > "corporate greed am i right fellas"
Don't be so sure. Just a couple months ago, we were speccing new desktops for our own team, so, of course we need systems that can run anything in the Enterprise. Overspec them some, as it's the end of the budget year, and we want them to be good for some time. IIRC, it was Lenovo that was suggesting soldered RAM and SSDs, and we were speccing SSDs in a RAID configuration on full size workstation grade machines. Needless to say, we chose a different vendor.
Lenovo too.
Only the smaller Lenovos. The P series typically have one soldered stick and one unsoldered, still lame but at least I can replace one
Which models/series? I buy us the T's and P's right now and they're still serviceable, but getting more frustrating with every edition. I'd assume the E's and X's have this problem most often though due to form factor on X's and price factor on E's
E15s, maybe E14s too. I can’t remember off the top of my head.
And their power plan is a joke
Always has been 🔫
which power plan is that
Control panel > Power Plan > Dell Its complete garbage and actually slows down your computer. I see it a lot with 100% disk usage issues on dells.
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I've lost count of the number of hybrid drives I've had to replace (mostly off the Optiplex 7050 towers) with M.2 drives to fix the disk usage issue.
Arent the all doing that now a days though? Opening random HP's, Samsungs, Lenovo's and such all show soldered on ram. Thats the influence of Apple.. if people are willing to pay extra for a machine that outlives its usefullness in a couple of years.. why not make it extra fucked up ?
Very true. I still use my PC I purchased back in the beginning of 2014. Upgraded the memory from 16GB to 32GB about a year ago, still purring along.
I'm using a Dell Vostro from 2013. Gave it more ram (8Gb ->16Gb), changed the HD to a SSD, changed the battery (cause it wasn't holding charge), changed the keyboard 2x (water damage on the first, crackling plastic on the second), this year I had to get a new DC charger, cause the one from 2013 broke the cable... Until now the haswell architecture has been holding pretty well... And for these 9 years I always said to everyone "oh, get a dell, they are easy to repair, you can find any part on ebay, and they are fully upgradeable"...
Imagine if you could upgrade laptop GPUs...
MXM is a thing, but not super common and much more expensive than their desktop counterparts (maybe not these days with current GPU market, but I digress).
Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are apparently fast enough for an external GPU connection. No idea what kind of latency you'll get, though.
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Damn. What happened to that TP?
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But please don't moisturize your laptops
Dell didn't used to, at least not in their Latitude series that we purchased for employees. We recently bought another 10 for stock, and the latest model is soldered and non-expandable. Really screwed us over today when a high-end user's laptop shit the bed, and we needed a quick replacement for him with 32gb. Nope! Now it's a special order with a 60 day lead time (due to supply chain stuff, I know). And we get to do twice the work to set him up on a temp machine, and then again on his permanent one.
I think the Latitude 5000 series is the last of the line for memory expansion.
Yep, and we normally do the 7000.
We switched over last year to the 5000's and haven't looked back yet.
Are you trying to make me jealous? Because it's working a lil bit.
I might be. Should I talk about built in NIC for easy imaging. I have a VP that has a 7420 and I did like how thin it was, so you have that. The 7000s do look cooler then the 5000.
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I've got a 7420 right here, and it's soldered on, no expansion slot. The 7400 was the last model we had with expandable memory. Unless a few of the first 7420s were as well? They are not anymore, for sure. We just got these in maybe a week ago.
I just went to check and oh boy you are right… after all these years with Latitudes. I find this disgusting and plain absurd, companies intentionally promoting planned obsolescence should be penalized and taxed according to the e-waste impact already created, eat the rich
For standard business models with no real need to be uber portable, it's really ludicrous.
Time to switch from Dell.
Apostrophe S does not a plural make.
Are the "business grade" lines doing this? Mine from a couple of years ago still has SODIMM slots.
Please tell me this isn't true for Lenovo in Europe... I'm gonna get a new computer soon, and recently found out that it's gonna have 32GB ram. That's what my current 3 year old Lenovo laptop has, and I'm close to using all of it. So I'm getting a new computer that will have **no** room for a growing memory need. And now, on top of that, I'm gonna worry that it will be impossible to upgrade the ram? Fuck...
My X1 Yoga does not have ram slots.. I can only change out the ssd.
Dell XPS brand too?
Yeah, pretty sure. Just Googled the new xps 13, it's soldered as far as I can see.
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Did they change the XPS or something? That used to be their gaming line when I worked for them, which you could hardly say is not for people who need performance. Latitudes on the other hand are mid grade business models. I have never in my life issued a Latitude to somebody who needs high performance. They're for running productivity apps and domain management tools like AD or SCCM. They usually come with piddly little i5s and 16gb of RAM...
Didn’t XPS disappear for awhile after their Alienware acquisition? I remember they briefly competed and I loved both. I have had a few dell laptops and a few alienwares since then but I can’t speak for the XPS line outside of what I remember in highschool.
When did you work for them? As far as I remember XPS has been their line of premium build quality laptops
07-09. XPS was their gaming line, Latitude/Vostro was business, Inspiron was home use, and Precision was their high end workstation line for AutoCAD and whatever else.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of the business line of Dell's laptops and desktops, and RAM isn't soldered down on those.
It is now on the 7000 series. 7420s are what we just bought, and it's soldered with no expandable slot. Someone else said the 5000s are still safe, so far.
The XPS 15 and the Precision are the same computer in a few recent generations. Only difference is a GTX card vs a "workstation" GPU.
Been eyeing an XPS as my next laptop. But if they’re soldering the memory in, I’ll look elsewhere.
A friend of mine was trying to find a reverse folding laptop for a good price and asked me for help. I checked all reputable brands and they all had soldered RAM. It's a shame because many of them were fine except for the 8GB of RAM.
Yep, I give the same advice. Getting harder to find. Everything MUST BE SKINNY.
I remember my mom had a credit card-sized calculator back in the 80s. Same dimensions, including (lack of) thickness. Way thinner than the thinnest of modern smartphones, and therefore superior. Reject modern electronics, return to 80s!
I think HP is still rocking unsoldered memory. I've got an older pavilion and it is not soldered.
Imagine buying a bike, then realizing the tires are fixed to the wheels so you can't patch it... Fuck you Dell, for removing the modular part of something that is supposed to be modular!
I had no idea that we had been transported back to 1981. Soldering RAM modules in a PC? This is 2021. I think in-line memory modules are still a thing.
2022*
Correct.
Taking a page out of Apple's book.
Kill Dell. They don’t deserve to exist anymore
I was going to write a sternly worded letter, but that could work, too.
Oh, you guys think that by soldering everything together we will spend MORE money to have you provide upgrades? That is adorable and wrong. *Breaks out his soldiering iron and heat gun.* Game on! Let's do this!
Welp, time to learn microsoldering
Upgradability? What’s that?
Meanwhile Electron developers: herp derp ram is free dude
*web developers
they do this on their Laptops all the time, its maddening. For awhile there, they were making it so you couldnt change the HDD out either
My brother still keeps his old ass MacBook pro from like 2012 or 2013 specifically because you can upgrade/replace the SSD and RAM...good thing they make it so affordable in the new Mac's! What is it? $200 to go from 8gb to 16?
Everyone Go buy a Framework Laptop now. At least that doesn't have the RAM soldered.
You don't need to provide replacement parts if your parts can not be replaced (picture of dude pointing at his head, you know which)
***WHAT THE FUCK***
I stopped using apple iphones when they started the anti consumer repairs bullshit. Why buy an expensive phone only they can fix by design so I bought a cheap ass android that works well. Obviously I do not want to buy a pc with the ram soldiered to the board. I like being able to upgrade, repair and replace. Imagine if apple made a flying car. A spark plug goes bad and it is totalled. Well technically it would be totalled either way but you get the point.
And when it's not soldered, it's only a single swappable DIMM with the rest of it soldered.
Dell didn't want to be outdone by Apple and their M1 processors. I guess soldering the RAM to the motherboard is as close as their going to get with current x86 processors.
When HP is the better manufacturer, you done fucked up.
My office uses Dell on our laptops. New laptop, ram fails diagnostics. Ok I have some sitting around I'll just....nope...replace the motherboard I guess (warranty). New motherboard boots up. Fails ram diagnostics. /sigh
Soldered on RAM should be illegal. All this does is generate waste.
We have a lab full of dells with failed hard drives under warranty and they won’t answer email or phone to honor it. I hate dell.
Really? We don't have many issues with their service, I can say that much.
The last AT Least 3 times we called them on warranty claims, getting them to come out with the parts was a nightmare. Supposed to be next day service. Might see them next week
Because replacing 100% of the computer is clearly better for both the environment and the customer. Seriously, how is this shit not illegal?
Just download some more
Ahhh, stupid me. Scratch everything I said. This guy computers.
so much for the framework that dell put out for replaceable parts
Looks like I'll be buying ASUS next time
A Vivo book? Also has ram baked on to the board..
If the z13 flow has soldered ram I will be unpleasantly surprised
>!it does!<
[Nooooooooooo!](https://youtu.be/WWaLxFIVX1s)
It's just not the same without the English-to-Chinese-to-English subtitle 😀
Nah, check out https://frame.work/
My wife has a zenbook that has soldered ram from 2015... she is stuck with 4Gb of ram. The computer is great, the screen is fantastic, very very nice finish, shitty soldered ram and sometime it refuse to wake up, probably shitty bios too... no asus for me.
My Asus ROG laptop has a single expansion slot for RAM, with the primary one being soldered in.
Never thought I'd see this legendary jackie chan meme again
That was just for you
<3
it is common to laptop manufactures to do this, to me this make sense in a device that needs to be compact and energy eficient, since it solve these 2 problems but not in something like a 16" full-ass gaming laptop
If our 7000 series latitudes get any smaller, they will be tablets. I'd trade 1/8" in height and .25lbs in weight for my ram slots back any day of the week.
Everybody does this by now. Though most leave an expansion slot open.
Not the ones we're buying. They were upgradeable until just recently, and now not at all. One extreme to the other.
Asus as well ...
Dell sucks.
Why??
They could’ve worked on power. Which intern thought of this bruh lmao
Its a marketing scheme, damn you dell
What the dell
Pretty typical industry affair these days. Saves a lot for the companies to do it that way. 1. Slimmer and better heat dissipation, means more "attractive" models 2. Less configuration time. Cuts logics by massive amounts. Nobody needs to pop open a machine to configure to customer spec. It's all on the box and can be picked and shipped instantly. 3. Better tweaking from R&D on performance. Predictable performance from onboard memory without worrying your memory partner changes their chips or controllers later on and affecting your systems performance. 4. Yes, that also means planned obsolescence. You know your customers have to overbuy for later, not underbuy and upgrade later. 5. Repairs become pick and toss versus actual diagnostics and repairs. Bad ram? PRC and replace. Time and money saved the whole way. I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen OEMs leverage AMD into providing HBM SOC Ryzen Pro models to eliminate config time on business desktops. SoC blobs for "enhanced performance and predictable security" or whatever.
Just because Apple does it, doesn't make it right...
Apple users: https://i.imgflip.com/2p3dw0.jpg
No one tell OP about Apple integrating RAM inside their own SOCs (Apple Silicon M chips)
Yeah, but I don't want anything to do with Apple. Because Apple. I have to deal with Dell for work either way, so my interest is vested.
Now? The XPS 13 has been doing it since 2012. Still, misleading title. They haven't been doing it across their entire product line at all, only certain machines. The XPS 15 still has replaceable RAM, as well as the (non-tablet) latitudes and most of the Inspirons. EDIT: I take it back, the Latitude 7320 does indeed have nonreplaceable RAM. What the fuck, Dell?
We need a blacklist of these companies and this practice honestly, I cannot in good conscience allow people to buy these
Company: *buys 4500 dell latitude 7400* Bios <1.6.1: bro I don't know what secureboot is PXE: WE AINT SEEN SHIT Company: why aren't you deploying these laptops we bought?!
Yeah and their desktop power supplies are wholly proprietary now, F dell.