alt Hacker NewsDell needs to admit they're in deep shit.
I just bought our entire G&A team M4 Macbook Air 15" for the same price as our Dell Pro laptops.
They are 20% faster, have 2x the battery life, and 8 more gb of RAM. Also standby actually works.
We had done an initial batch of Dell Pro 16 laptops and with 16gb of ram + the 255h (now 258v) it's over $1100 a laptop. Only problem is... they need 32gb of RAM on Windows 11 because the performance was terrible. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team at 16gb. The upgrade to 32gb of RAM moves the price to $1500+ each, they also recently swapped to soldered RAM for both Intel and AMD, so we are forced to the $1500+ option with a faster CPU.
Initial reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, about 50% of them are new to Macs and have figured it out, additionally they all love the battery life and performance (most are switching from 11th and 12th gen Intel).
Our more tech savvy members have mentioned the better screen, webcam and audio as positives.
I am considering switching our call center (~200 members) to Mac mini's, the same price as our Lenovo mini PCs and will last a long time, the Core Ultra 210 is not great. My only fear is people stealing them really.
Why would I pay $2000 for Dells mid line series of business laptops? How much is this XPS going to cost vs a Mac book Pro?
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Apple has kept prices stable for existing models, but is rumored to be paying 50% more for DRAM in 2026, which may impact pricing of new Apple devices that will be launched in 2026.
edit: https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-mar...
> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
> We had done an initial batch of Dell Pro 16 laptops and with 16gb of ram + the 255h (now 258v) it's over $1100 a laptop. Only problem is... they need 32gb of RAM on Windows 11. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team at 16gb.
Is that really much different than macOS? Checking my 32gb Mac Mini now, I'm sitting at 84% memory usage with just browsers, chat apps, some RDP/terminal windows, Mail and Apple Music open.
I'd also note that Dell does sell Qualcomm laptops - I've got a 12-core/32gb Dell Qualcomm as my work PC - every piece of software I use for work is now native ARM64 and I've got no complaints about performance/functionality.
> Also standby actually works.
That's a Windows issue. The recent active sleep (or whatever it's called) has been buggy across basically all hardware.
> They are 20% faster, have 2x the battery life, and 8 more gb of RAM.
I thought the minimum spec was 16gb ram as of a while ago?
> Mac mini
If you’re paying for power, it would be interesting to see what effect that change to Mac’s has.
I went from a nuc 9 to a mini and use less than 10% the power on the mini, and it’s more powerful.
Maybe they should just shut the company down and give the money back to shareholders…
When I joined my last company, it would have been politically unpalatable to run Windows which was what I was used to, Linux was sort of frustrating to me at the time (even if I'm sure I could have adapted and it has improved in the last 15 years), and then there were Macs--which I had never used but turned out to be very straightforward.
And I've been mostly in the Mac camp ever since even if I'll use other OSs as needed.
I take the "premium" experience of Apple hardware for granted, and if I wanted to buy a Windows laptop, I'd have no idea which brands make similar quality laptops for Windows. I'm shocked at the Windows laptops I see in the wild.
Is that what Microsoft Surface laptops are? Did Microsoft get in the game themselves to make sure a premium-quality laptop is available for Windows?
It you bought anything except RAM, a laptop refusing to use 12% for no obvious reason would be note worthy.
> Dell needs to admit they're in deep shit.
Yup, since forever and the reason is:
> ... on Windows ...
There's no fixing that.
It doesn't matter how much inconsistent and how much suckage there's in every new MacOS release: it's simply impossible to suck as much as Microsoft products.
What a weirdly worded post. You could have said something like:
"Dell has priced it's Pro line of laptops in-line with Apple's Air equivalents, however Window 11's high resource utilization means we have to pay for higher spec machines while still ending up with reduced battery performance, and inferior screens, webcams and audio."
But instead you make weird misleading statements like "and 8 more gb of RAM" and "it's over $1100 a laptop" that need to be decoded but are easily misunderstood if the reader lacks certain domain knowledge.
Then you have these unqualified statements like "they also recently swapped to soldered RAM for both Intel and AMD" which implies that it's a bad move but don't articulate why or acknowledge that Apple has been doing this since 2008.
> We were seeing average 88% memory usage
My 64GB MacBook Pro sits around that level after using it for a while, too. So do my Windows and Linux machines even with different amounts of RAM.
There's a popular page explaining it for Linux, but it's applicable to every OS: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
Isolated RAM usage numbers aren't useful because spare memory is used for caching. Even if you are using 88% of the RAM, that's not indicative of a problem unless you're encountering a lot of swapping. Even swapping a little bit isn't bad if it's not stalling the machine out. You have to look at actual performance, not RAM usage percentages.