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Hey, what's up?
John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.
I'm going to do a review on a product today, on a laptop.
You may have seen my review on my laptop that I've got here that I'm recording this on which
is my custom laptop from Origin PC.
You can check that out here.
This was what I had upgraded to when I traded in my old computer.
I had a Surface Book.
I've done all kinds of stuff.
I'm not going to go into the details and the history, but I'm sticking on the Windows operating
system side.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
I just saw you—I saw your eyebrow raise.
I know.
I know I pissed you off.
That's all right.
I can choose Windows if I want to, okay?
It's cool.
You can do Linux.
It's cool.
You can do your Mac.
That's fine.
I'm going to stick with Windows for now.
I've done both Linux and Mac and I'm just preferring Windows.
I know it's got a lot of problems but here we go.
Anyway, I'm just kidding with you.
I don't care what the operating system is.
I'm totally operating system neutral.
It doesn’t matter to me.
I'm just using Windows right now.
I did, you know, some of you are like, "Man, that's a heavy ass laptop that you've got."
Yeah, I agree.
I tried travelling with it.
I'd probably bring it for long term trips but I found out I don’t really need the
super horsepower.
Really, really that beefy laptops what it ends up being is to play Oculus Rift.
Yeah, I know, I know.
But it's the hard drive that's super-fast, dude.
I mean it's fun.
It's great for my desktop computer.
I probably should have just bought a desktop now that I'm thinking about it.
But hey, I live and I learn and I just repeat the same hardware—I just like to buy hardware.
I like computers.
I like to buy hardware.
That's just how I'm always going to be.
I used to build my own computers and now I just buy a shit ton of computers.
But I did buy another computer.
The reason why is because I needed something really light for traveling that I could still
record videos on, upload to Dropbox and stuff.
I have a Chromebook which was okay.
It was like an Asus flipbook I think, but it doesn’t connect to an iPhone strangely
enough so I couldn't really upload stuff.
It was a little bit slow and clunky.
It was a little bit too light.
I was doing some research and I ended up on this Dell XPS 13.
Now, I'm going to do a review on the laptop and I'm also going to do a review on Dell's
customer service, which, spoiler here, is shit, shit, uh, shit, shit.
At least at the time of recording this video.
Maybe what will happen is that will change but I'm not going to hold my breath.
When I do this review I'm letting you know ahead of time here also that I'm not going
to talk about the oldest specs, and the horsepower and the features of this.
I have pretty toned down version.
I think I've got the—it's the Dell XPS 13, the newest model and I've got the—I think
I've got the i5 with 128GB hard drive, so it's really the lower end of the model because
I didn’t need to spend a lot of money.
I think I paid like 1000 bucks for it or so.
I probably got—I actually got it new so maybe 800 bucks.
It's not super expensive.
I wanted a laptop under $1000 because I'm not going to use it all the time.
I'm just going to use it when traveling, but I'm actually using it more than I expected,
because now that I've got this nice, beautiful, light laptop and there's a coffee shop that
just opened nearby, I'm like, "Hey, I can hang out and use this thing and I can use
it on a plane."
I'm going to talk more about the usage of it and the design of it because, I mean, what
are we really talking about spec wise to price wise?
It doesn't matter.
There are so many options and choices.
Really, if you're thinking about a portable laptop what you really should be thinking
about is how well does it work, what is the design of it, and I guess if it's reasonably
priced, but how portable and whatnot and what kind of things can you do with it.
This is a sleek looking laptop.
It is definitely sleek.
It's light.
It's like what, is it—I thought it was—it's under 3 lbs.
It fits nicely.
I like the 13 inch because, again, it doesn't take up a huge amount of room compared to
this beast that I have here which I can't show you because I have to tilt the camera
down.
The other thing that I like about this—I don't actually appreciate that it's a touchscreen.
It is a touch screen.
I had problems with the touchscreen actually which I'll get to in a minute because of Dell.
We'll talk about Dell support.
I prefer—I don't get it.
The touch screen doesn't really matter for laptops nowadays.
But the keyboard is really nice.
It's really easy to type on this, really nice.
It opens very nice.
I like the hinge on this and the backlight.
It's a full sized keyboard on here.
Touch pad I'm not quite as impressed with.
It is pretty good.
I had some issues with it.
I think, again, related to the screen.
I wish they would stop putting touchscreens.
I'd rather just pay $100 less and not have a touchscreen on this laptop.
But I think in order to get the newer version they were putting it in there or to get the
higher resolution display.
Display is nice.
It is pretty bright and vibrant.
One of the cool things, one of the big reasons why I ended up settling on this laptop is
if you look at this display here what you can see is that it's basically edge to edge.
There's really no bezel here.
Even though this is a 13-inch laptop you're essentially getting a 15-inch display in a
13-inch laptop.
That was the big seller for me.
Again, portability, but I still have a large enough screen that works for me.
That was huge.
I mean honestly, that's the biggest consideration that I would take into buying this laptop
is because I haven't found another one that has that same thing.
The form factor is small yet that screen size is large.
Dell is definitely not paying me to do this review, although I will put affiliate links
so that I can make some money.
I'm going to piss off Dell in a minute here.
Port wise you can charge—the power cord for this is actually not too big.
It does have USB-C. It's got the USB 3.0, a nice little headphone jack here and a button
here for turning it on and speakers at the bottom here.
On the other side, another USB 2 and an SD card and it's got the lock thing if you use
that.
You can charge this via USB-C although I haven't figured out how to do that yet.
I need to find the right adapter.
I know that some things don't charge by that, but I would like to basically just have a
USB-C charger so I don't need the actual power thing even if it charges a little bit slower.
It will be less bulk to carry around.
I find it to be really portable and works out really nice.
I like the way it feels.
I like the way that it looks and I like the keyboard and it's pretty dang fast.
I mean considering that I have a low-end model of this.
I'm mostly doing web stuff.
I'm not doing video editing and things like that on this, but for my purposes, for answering
email, for doing the web stuff that I'm doing it works out pretty well.
Now, I did have some problems with USB 3 and the touch screen and apparently, I looked
on forms and this is a problem with this laptop.
I was able to fix it, I'll say, but Dell did not really help me.
The problems I was having was that every once in a while, I start up the laptop and the
USB drives stop working, the USB ports and also the touch screen stopped working.
So I'd go in the device manager and then have to reenable it and then I'd have to restart
the computer and then it would work again, but then after it went to sleep mode or whatever
or I restart it, it would stop working again.
So, I ended up contacting Dell support and they did this whole thing where they take
over your computer using LogMeIn or something like that or some version of it that they
have and they tried installing a bunch of stuff and wasted a huge amount of my time
installing a bunch of junk on here trying to troubleshoot it and update drivers and
stuff and basically did not fix the problem.
I went on to Dell Forums and found a lot of people complaining about this.
Basically, what it showed was that go into the bios and turn off all the USB stuff, like
reboot it, clear off device manager, turn it all back on and reenable it in device manager
and then everything works.
So far that seems to have fixed it.
I'm still having a little bit of track pad problems but it might just be the track pad
on this.
I'm going to have to try and clean it and see if that improves it.
When I was going through that process essentially Dell Support basically said they couldn't
fix it and they said, "Well, here's the options, we can send you the parts to replace it, to
fix it, to replace the screen and stuff like that.
You pay $30 shipping or something and we'll send you all the parts."
It seems like a ridiculous option.
The other option they gave me was you can take it to a tech or you can mail it to our
service center and pay shipping and then we'll return it to you fixed which is a pretty stupid
option because I need the laptop.
This is a business laptop.
I don't want to go without a freakin' machine.
I don't understand why any computer laptop support ever gives you the option that you
can mail in your laptop.
That's the stupidest fuckin' thing.
I just do not understand that.
Who's going to mail in their computer and wait for it to come back.
I guess I won't work for 2 weeks or whatever it is.
I mean, obviously, I've got a back up, but I won't be able to travel and work.
It seems really stupid.
The third one, I think, they said is we could have a tech come out to your house, install
the parts, you have to pay for the tech to come out.
I'm like, "No."
I was like, "Look, here's what I want.
Advance ship me a new one of these and I will send you back this one.
It's real simple.
You can put a hold on my credit card."
They're like, "No, no, it's outside the 30-day window.
We can't do that."
They're arguing with me, arguing with me.
I'm explaining, "Look, this thing doesn't work.
You've wasted a lot of my time."
They're arguing with me.
They keep on giving me the 3 options over and over again.
Then I was like, "Look, escalate this."
I said, "I don’t want to make a bad review and stuff.
It's a real simple solution to solve.
You wasted a lot of my time with this thing.
I can't not have the computer.
Just advance ship me or give me at least some kind of alternative.
Even if you send me a used one, I don't give a shit.
Just fix the problem without me having to go without a laptop and having to pay money
because I have to pay money I might as well return this thing to Amazon and just buy a
brand new one.
It doesn't make sense for me to do.
It's still within Amazon's return policy."
They're not having any of it, just repeat the policy to me, repeat the policy to me
like probably 10 times on chat they repeated the policy to me.
Finally, he's like, "Okay, we'll escalate this."
I get an email.
Okay, so Dell puts me on some kind of fuckin' mailing list and they start emailing me every
single day and calling me and giving me those same 3 options.
I replied to the email and I say, "No, no thank you.
I'll either handle this on my own and do a review on YouTube telling about how shitty
your support is or if you want to make me happy" because they say, "You're our valued
customer."
"Fine, if you want to make me happy, real simple, I'm not trying to rip you off or anything,
just advance ship me a replacement and then I'll send you back the new one.
This way I don't have to be without a laptop and I can make sure that the new one works
and it's going to solve my problem before."
Right?
No, replies back with the same 3 options again that I explained to you.
Then they started calling my phone and they keep calling my phone and leaving fucking
messages and they keep on emailing me.
Finally, I call back one of the—they escalated it higher.
Everyday they're calling for a week.
Finally, I get on the phone, I go through this whole thing, they're asking me all these
questions.
It sounds like they're going to help me and he says, "I understand.
I've looked at your case.
I understand your problem."
Then he says, "We have 3 options for you."
"We have 3 options for you."
I can't even do a very good Indian accent.
I was like, "Look, unless the next fuckin' words out of your mouth are 'I'm going to
advance ship you a laptop' don't talk to me, don't call me, don't email me anymore, take
me off your list.
As far as I'm concerned, your customer service is shit.
It sucks.
I don't want any part of it.
I'll just handle the problem myself.
You've already wasted more time than it would cost me to buy a new laptop."
I told them, "I bill a couple hundred dollars an hour" and I actually brought that number
down, but like all the time that you've wasted of mine I could have bought a brand new laptop
and not had to deal with this crap."
The guy is still arguing with me.
I'm like, "Look, sir" I actually said, I said, "Look, sir, I'm going to disconnect the call
because you're wasting my time.
Unless you're going to tell me that you're going to advance ship me a laptop, I don't
want to hear from you ever again.
I will deal with the problem myself, no thanks to Dell."
I basically hung up on him because he still would not shup up.
He was in the middle of repeating to me the 3 options that I have again.
I don't like to do this kind of thing and be negative and shit, but this was pretty
horrible customer service.
It was pretty shitty.
The laptop is awesome.
I actually like the laptop a lot now that I fixed the problem.
It seems to be working out really well.
The battery life on this thing is freakin' awesome.
Like I said, the keyboard is awesome, the display that they fit into this small little
package is awesome, it's very lightweight and I like it, but I don't like the Dell support.
Get one that's—my advice to you would be if your laptop doesn’t work, return it and
get another one.
Don't deal with the Dell support.
I wish I could say something good about them, but I really have nothing to say.
I actually have one thing good to say about them, they were pretty damn persistent in
not helping me and following up with me like crazy to offer me the same stuff.
They're really persistent.
Maybe at one point I would have given in if I were I lesser human being and said, "Sure,
have a tech come out, I'll pay $50" or whatever, but I'm not going to do that.
That's it.
Dell XPS 13-inch.
You can check it out here.
I'm sure that we've already put some links in.
As always, there'll be a link in the description below, but this is my new laptop of choice
for portable laptops even though I got bad customer service I still highly rate the laptop,
I give it 5 out of 5 stars.
All right, I'll talk to you next time.
Take care.