I read with interest this post by Denis Savenko about his choice of a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (6th gen), which looks like a nice bit of kit. The ThinkPad seems to have almost as much loyalty as MacBook Pro. 🙂
The recent announcement about the revamped MacBook Pro range caught my eye in a, “Did I make a mistake?”, kind-of way. A quick comparison tells me I didn’t based on UK pricing. In both cases the Dell has a 3840 x 2160 resolution touch screen. There are cheaper options available, which makes the discrepancy even greater.
- Dell XPS 15″ : Core i9, 32G RAM, 1TB SSD = £2,599
- MBP 15″ : Core i9, 32G RAM, 1TB SSD = £3,689
- Dell XPS 15″ : Core i7, 32G RAM, 1TB SSD = £2,048
- MBP 15″ : Core i7, 32G RAM, 1TB SSD = £3,419
That price differential is crazy…
You may have seen the YouTube video by Dave Lee talking about the thermal throttling of the i9 in the new MBP, and that is really what I want to talk about here.
The XPS 15″ i9 runs hot! Like burn your hand hot. I had one incident when playing Fortnite where the machine shutdown as the internal temperature was so hot. Under normal workload, like a few VMs, it doesn’t get quite so hot, but it is still noticeable. I got a cooler pad, which helped a lot, but doesn’t do much if it’s under really high load. It seems all these laptops that try to look small and cute don’t have a cooling solution that can cope with an i9. On reflection an i7 would probably have been a better, and cheaper, choice.
I’m still happy with the purchase, and with Windows 10. If you are out in the market for a new laptop, I would seriously consider the i7 over the i9 unless you buy a big laptop with a great cooling solution. You will save yourself a bunch of cash, and I really don’t think you will notice the difference.
Cheers
Tim…