Boxing Day Sale - 20% selected Dell laptops
$300 cheaper than deal a couple of weeks ago - also similar to deal for SILVER version which expired yesterday.
Price might drop in future due to announcement of new model but no indication so far.
Still going to have the Intel CPU "Meltdown" bug.
I'd wait a few months for the fixed CPUs from Intel to be released, as OS patches to fix it will result in ~20% slowdown depending on workload.
This is the reason I'm not jumping on that Chromebook deal. It might be more than a just a few months. They'll need to redesign their chips, produce them, send them to manufacturers, etc.
Then again, both Intel and Google have just said the patches won't slow PCs down too much… unless they were under heavy load. Only real-world tests will tell us.
both Intel and Google have just said the patches won't slow PCs down too much
Lol. Intel will say anything at this point to avoid bad press. It will slow PCs down generally 15-25%.. Real world we will see but I imagine it will be noticeable for plenty of users, particularly on older hardware.
I expect we will see some good discounts if and when the CPUs are fixed.
The biggest impact is likely to be cloud environments, because they are heavily loaded and have multiple users on a box.
Gaming it might make a slight difference but the GPU is usually the bottleneck these days. Maybe some hardcore work on maths/DB, cloud servers etc. I doubt most people will even notice. How much time does the average CPU spend running over 50%, hardly any IMHO. 25% slowdown, on the 1-2% of your day that needs max CPU. The everyday general stuff like Web, Excel, email, youtube etc aren't going to stress modern CPUs much.
No harm in waiting for more secure CPUs though. I'm still trying to get my head around how this breaking into the ram in memory used for speculative operations, and how hard it would be to simple patch the CPU to wipe that between process swaps.
It isn't breaking into memory, it is getting the cpu to reference a bit of memory (protected), which is then loaded into cache (depending on a condition 1 or 0). The call to the protected memory is rejected by the protection and the attacker doesn't get the data. However when they then reference it again, and measure how long it takes to get rejected (cache fast, RAM slow) and work out if it was a 1/0.
sneaky.
Does the new one only have type C slots? Bold.
Can't be a Dell without 2x lane thunderbolt 3 ports.
I'm surprised they didn't leave at least one type-A port.
"Courage" I guess?
I'm not fond of adapters. I'm going to need a lot of them.
@lostn: A lot of the new units dont have type A anymore which is pretty short sighted considering every thing I own is Type A. That being said I realise I dont plug in things are much as I used to.
It's 4x actually on the 9370 :)
Are there any pics of this rose gold? They're only showing the silver.
Isn't Rose Gold meant to look more pink? That's actually what I was concerned about.
But the gold in this photo (if accurate) looks more like the iPad gold.
I haven't been to the Dell website in ages, but is it just me or are they REALLY expensive?!?
I mean, even if with the "discount" I don't see any real value in any of the laptops shown.
What you're getting for your money isn't that good at all.
Happy for any comments (either from Dell fanbois or others, I dont mind), but looking at the XPS or netbook formfactor- I see nothing to tempt me. At all.
For the specs it seems quite pricey. I guess you are paying for the design and screen…
I have been looking for a new ultra light, reliable laptop so if anyone else has other suggestions I would love to know. I have looked at MacBook, XPS 13 and Surface Laptop but they all have too many negatives for me to invest that kind of money.
Zenbook ux430un. Runs kaby lake refresh cpu and mx150 for gpu. 1.25kg, great 14 inch screen (100% sRGB and near bezeless like the xps 13). Around $1650 for i5 and 256gb ssd and $1800 for i7 and 512gb both with 16gb ram and win 10 pro.
@ Fiximol - that's exactly what I have been researching as well.
The Zenbook looks just as sexy (imo), better specs and cheaper (the i7 model is a beast with 16gb ram and 512 ssd!)….so it's down to the brand name….
+1. I'd definitely recommend the Zenbook or Xiaomi over Dell any day, the dell has just terrible value (and coil whine and keyboard issues), being an XPS owner (company paid), it's annoying to see on ozbargain every other day.
Only issue with the Zenbooks is that they have a huge and extremely confusing product line, I can never just tell someone 'oh just get the 2017 13' Zenbook', for example.
@xrailgun: I have always had Asus laptops and their service is good but I have always had problems with hard drives dying in each one, hot fans over time (even with reformatting the whole system) and so on. I am not sure if I want to sign up for that again.
@gugs: Hmm that's good to know. We need more reports on these kind of issues where only long-term users would know. I wonder how the Xiaomi crowd is doing, probably still too new of a product, but we'd appreciate if anyone wants to talk about their experience so far.
Get anything but Dell. Personally think the XPS line is a flawed, buggy and overpriced mess and I wouldn't go near them.
Yea it's quite expensive for the performance. The premium goes towards the light weight, thinness and charging convenience (USB Type-C).
I would hold off buying a new PC at the moment. As the fix for Meltdown & Spectre CPU bugs has a performance impact of up to 30% depending on workload. Intel CPUs appear most vulnerable to Meltdown, while Spectre impacts Intel, AMD & ARM.
Yeah. This makes me not want to buy new tech for at least another year.
those looking to do some light gaming without a quad core CPU might want to consider the 7th gen models as they all have i7-7560U which means Iris 640 iGPU
EDIT: the "for work" section also has a range of XPS 13 deals -> http://www.dell.com/au/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?ref=…
and this isn't a black friday sale…. it is the boxing day sales that has been running for two weeks - choices have been changing over that time, with at least one price bump (the XPS 13 I ordered was cheaper last week)
Fixed - had a brain freeze - I meant Boxing Day Sale.
Oh man really want this ultrabook. My old macbook air is struggling!
Would not touch an Intel processor. Apparently the meltdown exploit is unfixable because it at a hardware level. Intel is affected by all 3 type of exploit in both of spectre and meltdown.
While ryzen is only 1 of three. And that one is easy fixable with software.
I've been eyeing the XPS 13 for a while as my fellow uni mates was raving about how awesome it was. Need a lightweight notebook mainly using for opening lots of tabs for research, photoshop, words and usual web stuffs - play some game like Diablo 3 type older games. or some mmorpg.
What would the experts here recommend? Now I'm really confused with the bad reviews =(. So Surface book, xps 13, hp spectre x360 or anything else? Was hoping to keep the price at about 1.5k.
I would recommend Lenovo, lots of good deals get posted on here. Anything from the ThinkPad line will serve you well.
I ordered This inspiron https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/350856 from a previous deal, hasn't been received yet. Do you think I should cancel it?
fuuuck. School starting soon and i still dont have a laptop yet. Where the bargains at :L
There is a new gen version just been announced….