Despite being an editor at deTeched, I’m still a normal consumer at the end of the day. I still use product reviews from other sites to help me pull the trigger on various things that I want. About five months ago, I was in the market for a new laptop. As much as I wanted to buy a MacBook Pro, it was difficult for me to spend $1500+ on a laptop at the time. So like most people, I started doing some research on the best laptop around $1000 give or take a Benjamin.
I haven’t bought a laptop since my 2010 MacBook Pro. That laptop helped me through some difficult times during college. Right after getting my first job, I put the MacBook Pro out of commission and primarily used a Surface Book which was provided by my work. It’s still my main driver at work and even though it has some flaws, it’s a great laptop. With deTeched taking up more of my time and starting a post-baccalaureate in computer science, it was finally time for a personal laptop.
At the time of my research, the overwhelming majority of the best 2017 PC laptop was the Dell XPS 13. When I do research on something that I want, I go way overboard. I must’ve seen every single YouTube video and read every review on the Dell XPS 13. The two main features I was looking for was good battery life and a compact, lightweight design. Based on the reviews that I’ve read, I came to a consensus that the Dell XPS 13 would be a slam dunk. I went ahead and bought the FHD Dell XPS 13 for battery life instead of the 4K version. My eyes can’t really tell the difference between 1080p and 4K and I would rather have better battery life instead.
After five months of heavy use, I can say that I am extremely disappointed with the Dell XPS 13. The biggest issue I have with this laptop is that the trackpad is absolute trash. It works fine 75% of the time, but that other 25% makes this laptop pretty much unusable. When it works, the trackpad is decent for a PC. However, it will stop registering my movements at times and the only way it’ll go back to normal is if I right-click and move the cursor. This will solve the problem for about five minutes before it acts up again. There are other times where the trackpad thinks I have two fingers on it and will start scrolling instead of moving my cursor. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve been to use a mouse pretty much all the time. I’m worried that I’ll get so frustrated that I’ll chuck my laptop in a blind rage.
The battery life isn’t as good as reviews made it out to be. The proclaimed “epic” battery of the FHD Dell XPS 13 ranged anywhere from 12-16 hours of battery life on a battery test that used continuous web surfing on Wi-Fi. I ran the same test on my laptop adjusting the brightness to 50% and I consistently get only 7 hours of use.
Before any Dell XPS diehards jump at my throat, I’ve spent hours trying to fix this trackpad issue. I’ve tried updating my drivers and tweaking all sorts of settings to make my trackpad work consistently. I’ve even talked to Dell Support which was the biggest waste of time in my life. Dell might have the worst customer service of all time but that’s beside the point. The main point I’m trying to make with this long-winded rant is to be cautious when it comes to reading product reviews on tech sites.
Anytime a flagship laptop comes out, every big tech site will have a review on the laptop within a week of release. These are the product reviews that are the first results that pop up when you Google to research on whether you want to buy the product or not. A week of use on a product is not a sufficient amount of time to write an extensive review on how the device actually performs. Why is it that all these tech reviewers rave about the Dell XPS as the best laptop but when you see their primary laptop, it’s something completely different. Take their reviews with a grain of salt.
Another thing to worry about when it comes to product reviews is the echo chamber it creates in the tech community. When it came to talking about the cons of the Dell XPS, every single site spent the majority of their review complaining about the webcam placement. Many sites had the only con being the webcam placement. If more time was spend actually using the product, I am absolutely certain more cons would’ve popped up instead of echoing that the obvious inferior webcam placement was the only issue.
So what can you do as a consumer? The first thing I would do is to check to see how much time went by between when the product was released and when the review article or YouTube video came out. Everyone is racing to be the first when it comes to flagship product reviews. I wouldn’t put too much weight into reviews where people have only used the product for a couple of weeks. There is no way to really know how the device truly performs. These reviews are only helpful when you want to roll the dice and be one of the first to use the new product. Instead, I would look for long-term product reviews of people who have used the device for much longer. These are commonly found on smaller sites so you might have to do some sifting into the third and fourth pages of your Google search. The information on long-term reviews will provide much more information and weed out actual problems on everyday use. At the end of the day, it’s your hard-earned money that you are spending so it’s good to know what you are investing in.