Declining Dell latitude quality in latitude line. PICs

This is my rant post against the dell latitude line. I am IT, in a company that uses DELL. I work with them everyday and can't believe the prices they charge for what their product is. This is my advice for you to stay away, and go with another brand eg Lenovo. Dell knows they have companies like mine by the cahones; we want to keep as much of our infrastructure as consistent as possible e.g, dell server, dell storage, dell monitior, dell laptop. Catch 22, the more dell equipment we have, the more want to stay with Dell.

The machines I work with are:
14" d620, d630, e5400, e5410, e5420, e6420
13" e4300, e4310, 6320

1. screens. The screens are getting wider, more squeezed and smaller. The colors/contrast are worse, with a horrible blue tint. I see $500 laptops with much better screens.
the d630 latitude line had the best screen and blows away the other latitude models. Side by side, anyone can see the huge quality drop, smaller, way worse color, less sharp.

2. large body, small where it counts.
while the screens are shrinking, the laptops are growing significantly in side. I'm typing on a e6420 and it has a huge 1" bezel around it. They were too cheap to put a screen in that actually fit the panel.

this compares their portable 13" line. You can see how the laptop has grown in size with each generation
photos
bottom to top:
e4300 13"
e4310 13"
e6310 13"
e6420 14"

3. overall build quality (BQ) / tightness
here again the oldest d630 was the champ. Much tighter and firmer feel with a the best trackpad of the bunch. note: the 6400 vs 5400 latitude was a bump in price, with better plastics. However, the latest 6420 vs 5420, there is only a slight BQ incease [lid, lid latch], but 6420 is trying to be cool but is ugly as sin = organge lines around keyboard with HUGE screen and keyboard bezels. I think the 6420 may be actually thicker than the 5420. the e6420 is a lot firmer than e5410 e5400 but it’s still bulky and large.

best to worse: d630, e4300, e4310, e6320, e6420, e5420, e5410, e5400

 

I largely agree with you. I bought D630, D830's, which, compared to the D600's and D610's, seemed like a massive improvement. Took delivery of an E6400, and it seemed much flimsier. Have gone back to buying D630/D830's off of eBay, even going so far as to load Win7 on them, and upgrading with SSDs. The new E6520/E6420 series looks awful, and even the E6400/E6500's/E6510's/E6410's I see on eBay are pretty junky.

Thankfully the D630/D830 still has enough processing power to meet my needs for the considerable future, and, by upgrading to the latest battery technology and installing LED backlighting and SSDs, battery life is considerably extended from the baseline configurations.

The only redeeming characteristic of the E-series, IMHO, is the keyboard is considerably better than on the D630/D830. Also another annoying thing about the E-series is they lack 2 internal miniPCI-E slots, so you're forced to, for at least your Wi-Fi card, use a half-sized card.

IMHO, putting a full-sized keyboard on the E6520 was an awful move..

 

I agree that the 14" Latitudes do have a screen bezel that is unnecessarily large. The keyboard doesn't require that much space so they could have made the laptop less wide. I think on the 15" Latitudes however, the bezel is justifiable given their inclusion of a full-size keyboard along with the abundance of 15.6" panels compared to 16" panels that would fill out the space more.

In defense of the drop in screen quality, the problem isn't isolated to Dell's. I'm not aware of many manufacturer's that make a high quality standard resolution (1366x768) panel. In this day and age, if you want decent screen quality, you really have to upgrade to the high resolution screen. It's not really Dell's fault that panel manufacturer's do not sell high quality standard res panels. I know this isn't as feasible with corporate quantities of computers but a simple screen calibration would probably cure the blue tint you perceive.

Regarding the full-size keyboard decision, I think it's fantastic for doing work in Excel. The numpad is 1000x better to work with than the number keys when entering numerical data. As a matter of personal preference, I prefer that softer keyboard feel on the new Latitudes compared to the clicky ON/OFF feel of the old Latitudes but I understand if you prefer the latter. Neither keyboard has any flex so there's no difference in objective quality to me.

Lastly, regarding build quality, I agree with you on that one. I dropped my old D630 several times but nothing ever came loose and it kept working. I'm a little more worried about dropping my current E5520. However, I don't think "prettiness" comparisons between the old series and new series belongs in a discussion about build quality, since that is a rather subjective topic.

BTW. Good luck fielding complaints about Fn/L-Ctrl button placement if your company switches to Lenovo

 

Could you post more comparison pictures, maybe with them side by side? Thanks!

 

Ya, one reason why I might jump ship to Lenovo permanently. Newest reincarnation of mainstream E series workhorse almost made me vomit. It is bulky, plasticy and just feels cheap. What Dell was thinking when some crazy in the R&D department was like, oh hey let's make it look like a consumer notebook, I shudder to think. Honestly what was wrong with the E6410/E6400? Those were good looking, plain, and just sleek, even though my refurbished E6410 had issues, overall I did like it.

D series are phenomenal, while I had my D620 and D630, I honestly did not want to sell them. They just feel like they could go through a warzone and still function. I am still running a D600 + dock as a backup work laptop, and I am still loving the SXGA+ screen. And the D series keyboards are ALOT better than the E series (E series feels squishy). D series keyboards come close to Lenovo's ThinkPad keyboards (but fall short, track point/stick isn't anywhere near Lenovo's). Only thing about D series I didn't like was the battery placement, that crappy battery latch on the D620/D630 and of course the Nvidia defect.

 

I'm also in IT, and for the most part, I agree with you. However, the problem isn't really quality, but rather something more fundamental - design.

1. Screens: I've only noticed an improvement in the screens going from D620 to D630 to E6400 to E6410. However, I had the 1440x900 premium panel in all of them, so that could be part of it.

2. Size: Sadly, this is the result of the shift to 16:9 screens. Doesn't make much sense for a business laptop, but that's the way the industry is moving, so not much can be done about it. It's not just going to be Dell that is getting wider and shorter.

3. Build Quality: Since we're talking about the keyboard, my gripe is mostly with the loss of the top row of keys. Going to the E6400 already made me lose Print Screen as a dedicated button (use that quite a bit to illustrate a procedure), and now the group of 6 keys (Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down) is getting jumbled around.

I waited to purchase my laptop until the E6420 came out, which resulted in my decision to get an E6410. The E6X20 series is going waywards towards consumer design, and I have yet to see any E6420's anywhere...around this time of the E6400 or E6410's lifecycle, I had already seen quite a few.

 

I have heard this but we did not use them at my company. From this generation we only used the e5400/e4300

As for the screens. We starting using the higher resolution screens on our e6420. While the added res is there, the color/contrast is still just as bad as the standard resolution of the e5410 and way short of d630 line.

 

yup

as a proud owner of d620's d820's and a few e6510's

the new 6520 etc line makes me puke

looks, design, issues upon issues....

i am wanting to get a new top of the line biz lappy in a months time

and may have to go thinkpad......

 

I actually LIKE the new 6x20 line compared to the 6x00 and 10 lines. They seem built more solid, the LCD cover is less flimsy, and they seem to run cooler. The only downer is all the screws to remove the bottom cover instead of the single screw on the older ones.

That being said, the D630 was my favorite laptop as well as long as it didn't have the stupid NVidia GPU inside. What a nightmare those were.

 

My E6410's lid is fine - pretty sturdy for something that seems that thin. And the aesthetics of the E6x00 and E6x10 was much better in my opinion.