New Latitude and Precision's

Our account manager at Dell says there's nothing on the way right now, he says the refresh of Latitude and Precision will happen late spring-early summer 2010.

 

i think that's impossible...

 

He could be right I suppose. My account manager never has info he's willing to share until it's almost to the intro date. Sometimes I get invites to go see future hardware but since I stopped buying the mountains of kit those have dried up. I think in either case I'll delay the 'portable big' machine until I see what Dell decides to do with the Z.

 

Me too, as the part system fill up daily now, It's the same keyboard on the E6410 and E6510 as earlier models, looks like there is no refresh on the chassis. Talked to a dell rep today, and he said only motherboard, cpu, ram, gpu will get a refresh.......back with more later.....

 

good news

 

I hope for:

motherboard --> USB 3.0 ports
cpu --> up to i7-820QM
ram --> up to 16 Gb, DDR3 1333Mhz
gpu --> option for ATI Mobility Radeon HD5XXX

If nothing changes about chassis, display could (and should!) stay 16:10 (RGBLED optionally, of course).
That way, the M4500 should compete well against HP 8540W, which is an extremely "sexy" machine (on paper, at least).
And allowing ATI GPU choice besides Nvidia could make it a "universal" notebook, good for gaming too if one prefers, not just a powerful workstation (we don't all design bridges with CAD programs ...).

But I'm afraid RAM up to 16 Gb is unlikely if there is no chassis change and they keep just two RAM slots.
All in all, I'd prefer a chassis refresh, with more RAM slots and attention to cooling issue too.

 

With the W510 and 8540w allowing up to 16GB ram, it would be disappointing to see the M4500 at only 8 GB. Also, I really doubt they are going to give us an option for a Radeon GPU. Any ATI option would come from their FirePro series (whatever replaces the V5700 probably),

 

Why not? The HP Envy 15 comes with up to 16GB, too. Speaking of which, I feel they should try and get the 4500 closer in design and form factor (well thickness, mostly) to that Envy. You know, thinner, lighter, more sexy; and optical drives are quickly becoming a thing of the past as well.

 

I'm all for better looking notebooks, but a business class laptop has to give serious weight to cooling. I hope for better cooling and therefor don't care if the M4500 stays the same or even gets a bit thicker.

 

Oh yes, that goes without saying! Crippling functionality to buy some aesthetics is not an acceptable strategy in this class of machines.