Your thoughts on Latitude E6420 design

Once he posted that piped little seedan with sun glint, I realized his sense of fashion.

GK

 

I, too, find the E6x20 design tacky and unprofessional compared to my elegant E6400.

Given the design flaws, the shift towards consumer notebooks (design, HDMI, no USB 3.0, Optimus -- causes Linux grief), and the clearly cheapo power supplies, it looks like all those shiny metals and colors are an attempt to distract the buyer from the cost-cutting that they did in the E6x20 series.

 

You may be right on flaws, and on cost-cutting... it's a constant mandate for survival and good design... but I don't see an intentional shift one way or the other to deceive the buyer or to hide inferior components. The reviews observe that the E6x20s are well-built. And by definition, any product that hopes to survive in the PC market place that is OPEN to all comers, thank God!, earns its right to differ with preceding and competing products, and other peculiar preferences.

GK

 

Whereas I found the very slab-sided and plain materials on the E6400/E6500 a big step back from the much better design of the D620/D630/D820/D830. The E6410/E6510 was an improvement. The E6420 design, if better executed, COULD have been a big improvement - the materials are better, and it feels more solid - but they also porked up the footprint, moved the speakers to a less useful place, and and cheapened out on enough of the details.

I don't get the hate on HDMI. DisplayPort has some potential advantages over HDMI/DVI, but in practice HDMI is much more convenient with no down sides to it unless you are running a super-high-resolution display (those with 2560x1600, sorry.)

This is a serious omission, and undoubtedly cost-cutting, but at the same time if you have eSATA or eSATA+power as all of the E-series do, there's really not a lot of need for it.

This is a temporary drivers issue, and it's hardly unique to Dell - EVERY discreet graphics Sandy Bridge laptop I've seen has switchable graphics, and Nvidia's way of doing that in the present generation is Optimus. The only way to avoid it is to go with an alternative (HP?) who uses ATI, or buy integrated graphics.

Yeah, I do not like the new ones.

 

Gosh the hate. The SE models all have the spoiler as a factory option.

Anyways back on topic, I mean the new Latitudes again look like it was designed by a teenager for teenagers. It's just so unprofessional looking. I guess that is Dell's thing. Keep a design for 2 generations than change. D600/D610 => D620/D630 => E6400/E6410 => E6420/E6430

 

I said distract, not deceive, as in low quality laptops aimed as teenagers with extraneous shapes, lights and colors. I agree that, other than the serious design flaws in the early shipping units, the design is claimed to be "solid". But there is also clear cost-cutting going on as well as a shift in market positioning, as Dell admits themselves in their Gen-Y references.

The OP asks if we care for the design. Some of us don't -- if you do then great. Enjoy!

 

OK, you like the design. That's fine -- the OP asked for opinions.

That is exactly the point -- business users, esp. those of us who do some software development, will want to use an high-res external display. A business-grade machine should make that possible, even more so now that we are stuck with 16:9 displays. There are DisplayPort to HDMI adapter cables that work great so you don't really lose anything with DisplayPort. The problem is that the darned display port technology never settles down (VGA, S-Video, DVI-I, DVI-D, DisplayPort, HDMI 1.3/1.4, ThunderBolt, ...).

Wrt Optimus...

Let's please not discuss discreet or indiscreet graphics -- this is a family-friendly forum . But on the subject of discrete graphics...

Look at what some of the Vaios with Optimus have: a manual switch on the keyboard that let's you disable it so that you can easily dual boot Linux without going into the BIOS. And the BIOS controls in the Dell do not let you turn on integrated-only so you are stuck on Linux without the battery life benefits of the integrated GPU. Dell's "solution" is not adequate for those of us with a Linux requirement.

 

The only feature of the E6420 that I like is having the Pg Up and Pg Dn keys near the front of the keyboard.

I'm puzzled by what Dell has done. The E6410 was a sound design which addressed most of the few weaknesses of the E6400 (eg provide more rubber bumpers on the display). The colour options allowed users a little customisation of what is clearly a business machine where functionality and robustness are key requirements.

Now Dell has produced an excessively wide machine (with a bigger footprint than the competitors), put colour where users may not want it, done away with the one screw access to the interior, failed to integrate USB 3.0, etc.

I had hoped that Dell would build on the E6410 and squeeze the 16:9 display into that form factor (but if the new Apple notebooks still offer 16:10 displays then that would be the preferred option - if Apple can tell the display manufacturers what to provide, then why not Dell?).

I'm disappointed.

John

 

I don't like the new design, at all. I WON'T be buying one, and I wouldn't want one given to me, either.

 

E6420 looks like a toy compared to the sleek business looking E6410.

I am very disappointed.

The Dell logo in the middle of the lid screams of consumer.