About 1.5 months ago I purchased the Inspiron 7000 (4K model, 7548), which I have started using intensively since 10 days now. Although I could not find much information on the device I decided to buy it anyway, seeing that I've owned Dell laptops for more than a decade. My previous device was a Dell Latitude 6430 - which I was highly satisfied with.
The Inspiron 7000 has some very poorly implemented design features and seems insufficiently tested before it was released to the public. I cannot understand how a company as Dell, which should have basic know-how what to do and what not to do can release a laptop which glaring deficiencies and ask a premium price for it. What follows is a list of small and big annoyances.
First of all, my general impression of the laptop is that it is well built physically. The screen is brilliant and lavish, the weight and height in proportion. However after using it for a few hours the feeling of quality and 'macbook like' experience faded. I would also like to state I run the LATEST bios currently available (A02).
1) Excessive and unnecessary fan noise.
Although absolutely silent during simple tasks (tweaking windows, a bit of internet) the fan kicks in when watching any kind of video, unpacking software, working with Photoshop/indesign or running any other kind of vaguely demanding software which stresses the cpu more than 10%. The fan itself is a high-pitched type, but much worse is Dell's absurd fan profiling. Out of the blue the fan will start running at 50%, then a 100%, then 75% and then after maybe 10 seconds of screaming, turn off again. With more 'demanding' applications such as a low quality youtube stream the fan will turn on to about 50-75% constantly, at such a volume that it is unpleasant to watch a video. I now refrain from whatching any kind of video content without headphones, because it's simply frustrating. My previous laptop has a 34 watt i5-3340m cpu which is identical in performance to the i7-5500u (15 watts). I don't understand why a CPU that uses 1/2nd the power needs a much noisier fan. It makes no sense, and greatly undermines the user experience of this device. Right now I'm using the laptop in temps between 18-23c, I do not even want to imagine what it will sound like (a screaming jet-engine of *** probably) in a months time in 30+ room temperatures....:( It's like this laptop has never left the air conditioned office of the Dell head quarters prior to it's sale..
2) The 4K screen has obvious moire/pattern issues.
Maybe it's just my device, maybe it's my panel-type, maybe it's every 4K laptop out there. But the quality of this display is sub-par. There are fine diagonal lines visible when viewing the screen in anything but absolutely straight-on. They show mostly in beige and light-grey areas of even color. The beige color of this website (outside the white content area) is a good example - it looks uneven for me when viewed at a slight angle, and has a patterned appearance. Unacceptable - I am using this laptop to do graphic design, and I often find myself thinking that something is not a solid color while it is. I hope my screen is defective and this is not a common feature of all 4K screens.
3) The 4K screen has a pentile contruction that significantly degrades fine details to FHD levels.
More frustrating than the moire patterns is the obvious lack of 'real' detail in small non-black text or icons/details. I have excellent eye-sight and find it frustrating to see a very course rendering of for bright colors - there is a clear visibility of black subpixels, or in the case of gray/white text you can see the edges of small fonts are very ragged and unsharp. A regular FHD screen provides a much calmer and sharper appearance for that kind of content, to my surprise. The pentile layout of this display means there are no 'straight' angles, and effective resolution for non-black is probably more like 2000 horiontal pixels rather than 3850. A major disappointment, and not at all comparable to the 4K screen of competing brands or their own 2014 XPS model, for example. Basically this seems a very low quality implementation to just slam '4k' on a laptop.
4) The screen's yellow/green color rendering is horrible.
For a display touted to have '93% SRGB' I must say I am terribly disappointed. Contrast seems fine, but it's the rendering of green's and especially yellows that is very, very far off the mark. So far that I could not even correct it with color profiling. The monitor simply is not able to display bright yellows at all - they show as lime-green at best, and that is after using display calibration. Without it, bright yellows simply look an intense shade of green. Sunsets, flowers or basically anything that has more than average yellow hues will look strange and inaccurate. I am annoyed by this because I expected that an IPS panel with 93% srgb coverage should be fine to do graphic design and photo editing with, at least after calibration. I am now stuck with worse color display than my previous E6430 TN-panel (which had poor viewing angles but at least was pretty good straight on).
5) The screen's auto-brightness when on battery is poorly implemented and cannot be turned off
One other thing to add injury to insult is that the auto-brightness (So far only witnessed when running on battery) 'feature' seems to be not only fixed - I cannot find a way to turn it off - but very aggressively and poorly implemented. In a very choppy fashion it will lower or raise display brightness in about 5-6 steps during 1.5-2 seconds, depending on the content of the screen. Lots of white? It will become darker. Lots of black? It will become lighter. The net result is that when you watch a movie the screen will be chopping it's way up and down allll the time. Also it is tricked by gray - a tiny bit more gray can suddenly trigger the auto-brightness, so scrolling the web at night on battery can be a strange experience with the display doing it's course-stepped brightness adjustments without any real need. Again, it seems that this was not tested. I have owned a Dell laptop before that did auto-brightness adjustment but at least it was linear - it would fade from one % to the next without visible stepping. The current system of 5-6 steps looks and feels amateuristic - my friends thought my screen was broken at first. I now resort to running as much on power adapter as I can to avoid the problem.
6 Power adapter makes high-frequency noises when charging
The power adapter makes a very intense, high-pitched noise while charging. It's sufficiently intense that I had to disconnect it during sleeping. I have never experienced coil-whine from a new, a-brand adapter before. The noise is not constant, but it has a 2-3 sec 'music' in it where it goes from low to high and back. I now put on some background music so I don't hear it, but it's again a sign that Dell has either not been very strict on quality control. My previous adapter from me E6430 never exhibited this behavior (and is very similar in output power - and actually worked just fine on this laptop too, sadly I opted to keep the new adapter and sell the old one ...how stupid of me!).
7)Wifi signal quality is not great
When I compare the wifi range with my previous E6430 latitude, I notice it is about 30-40% worse. I get significantly lower throughput on the same wifi router, in the same places. This laptop is significantly larger than my previous 14" model, and it has an Intel wifi adapter. I do not understand why the signal range is so much poorer. Where my previous laptop would list around 6 wifi signals (besides my own) I currently only see one - mine. This does not make me happy, since I often work in places where I need to depend on wifi hotspots with less than optimal signal strength.
8) The touchpad isn't very accurate + interferes with typing
It was a significant downgrade to go from the touchpad of the E6430 to the current one. It feels ...I dont know, less accurate? Strange? It's just that it lacks the high precision interaction that the (far smaller) touchpad of the E6430 could deliver 24/7. The lack of physical buttons is visually pleasing but in real life just quite frustrating. Commonly used gestures such as having one finger on the left button and the other navigating are impossible. The touchpad does not handle multiple-input very well. I tried to adjust settings, and even resorted to installing Synoptics software to access a greater range of tweaks. This allowed me to remove the button area from the navigational input, which helps a bit. But still the touchpad often just does not seem to like multiple finger input. The other issue was that whilst typing the cursor would often jump all over the place. This turned out to be the palms of my hands very gently touching the touchpad surface (its huge and below the keyboard, what could we expect..). I could only resolve this by installing a third party app called 'Touchfreeze'. That solved it completely. I don't get why this was not resolved in Windows or some dell utility, but ok. Perhaps an oversight on my part for some hidding setting?
9) Fans are placed exclusively on the bottom. This causes overheating quickly.
No wonder the fans are running with the slightest of CPU usage - the ventilation shafts are placed on the bottom of the laptop. With minimal clearance to the desk surface this provides little airflow. Worse, when you use the laptop on your lap (hence LAPtop) the ventilation shafts are chocked and the fans start to whine up and sound like they are not very happy. Heat builds up quickly when watching a video. This means I can't even watch a video in bed without having to use a book or something else flat below the laptop else CPU temps will creep to 80-90+ in a short time. Poor design again - a few fan slots (Extra or mainly) on the back would have been visually less attractive perhaps, but far superior in terms of cooling and daily usage patterns.
10) Laptop discharges aggressively when in stand-by
Perhaps a software issue - I dont know. But this is the first laptop in my life that loses all of it's power during a few hours without power adapter, while in stand-by (hibernate works fine). I am currently running Windows 7, and in contrast to the other issues above have not tested this in Windows 8. I will make this a 'bonus frustration' point that I will not hold against Dell, but it is something I'll be testing on Windows 8 when I have the chance.
11) 4K videos cannot play smoothly at all.
Sadly it seems impossible to play 4K video on this machine. The graphic switching utility makes it impossible to assign the Radeon videocard to Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox or even VLC. The internal HD5500 should theoretically be able to do so, but cannot even manage 1440p demo videos without stuttering. It's frustrating to have a faster videocard in my system, but no ability to assign it to the programs you would normally use to play 4K video content. It shows a 'locked' sign on these applications, and thats' all there is to it - many other Dell users have reported the same issue for a year now, irregardless of intel/amd video chip combination. Again, not what you would expect.
All in all a highly disappointing experience. The way the laptop looks and the way it actually fe
els in daily use differs greatly. I feel like in most regards I have made a step down from my now 2.5 year old E6430. CPU performance is identical, and yet despite using less than 50% of the power the current i7-5500 runs a lot hotter and needs fare more aggressive and annoying fan speeds. The touchpad is not as accurate, the touchpad buttons are a major step back to use, the display colors (yellows) are very inaccurate, the displays 4k resolution turns out to be a marketing gimmick that does not perform well in all regards, the adapter is a dud...
All in all. I don't understand why I've spent €1000+ on a laptop and feel like I realistically haven't gained much from my previous, 2 year old E6430. I am currently located on the canary islands and hence the 'world wide support' that I purchased (2 year premium support, next business day on site) is worthless. They don't cover the islands, although there are 2.1 million inhabitants. I'll be moving to mainland spain in a few weeks so I will certainly have a technician check up on at least a bunch of the above issues - although I have a suspicion that a number of issues really are just poor design flaws (extreme fan noise, poor fan speed profiling, auto brightness to name a few).
I'm looking forward to a reply from a dell worker to address some of the issues above. I would hate my experience of this laptop to be representative of all other inspiron 7000's out there. It would not do the reputation of this device much good, especially not if things cannot be resolved.
- a disappointed customer.