Dell's new business mid-rangers have a brand new design as well as Intel Tiger Lake. There are many changes happening for the new Dell Latitude 5320, Latitude 5420 and Latitude 5520. One is especially interesting: Dell is getting rid of its equivalent to the ThinkPad TrackPoint.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-kills-off-its-TrackPoint-on-the-new-Latitude-5320-Latitude-5420-Latitude-5520.513041.0.html
Dell is shooting themselves on the foot with these decisions.
Hopefully, there's Lenovo out there as another option
Completely idiotic decisions - removing touchpad buttons, pointing stick, Ethernet and dedicated page up/page down. This is a massive downgrade. Will avoid since I was planning to buy this if they had kept the input devices and Ethernet as it was in 10th gen.
I am a thinkpad user some 15 years and I never knew dell uses trackpoints too; sure they probably work differently but if I knew Id consider dell. Now I know I can look at old dell models but the removal of buttons is exactly what lenovo did with T440 and it was a mistake quickly corrected.
They're going in the way wrong direction with these changes, essentially making business laptops no different than consumer laptops other than the support. My Latitude 7390 with dedicated mouse buttons, pointing stick, and keyboard with generous travel will probably be my last great business laptop. I guess the Lenovo Thinkpad T series are the last true business laptops out there. I hope they don't thin everything and remove features just to make things a MacBook clone because the majority of tech journalists harass them to do so.
Ohh, these are MS Modern Standby compliant. And that's the issue. As with my Latitude 5401, these will also suffer from inability to use normal Sleep mode. Modern Standby is buggy, it crashes the system randomly overnight, or wakes the laptop while it's in the backpack. Definitely not for the power users, no buy.
Does such a touchpad as shown in the pic behave like a clickpad at least (bottom portion or entire touchpad clicks down) or is it now a complete buttonless rectangle with only tap to click? Anyway it is a downgrade to lose 5 clicky buttons.
Poor businessmen. They just wanted a nice computer like in the good ol' WinVista days.
At least it crunches those 666.6 GPuppy/ears per selfie in AI/ML workloads.
Not like I needed another reason to not choose a Dell, but there it is, or, more accurately, there they are. The only reason I've even looked at these before is because they were one of the few options with a TrackPoint, even if it is a crappier version than Lenovo, which makes no sense, since the Lenovo patents are expired, meaning that, if anything, they should have been made significantly better, not removed. And cramped arrow keys are bad enough on a consumer laptop, but on a business one?!
Removal of the ethernet port sucks, and isn't really necessary just to slim down a computer, but it's unfortunately getting to the point that doing so is just the norm anymore, and with Wi-Fi where it is most people probably don't use it enough to justify it, and those that do can use a USB adapter. Not ideal, and it's a shame to see them being removed, but laptops can't have everything. It'd be nice though if something could be done with the ethernet standard to make it so you could just use a USB-C cable to connect, and places could use adapters on the ethernet ports.
Finally, the reason I didn't buy the Inspiron 2-in-1 recently was because of the pathetically small battery, so it's sad to see them shrinking the batteries in these now, too. Between common themes of poor battery life, overheating, poor performance (often due to the overheating), and lousy support, Dell has really gone downhill.
When I noticed the catastrophic decision to discontinue dual-pointing keyboards, I was still able to order 2020 models Latitide 5411 and 5511 with TrackPoints, by the end of May 2021. But as it looks like, they are the last purchase from Dell, unfortunately.
I like maintainability of Dell laptops, good cooling, and design in general. I will miss them.
Dell laptops really are going down. I feel sorry for them.
Mo,
www.buysellram.com