Ha, I thought a 1Hz display was a typo until I read the article - that's the minimum display update, not the maximum: for situations when nothing's changing on the screen to save battery life.
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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On phones and tablets, variable refresh rates make an "always on" display feasible in terms of battery budget, where you can have something like a lock screen turned on at all times without burning through too much power.
On laptops, this might open up some possibilities of the lock screen or some kind of static or slideshow screensaver staying on longer while idle, before turning off the display.
With enough pitch black on the lock screen background, you should be able to keep it going for quite a bit longer, since this apparently has OLED. I think for phones, always on is usually a black background with text and stuff on it, isn't it?
Most Android phones with always on have a grayscale screen that is mostly black. But iPhones introduced always on with 1Hz screens and still show a less saturated, less bright version of the color wallpaper on the lock screen.
Build quality for Dell is down over the past few years
Hijacking top comment to report that: This is true across the industry for (most) OEMs
The Secret is to buy "Enterprise level"
Check out the LATITUDE line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Latitude
Those are enterprise fleet laptops ... the ones they have to support for 5-10 years.
You know which line they don't discontinue parts for? You know which line has repair manuals and driver updates available? wanna take a wild guess which line is usually more modular and powerful at the expense of being less sleek looking and thin?
And the best part is that you can usually buy them fairly cheap if you find them used.
I prefer Dell Latitude to HP Elitebook, Thinkpads are OK too but they've gone down in quality a lot since they got bought by Lenovo
TL;DR = Buy an enterprise level laptop, consumer line laptops are all trash,
Replying to my own comment to give yall one more tidbit.
The latitude product nomenclature is still standard
- 2 first digits of the model number are the "class" the higher the laptop the more high end
- last 2 digits of the model number are the generation (we are current in 60)
So for example the Latitude 9460 is the very high end laptop that came out at the beginning of this year while the 3540 was the entry level economy latitude that came out in 2023
Lenovo has been making thinkpads for 20 years. The complaint that their quality is still less than how laptops were manufactured 2 decades ago feels rather dated.
Tbf I took "build quality for Dell is down" to mean the Latitude lineup because their non-enterprise lineups... eh... I've never seen one with any build quality.
Top tip, buy a used enterprise laptop. You can get one hell of a deal when big companies throw their entire lineup out after a few years and flood the market. Some have a few scuffs here and there, but others are mint after sitting plugged to a dock for the last three years in a row.
Might need a new battery though, so research how easy it's to swap and calculate that in the cost just in case.
The Latitudes are balls in the worst way. Including the new "Pro" models. I've had i7 and i9 Latitudes that are slower than my i5 XPS 13, and yeah that thing sucks too but at least it sucks predictably.
I got a couple of latitudes and found they had soldered ram so I couldn’t upgrade them later 😭
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These fuckers have no USB-A ports but has a headphone jack?
Buy a Framework, I have 4 slots that can be everything from USB-A to C to RJ45 to card readers when I need it, and I can charge the thing from any port.
I'm waiting patiently for Framework to release a 14" to 15" touchscreen 2 in 1 with stylus support. I'm glad they dipped their toes in the water with the 12, but the offerings just aren't yet there to tick enough boxes for me.
The correct way, really
Replacing the function keys with a capacitive bar was the stupidest thing they have ever done. So silly that even Apple walked back on that design choice.
Any serious laptop buyer would rule out a laptop just for that. And any casual buyer looking to spend XPS money on a laptop is going to buy a MacBook.
I'm glad the XPS line is back but unfortunately for Dell Windows is worse than ever.
When I last bought an XPS 13, there was an option for Ubuntu. I agree that many people will choose a Macbook, but the XPS line has been decent. Perhaps someday they will discover the third OS option.
And the worst part is, Apple has a lot more influence over software on MacOS than Dell does over software on Windows. Meaning Apple was able to influence at least some (though not most by any measure) 3rd party developers to make the touchbar context aware. I somehow doubt Dell had any such luck, so it would've been even worse than the Apple touchbar which was already shit.
In fact, had Apple included it in their whole lineup for a few years, it could've actually been useful. But Airs and 2 TBT3 13" Pros never got it, neither did the ubercrappy 12". A huge issue was the lack of adoption by developers (because to make it truly useful, they'd have to customize the touchbar for their application), but why would the developers have been motivated to do it if the thing wasn't even on every new device sold.
The touch bar worked well for me on a Macbook. Most of the hotkeys there use cmd+something instead of the f-keys, so I needed the f-keys with only a couple apps, namely Double Commander. But what's better, there are apps to put custom controls into the touch bar. The most useful one for me was the button to hand off the Bluetooth headphones from the laptop to the phone or vice versa (via a bash script of mine). Plus I could also have app-specific custom buttons.
My work gave me a Mac with this. I absolutely hated it - constantly triggering random things I didn't want or need and apparently something about the wiring caused the physical keyboard to fail prematurely.
Fortunately we've moved on from those dark days. I still have to use a Mac, but at least there's no touch bar.
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1 Hz display option: like an e-Ink display?
(it says 120Hz in the article)
They might mean down to 1hz like some smart phones do, to save battery.
There's a 1920 x 1200 non-touch display option, which will surely get you better battery life than OLED. But what's most interesting about it is the 1-120 Hz variable refresh rate, which Dell says is a first to for this model. That extremely low refresh should help save power when static images or text is on the screen.
Ah yeah, I should have read the rest of the article. I didn't know about that feature though, that's cool
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I miss my clitmouse XD
I'll never buy an xps again. Last one needed pretty much everything replacing, and within 3 years dell stopped manufacturing the battery!!
$2k on a laptop that's a brick within 3 years?
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Good Lord, they're copying that hideous notch design from the macbooks.
On one hand, its not that bad on a Mac... but that's because the OS is designed in such a way where there's nothing there and it sorta gets lost. Windows isn't like that at all.
On the other hand, At least its not right above the keyboard like some of the ones we have at work... the "up the nose" cam is not flattering.
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Not the capacitive touch bar!
1 Hz display option
Btw, is there something like Adaptive Sync for display servers? Although most devices' drivers only allow for 30 or 20 Hz minimum, automatic change from energy saving (reading static text) to high refresh (scrolling text, playing video) would be neat.
And while we're on it: recalculating all 4 million pixels just because you moved the cursor is kinda a clutch, no? Not to mention 30+ times in the second just because.
I was confused when I read that part of the title, I thought they accidentally typed it instead of 120. A 1hz display for all functions would be a hilarious thing to play with for a minute or two.
Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was 'compressed screen updates', which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.
Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn't easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.
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