Giving back the XPS13
Over the last six months I’ve had the privilege of working off of a Dell XPS13. I signed up for the Sputnik program thinking there was no way I would get one and was accepted early on. We received a test unit at Adknowledge and things just seemed to fall into place. Over the past decade of carrying a machine home with me daily, this has by far been my favorite. Various beasts have passed through my hands, most of them Latitudes or varying sizes, a couple ThinkPads and a pairs of MacBook Pros. None of them I’ve enjoyed as much as this little number. I had for many years thought I needed a big monster of a laptop decked out with a huge screen and massive drives. Recently I’d come to the realization that I spend 90% of my day in console session or in a browser where apps have gotten so much better over the last couple years. I don’t need a 16GB of RAM and 1TB of disk, the times I need more horsepower I am looking at something much bigger and will probably need to be running the app in a cluster or off of a VM server. What I need day to day is something that’s light and portable that I can fire up quickly. Something with a big enough keyboard for my hands (I’m 6’2″) and I don’t feel like I’m missing screen real estate. A machine that is not akin to setting up a Dungeon Master screen in front of me when I take it to a meeting. It gets bonus points when it looks sexy enough for the C-level people in the office to request one too. The XPS13 has been all of that and more. From the get go running Ubuntu on it has been a dream, it’s going to be a sad day on Friday when I turn it back in.  The new job I’m taking with Pivotal has a standardized order of a MBP for everyone. I’ll be required to run VMs much more often, so I don’t think the little guy would hold up (though I’d love to give it a try) even were I able to hold onto it. Thus I’ll have to set what has been my favorite laptop aside and move on to something else. The poor thing did get pretty hot on a minecraft server with a lot of action going on, so maybe his next life will find him some lighter usage and he can make someone else just as happy.