Dell XPS 12 or Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro

T

Tarrosion

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 2, 2007
Messages
110
Any thoughts on Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro vs. Dell XPS 12?
The Yoga would be the model with an i7, 8gb ram and 256gb ssd, e.g. here
The Dell also has an i7, 8gb ram and 256gb ssd, e.g. here

The two models are close enough in price that it's not a differentiating factor for me. I hope to have the machine for a long time, so I'm more concerned with comfort of use, keyboard/trackpad quality, screen quality, battery life, durability, etc.

Usage is probably 70% browsing and documents, 20% programming and light numerical computing, 10% gaming. 80% of the time at a desk, but frequently on a plane.
 
We just bought 2 x Dell XPS 12's from the Microsoft Store here in Kansas City at Oakpark Mall.

They are substantially discounted from everywhere else. They are the new 2013 Haswells, NFC, Intel Dual Band Wireless A/C, S-ISP 1080p display, Intel i5 4200, 128GB SSD, 4GB DDR3, 6cell battery, 8 - 9 hours battery time, real Carbon Fiber Upper / Lower with milled aluminum frame. Backlit keyboard, etc etc.

Hell of an Ultrabook for only $699. We also got student discounts on both of ours which made them even cheaper.

Do don't need an i7 on an ultrabook imho. If you want 256gb msata, just get one of the refurbished msata's from Microcenter for $119 and do the simple upgrade yourself. The videos are all over youtube.
 
I've heard pretty mixed things regarding the yoga 2 in regards to battery life, ability to push the high res display, color accuracy, etc.

Norm at Tested.com spent some time with it and had a decent little review of his experience.

For a much more thorough review, checkout notebookcheck. They do a great job.
 
Deinos, thanks for that first link. Very interesting to compare it to e.g. the borderline fawning Engadget review!

SixFootDuo, do you know if replacing the hard drive yourself voids the warranty? I did this on my previous laptop but only after checking that the warranty was still good...which came in handy when the motherboard died 11 months later.
 
I played around with a Yoga 2 at BestBuy. I found it was a bit difficult to use 3200x1800 resolution screen. It did not scale properly on the desktop so that icon and text you appear larger to make it easier to see. It was literally a 3200x1800 desktop on a 13.3" screen making everything hard to read. It would really my 1st time using Win 8 so I could not figure out how to enable scaling. Hell, I had to use search just to bring up the Control Panel.

I used IE to surf the web and the contents of the webpage did scaled up fine. But the IE's menu bar was really tiny since that was obviously not scaled up to make it easier to read. I am sure that if I stuck with I could have figured out how to enable scaling... eventually. But I got frustrated with the Yogas 2's super high resolution screen and Windows 8.
 
JaguarSKX said:
I played around with a Yoga 2 at BestBuy. I found it was a bit difficult to use 3200x1800 resolution screen. It did not scale properly on the desktop so that icon and text you appear larger to make it easier to see. It was literally a 3200x1800 desktop on a 13.3" screen making everything hard to read. It would really my 1st time using Win 8 so I could not figure out how to enable scaling. Hell, I had to use search just to bring up the Control Panel.

I used IE to surf the web and the contents of the webpage did scaled up fine. But the IE's menu bar was really tiny since that was obviously not scaled up to make it easier to read. I am sure that if I stuck with I could have figured out how to enable scaling... eventually. But I got frustrated with the Yogas 2's super high resolution screen and Windows 8.
Click to expand...



/shrug, I think someone may have turned off scaling on that machine then, because I've never had those issues, and my eye's are hardly "ideal". /shrug.
 
Try to find out if the yogas have fixed their bad yellow problem. Every yoga 2 pro I saw in store had the bad yellow (true yellow shows as the color of brown mustard, not true yellow. Just open up any paint program and look at its color palette to see the issue.

As far as the resolution goes, while it was initially a selling point for me, seeing it in store made me realize it was overkill and I would end up having the desktop at 1920x1080 anyway (which looked great, btw, no fuzzy edges at all). But why pay for the resolution if I wasn't going to use it.

I ended up going larger, but if I was set on the smaller form factor, I think I'd go with the XPS 12.

BB
 
I looked into this a bit actually and apparently the Yoga 2 Pro is not a "true" 3200x1800 in the sense that it isn't using a standard RGB sub-pixel arrangement. It uses a pentile sub-pixel arrangement instead, and so you actually get less sub-pixels then you would with a RGB 3200x1800 screen. This is also what contributes to the color issue.
 
If you had any interest in the Yoga 2, I would highly recommend looking into the Thinkpad Yoga. Build quality is going to be a lot better and you get a Wacom stylus for drawing and use in OneNote/Evernote. Only thing you lose is the resolution (Thinkpad is 1920x1080), but from the sounds of the Yogas display issues.... this shouldn't be too much of a problem.
 
1080p is plenty for a display that size to be fair. You are hardly loosing much.
 
I recently picked up an XPS 12 i7 4500u 8GB 128GB SSD

I used to have a surface pro and before that an Asus EP121.

I liked the surface pro but I found for using the tablet as a laptop in my lap for typing the surface keyboard wasn't good enough.

I bought the xps to mainly use a laptop but still have the ability to lay in bed and use it like a tablet. I would say my usage is 60% laptop 40% tablet.

I did look at the yoga, however I didn't like having the keyboard exposed while using it in tablet mode, just my personal preference
I find the 1080P screen on a 12.5" screen just perfect. I've got the scaling at 125% and everything is working good. Battery life is awesome as well.
 
Sounds like the XPS 12 is the way to go, based on the Yoga 2 Pro's quirks. I still find it wild that Dell's design is actually semi-practical, even if I wouldn't want to read a book on it like I would with an iPad.

It's a bit sad that Windows PC makers seemingly have trouble doing ultra-high resolution displays... love the Retina MacBook Pro's display. Not quite as high-res, but it doesn't suffer from color issues (and doesn't seem to have any significant retention issues, at least in my experience).
 
Just in case anyone is wondering, there is a fix for the yellow issue. The trouble seems to be that you must update the BIOS and also update a win8 program that controls the display settings. Many people complain online about the "fix" not working, only to find out they only did one.

I'm sure opinions will vary, but the win 8.1 update really fixed a lot of these issues. I don't think this will be too unique of a problem for long. The push will be to these high end displays at some point, and microsoft seems to have dealt with most the problems. At least this is all about what I read when I was researching the yoga 2 pro.

Just as a comparison, the HP Spectre 13t-3000 has a 2560x1440 screen and is supposed to be nice as well, assuming you don't want the tablet mode. There are few reasonably priced high DPI laptops. Most with these types of screens are easily $1600-2100.
 
a legitimate point of the screen, it seems, is that it really negates a lot of the benefits of haswell in regards to battery life. Instead of allowing for an 8hr ultrabook, it remains around 6hrs. I've read reports of people running it in 1080p mode and it does actually extend the battery life a bit.
 
I ended up with the cheaper model Dell xps12, and highly recommend it. The machine is well built, conversion to tablet is fast and satisfying and you don't have an exposed keyboard on the bottom. Specs are good enough, screen is beautiful, keyboard is a joy.
 
It's happening to their entire range. Even Alienware upgrades must be done in specific bundles.
 
wtf.. if i wanted that i would go to Apple.com to be told what to buy...

Ridiculous......
 
The more "sealed" laptops become the less configurable they become, that is one of the trade offs.

There's still options, they are just segmented into more as different product lines. You'll notice that on the Dell site for example, there is just a lot of different models.
 
The choices at places like dell were not useful anyway. They charged so ridiculously much to make a simple upgrade it was way cheaper to buy that part and put it in yourself. In almost all cases I bought the base model.
 
Deinos said:
If you had any interest in the Yoga 2, I would highly recommend looking into the Thinkpad Yoga. Build quality is going to be a lot better and you get a Wacom stylus for drawing and use in OneNote/Evernote. Only thing you lose is the resolution (Thinkpad is 1920x1080), but from the sounds of the Yogas display issues.... this shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Click to expand...

I would steer you clear of the ThinkPad Yoga for now. They are using an LG panel that is known to have horrible image retention issues which get worse with time. Search "Thinkpad yoga image retention" on Google if you want sources. Lenovo has yet to acknowledge that the problem even exists.

What I *would* suggest is the new higher resolution Acer Aspire S7's that just hit microsoftstore.com this week. They have been getting great reviews everywhere.
 
limitedaccess said:
The more "sealed" laptops become the less configurable they become, that is one of the trade offs.

There's still options, they are just segmented into more as different product lines. You'll notice that on the Dell site for example, there is just a lot of different models.
Click to expand...

It's not that so much, they've reduced the options the consumer can see. Sales reps can still configure workstations with different cpu/video/ram/drives, so it's not a technical reason, just a cost/efficiency thing. It's annoying.
 
dave3533 said:
I would steer you clear of the ThinkPad Yoga for now. They are using an LG panel that is known to have horrible image retention issues which get worse with time. Search "Thinkpad yoga image retention" on Google if you want sources. Lenovo has yet to acknowledge that the problem even exists.

What I *would* suggest is the new higher resolution Acer Aspire S7's that just hit microsoftstore.com this week. They have been getting great reviews everywhere.
Click to expand...

A $1200 Acer? Has hell frozen over? Lol
 
dave99 said:
It's not that so much, they've reduced the options the consumer can see. Sales reps can still configure workstations with different cpu/video/ram/drives, so it's not a technical reason, just a cost/efficiency thing. It's annoying.
Click to expand...

I believe the lines, the more work/business oriented lines, you are referring to though also tend to have more web configuration options as well still.

The consumer lines are generally much more locked down now. Especially as the market really is now oriented to "sealed" type designs (Ultrabooks for example).

Even the work lines though are moving away from configurations. I know with Lenovo the newer Thinkpads (well some of them) for example are becoming less configurable (even if you call in) depending on how sealed they are basically.

You get weight and size savings with a sealed design (involving a lot of soldered components) but the tradeoff basically is you can't swap.
 
/usr/home said:
A $1200 Acer? Has hell frozen over? Lol
Click to expand...

I know! I would have thought the same, but it's the best windows ultrabook out currently..well, I haven't heard much about the Asus ux301 yet, and that could be a contender as well
 
There's the Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus as well for another high end Ultrabook. If it were me though I'd get the Sony Vaio Duo 13 or Thinkpad Yoga if price weren't a consideration (pen support fixation?).

Acer has been trying more upscale products. But the majority are still the cheap things they have being sold at the big box stores.

The S7, R7, some V5/V7s, and Travelmates are more up there.

For those a bit jaded about LG IPS panel quality control, I think Acer tends to use AU Optronics AHVA panels instead.
 
Last edited:
I just went through this jumping from lenovo u430 -> asus ux302la -> yoga 2 -> samsung ativ 9 -> dell 14 7000 -> dell xps 13 -> mb pro -> finally t440s.

I couldn't find anything that I felt 100% happy with after seeing in person or reading forums. Finally got so tired of looking that I just ordered the t440s 1080p touch and AC wireless right at 1050 before tax, hoping for the best when it arrives.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top