After nearly six years of faithful service, my company-issued Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon suffered a terminal liquid spill. Due to recent university procurement policies restricting hardware purchases strictly to Dell, I transitioned to my new machine yesterday: a Dell Pro Premium (let’s call it what it actually is—a rebranded Latitude).
While the new laptop brings a couple of minor modern upgrades, as a tool for daily work, it feels like a significant downgrade in the areas that matter most.
1. Ergonomics & Typing Experience: A Complete Disaster
For a portable machine meant for long hours of writing and editing, the input experience is paramount. This is where the new Dell fails most severely.
Flat, Unseparated Keys: The keycaps are completely flat with minimal spacing between them. Without tactile borders, my fingers constantly slide across keys, making it frustratingly difficult to locate key edges by feel.
Swapped Ctrl and Fn Keys: Dell placed the Fn key where the Ctrl key should be on a standard layout. Every attempt to perform basic shortcuts like Ctrl+C or Ctrl+V triggers an Fn combination instead. Unlike ThinkPads—which allow you to easily swap these key functions in software or BIOS—Dell offers no straightforward way to fix this layout flaw.
Mushy Key Travel & Poor Bottom-Out Feel: The ThinkPad keyboard provided distinct, crisp tactile detents at the end of each keystroke, giving clear feedback without requiring extra force. The Dell keyboard features shallow, mushy travel that lacks a firm bottom-out point, slowing down typing speed and causing unnecessary finger fatigue.
2. TrackPoint vs. Trackpad: Missing Efficiency
The Loss of the TrackPoint: The absence of a center pointing stick (TrackPoint) is a huge blow to workflow efficiency. On the ThinkPad, editing text required moving a thumb and forefinger just a few millimeters to precise physical mouse buttons without ever lifting hands off the home row. Moving back to a trackpad-only layout introduces constant, unnecessary arm and wrist movement.
Credit Where It’s Due: To the trackpad’s credit, it is surprisingly good. It is smooth, responsive to taps and gestures, and features solid physical push-down clicking mechanism—though it still can’t replace the speed of a dedicated pointing stick for heavy text editing.
3. Display, Performance, & Battery Life
Display: The screen is visibly brighter and sharper than my older ThinkPad. It is a genuine improvement and one of the few highlights of the device.
Performance: On paper, the RAM is faster. However, Intel’s newer processors in this class have moved away from traditional Hyper-Threading. As a result, multi-threaded CPU performance feels roughly equivalent to my four-year-old ThinkPad, making the generation gap feel like a wash in real-world everyday tasks.
Battery Life: While I haven’t completed a full test cycle yet, the efficiency improvements of a newer platform should yield a couple of extra hours of battery life compared to my aging previous machine.
Build: The device is noticeably heavier than the ultra-light X1 Carbon, making it feel slightly chunkier in a bag.
Final Verdict
A laptop’s primary job is to serve as an intuitive interface between the user and their work. While the Dell Pro Premium offers a decent display and a solid trackpad, it falls severely short on core input ergonomics. The combination of flat, mushy keys, a frustrating layout, and the lack of a pointing stick makes for a tedious typing experience.
If your workflow relies heavily on typing speed and precision editing, this machine is a frustrating compromise forced by IT policy rather than a true upgrade.
I’m sorry about the recent several months of server downtime. it looks like there was an error in the backup software I was using to regularly back up the site whereby it wasn’t removing the old backups and thus I ran out of space. The problem has been corrected and the old backups were removed, the server updated and restarted and clearly, as you’re reading this, it came back to life.
With any luck, over the next few months I will be migrating this site to a different virtual server, hopefully hosted in my own personal cloud, but we’ll see how far I get on that in the next post.
I hope everyone is having a great day, and there WILL be more project posts to come (really this time!)
I’m currently EVERYWHERE trying to learn as much as I can about the various AIB partner boards because AMD wouldn’t allow performance numbers or overall reviews to go up for AIB partner cards until the day of release (very annoying to those of us who want to know what they’re buying before they buy it on launch day… I hate embargos). Fun times.
For real time info, check out Falcodrin's twitch stream (which is up pretty much all the time tracking what vendors have what models of GPUs and CPUs and has up-to-the-minute launch/queue notifications.
I’m currently considering the Asus 4090 Strix (which is entirely too large) and the Asus 4090 Tuf because the Asus cards have an extra hdmi port, are of generally known high quality, and because all the AIB partners cards seem to be able to reach a 600w power target out of the box. (at least that’s what I’ve heard) It’ll still be about a month before we see any water blocks for any of the 4090 cards though so I may just hold off for a little while (another week or so) until I can watch and read more reviews.
I’ve come to really love my Sennheiser hd 6xx headphones over the past few months and have used them pretty much every day since they came into my life, but they aren’t perfect. they lack sound stage (they have a really intimate sound like the band is playing directly into your ears rather than in the room you’re in) and they tend to be a bit warmer / vailed than I feel they could be putting an emphasis on the lower mids/upper bass. I’ve been told again and again and again that I should try out the HiFiMan Sundara headphones, that they are drastically different/better from the somewhat lower end headphones (like the 4xx, 5xx that I own and are drastically better than the he 560 v4’s that I bought on sale for similar money to the Sundara that I didn’t enjoy and will be reselling soon) so I finally decided to bite the bullet and pick up a set of Sundaras from amazon (figuring I have a month to audition them and i can straight up return them if they don’t please me, and also I have a few hundred dollars in negative balance on my amazon visa at the moment from returns that I recently made, as well as getting 5% cash back for the purchase *shrug*) I look forward to doing some a/b testing in the near future, and i’ll probably do an unboxing and hardware comparison as well.. #audiophile #ExpensiveHobbies #FirstWorldProblems
Facebook just reminded me to reach out with updates, so here I am! (There will be a more complete video update in the next few weeks). So what have I been up to? I’ve had multiple open quests.
My day Job has had be doing lots of professional live streaming
My desk chair recently died and I’ve been researching a replacement
My NAS got a rebuild in a different case and had some issues recently leading to some required maintenance
I began research for a phone video I’d like to shoot
I purchased a new panasonic g7 camera to put in my prompter (thus freeing my panasonc g85 which has the same sensor but more features, so I can use it as a handheld camera again)
Bought a cheap camlink competitor (1080p 30, but very inexpensive and seems to work decently, review on that to come)
I purchased an application called touchportal which is a less expensive and imho better competitor that turns any ios or android device into a fully customizable streamdeck
I’ve been rethinking my digital dashboard project
working on some Christmas presents for my family
messing with my valve index preparing for a review, got a cr6-se 3d printer (that I’m still a little suspect about, more on that later)
will soon be rebuilding the virtual server that runs cpgeek.org (mostly due to the fact that Ubuntu no longer supports 32 bit applications and I was using the 32 bit version on a virtual machine to try to save memory and space as it’s got fewer than 4gb of ram allocated)
amazon associates payouts seem to be getting worse and worse so I’ve been updating @cpgeekdeals less and less but still throw some stuff up there if I find something particularly good.
I’ve been attempting to upgrade some of my computer components but having a devil of a time getting resellers to sell them to me (more on that later)
I’ve got some holiday time that I’m taking soon so I’m hoping to get some recording time in for some additional youtube content (which I’ll be reposing here) explaining some of this stuff soon. so stay tuned.
For the past week or so I’ve been doing some research into tech deals and where to find them, how to suss them out, etc. and thought about how to get them out to my fellow geeks out there, and figured that twitter had a good following with integrated opportunity for sharing and conversation so last night I soft-launched @CpgeekDeals with a few awesome deals I was able to find, and will be updating every couple of days or so with more as I find them. Please check it out and follow if you’re interested in saving some cash on some of the latest and greatest tech gear and services! Tell your friends!
This is just a quick unboxing of my new USB power cable and adapter for my new Panasonic G85 micro four thirds camera. This should enable me to keep it powered all day while I’m in the studio, and with the help of my Imuto battery bank (see previous video), it should help keep my camera powered for several hours of recording out in the field as well!
If you’re interested, please check it out on amazon, using this link to buy this product (or any other on amazon) really helps the channel quite a bit, so I’d thank you to give it a click! https://amzn.to/2DPswix
I own an IBM Model M keyboard. It’s easily (by orders of magnitude) the oldest component that makes up my workstation, but due to it’s wonderfully tactile precision, it is certainly my favorite keyboard of all time and despite it’s age, still serves me every single day as my primary desktop input device. However (there’s always a however), I’m confident that beyond some light surface cleaning and disinfecting, it had never been properly cleaned.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve updated anything here and that’s a darn shame. Here are a bunch of cool projects that I’ve been working on recently and are still ongoing!
The absolute best online, web, and mobile to-do list management system for all platforms. TONS of integrations with applications that you probably already use!
