Dell Latitude 7330 review: business laptops are too expensive

Sometimes I’m convinced that Dell is just showing off. The Dell Latitude 7330 is a magnesium business laptop with Intel’s enterprise vPro technology.

This combination of features appeals to business audiences and may be just what some IT departments are looking for. But it’s also probably the most extreme example of the “thin at any cost” mantra I’ve seen this year. It’s a shame because a secure, connected, vPro-powered device like this can be a great purchase for freelancers and small business owners.

The best part of Latitude’s testing period was not actually using the device, but carrying it around. You feel like you have nothing in your backpack. In some circumstances, he’s over half a pound lighter than the XPS 13 Plus consumer product.

Its lightness comes with some trade-offs. The whole chassis is flexible and does not appear to meet MIL-STD 810H durability standards. But rather than beautiful or rugged devices, Dell promises light devices, and Latitude offers the former aspect.

However, opening things up and using them is a much less amazing experience. My review unit has a 16:9, 1920 x It came with a 1080 panel. It’s functional, but it doesn’t look very nice, and it feels like you’re using an antique. The keyboard, touchpad, and speakers are fine, but equally unexceptional.

Performance is my main issue with this device and the number one reason why it doesn’t seem like a good purchase for many business customers. is not.

My test unit (about $3,150 MSRP, currently $2,047) included a vPro Core i7-1265U, 512 GB of storage, and 16 GB of memory. I don’t think benchmarks will help much here (yes, I ran some, but who am I?). From a few days of use, I can say that this device falls short of what is typically expected from high-end competitors like the ThinkPad line. It’s an Intel technology built into the , which helps IT professionals remotely manage, diagnose, and update devices. It also enables a range of security and virtualization features that tend to please IT departments.

For one, battery life averaged just 3 hours and 35 minutes. This would be a big problem even if everything else on this device was great. But even with the power on, I could feel things chugging towards the upper end of my workload. , doing some downloads and trying to navigate it across 20 Chrome tabs, I noticed a visible slowdown on my Latitude. I don’t see this as an unrealistic office workload, so I’m concerned.

It was good enough for photo work, but heavy programs like Adobe Premiere and Media Encoder were sluggish. They took ages to open and crashed frequently. This is common in thin and light laptops like this, but when it comes to graphics work, many inexpensive devices can get the job done faster. , it took quite a while to open and interact with Premiere, but it was still about half the time it took the Latitude to export a 4K video, and scored much higher on Premiere’s PugetBench. Professional.

You can use this for light games — overwatch on ultra settings rocket league at its best and league of legends Everything was playable.but tomb raider It crawled and stuttered at an average of 18fps on the lowest possible settings (a slightly lower score than the P-series XPS that managed to get out of the highest settings for gaming). but this result shows how limited the graphics chop is.

We promise that we recognize the value of such a device. Combining the benefits of Intel’s vPro platform with extreme portability can meet the needs of many individuals and businesses. But other top business laptops, such as Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Yoga, offer better performance, battery life, and are built for similar prices (while still offering vPro and a legion of other enterprise features ).

And for freelancers, small business owners, and anyone else who might be able to run the consumer space, the Latitude is an even worse deal. You can get the 13 Plus vPro model for $1,549 and the regular XPS 13 vPro model for just $999. These devices have much longer battery life, better displays, and more durable chassis.

Such business laptops offer many advantages for professionals, not only in terms of remote management, but also in terms of security. Latitude’s presence detection, enterprise-class security, and dual network connectivity can be a huge benefit for family business owners and founders looking to get their startup off the ground. But I worry how much these customers will give up on choosing this Latitude. And while the priorities of an IT manager buying a huge fleet are far from my view as a critic, my instinct is that you can better serve the diverse needs of all your employees. This means that we need to consider a model that especially Regarding battery life.

Photo by Monica Chin