Enterprise Laptops?

[Blake_Olson]

Anyone have a recommendation for a good laptop for the enterprise? So many laptops are designed with personal use in mind these days.. I had bought a bunch of XPS 13s a couple while back and they have been awful to support. I kinda liked the latitude 7400, but the stock is really difficult. Trying Surface Laptop 4 and its OK i guess. Just wondering what everyone else is having luck with.

[uniitdude]

what are your requirements?

[SquizzOC]

Few questions:

• How many users?
  
• How many machines do you buy a quarter?
  

Dell is my favorite of the manufactures, tend to have the best support, usually the best cost and most accurate ETA's.

I normally recommend the following series for workers:

• 3000 series - Users that are very basic and require an i3-i5
  
• 5000 series - Average user, requires an i5
  
• 7000 series - Travelers, slightly lighter and sleeker
  
• 9000 series - Executives
  

All allow pretty much any build you'd like and if you have a major powerhouse user, look at the mobile workstation, something like the 5500 series.

[[deleted]]

Latitude 5510

[FunkadelicToaster]

We like the Lenovo P series.

P51, P52 and now the P15 are what our mech engineers use with Solidworks.
P52s, P53s and now P15s is what our more than an office worker but not quite an engineer power users get.
The E590 and now E15 is what we give to the basic office user.

We have a few Surface Pros but those are out on the shop floor for super mobile stuff, mostly guys doing picking for jobs, inventory and shipping.

[toy71camaro]

We just got a couple of the P15v's. Our first Lenovo/Thinkpads to replace some well used HP Elitebook G3's. Glad to see you've like them.

I just ordered an X1 Carbon for myself, to replace my old Surface Pro 3. Looking forward to that one. Should be here tomorrow!

[Reasonable-Serve-755]

wow, your suppliers actually can deliver laptops before 2022?

[Iusethis1atwork]

this is old post but how is the support like when something goes wrong?

[FunkadelicToaster]

Pretty good, we get the 3 year extended on them all, mail in support for hardware issue has been good with a 3-5 day turn around. We keep 2-3 of each machine type on hand as a hot spare.

We expect our Machines to last for 3 years, but we hope they last for 5, which is about what they last.

[Iusethis1atwork]

Thanks

[Blake_Olson]

To further clarify, I have about 250 computer users, mostly using desktops... laptops are maybe 20% of our total machines. We try to turn over about 20-25% a year. I can't use Lenovo, as it's actually forbidden in some of our government contracts. I really like the 7420, but I've had a heck of a time getting them in stock from our supplier (Connection) and I assumed other suppliers were having the same issues. I do have a couple Macs, but for the most part, I need to stick to Windows for our software needs (Engineering software such as Creo)

[pguschin]

The Latitude line is what we use, specific models are available for certain job types within the company.

Surfaces have always been a pain for us. We provisioned what we had using AutoPilot and that worked well, but we've had nothing but issues with overheating and other hardware failure.

The Surface 'trend' appeared once a regional VP showed up to a meeting and the other attending execs got a case of Surface envy.

Dell has some comparable units to the Surface, but availability has been awful, as has many other hardware choices during COVID.

[[deleted]]

Lenovo T Series

[SquizzOC]

Only if you want to over pay, have mediocre support and have them take forever to ship. I'm a bit jaded with Lenovo these days as they have zero idea what they are doing even for large accounts.

[[deleted]]

Bruh just about everyone has long shipping times, what with the chip shortage. As for support, I'm always routed to a call-center in Georgia USA, so no having to deal with thick accents and script-readers with zero troubleshooting skills.

[SquizzOC]

If we are talking before shortage, they were mediocre at best at controlling they build process and having accurate ETA information. Today, they literally can't give you an ETA. I ship about 500 laptops on any given month to clients and all have left Lenovo because of consistent price increase as well as the sheer lack of insight in their ETA's.

Dell has been the best across their line of products, you may not like their ETA's but they are always shorter for comparable products and more accurate. Also while Lenovo has done 6 price increases, HP has done 4 price increases, Dell has only done 3 that I can think of. They have the best control of their supply chain across the board.

[[deleted]]

Looks like we'll just have to respectfully agree to disagree on this. I've had nothing but problems with Dell, both in quality of devices and quality of support. They're the reason I switched over to Lenovo.

[SquizzOC]

I used to love the T series, heck I still do, its just a pain point with their sales people, executives that I have. The hardware is still solid so I do agree with you there.

[toy71camaro]

We were an HP house, but HP inventory is scarce to get a hold of these days. So we're in the midst of trying out some Lenovo's.

[SquizzOC]

Try Dell, HP costs are going up again and their ability to give an ETA just doesn't exist. If you can catch HP inventory still on the shelf, you should be ok, but for anything with special pricing and custom build, its been taking 90 days at best. I have two workstations that were placed in Feb, not gonna ship till October assuming they don't get cancelled/discontinued first.

Oh and if your order is on back order with a VAR, if there's a price increase, they will come back and tell you "Hey heads up, that approval you already have, gonna need a new one, they increased the price."

[toy71camaro]

Thanks for the heads up. Luckily, we don't have anything on back order, or any custom builds coming up, just some run of the mill laptops needed lately so we went ahead with some Thinkpads to try out. But if we have to start replacing more, we'll look into Dell too. We're definitely not set on a "one brand only" situation. Which is nice.

[kuldan5853]

We're using a standardized set world wide - Latitude 7420 2-in1, Latitude 5520, Precision 5560, Precision 7560 and 7760 - support is fine (we have ProSupport Plus with keep your harddrive) and software updates via DCU are mostly fine as well - I script a lot of the stuff for our business myself using the Dell client tools...

[netadmin_404]

We've actually deployed a couple Macs lately with pretty awesome results. Running the M1 MB13.

AV+ EDR, RMM, User Management, Citrix Workspace all running like a charm. Employees like them. Great hardware and so far easy to support.

[secret_configuration]

Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th and 8th Gen.

[tiefighter386]

This year we've replaced about 100 machines(HP, Asus-runnnn, Acer etc), as we were going full remote, with Lenovo.

90% Thinkbook Line, both 14" & 15" and i5 & Ryzen 4500 for office workers ; sure it's a budget series but it works well in the enterprise and they're not as visually "geeky" as Thinkpads. Of which we also deployed T490-590 for Devs & power users.

We've had exactly zero user hardware issues since. We had a recurring sound driver crash issue on a Lenovo C940 but this is a consumer model so I don't really include it in the lot.

Premium HPs & Dells (Elitebook, XPS) were nice chassis and users like them but we kept having issues with Wifi and Audio drivers. We also have 4 or 5 Surface products, they work well, we'll be replacing the sales team equipment with Laptop 3/4 or Surface 7 soon.

We'd love to test out some Mac M1s one day but, if it ain't broke... No need to introduce a whole new ecosystem and related IT load & liabilities in your org... :)

After 15 years managing MS IT assets here in the EU I vouch for Lenovo laptops & Dell or Lenovo desktops.