Why Dell Laptops Are So Bad Nowadays

At High Performance Laptops, we spend over a hundred hours testing and reviewing EACH of the new laptops, tablets, convertibles and various other types of notebooks that come into our test lab. However, we can’t always tell what a product is like to actually live with i.e. which models fall apart after a few months of ownership, suffer from ordering and delivery issues or have poor vendor support. This is where Product Review does a good job and, in this article, we’ll analyse why Dell only has a pitiful customer rating of just 1.4 / 5.

Unlike the plethora of fake ‘user reviews’ you see on Google, Amazon, online shops and laptop vendor’s own websites, the reviews on Product Review come from vetted, bona fide laptop customers. Out of almost 1,000 user reviews (from Australia alone), over 10 per cent of Dell customers made a Return Claim and over 13 per cent made a Warranty Claim. The average Dell Product Quality Score is only 1.8 / 5 and Dell’s average Shipping Rating is just 2.0 / 5. With Dell recently scrambling to address a global 2025 “Horror PC Slump” are the clues in what it’s customers are saying about it?

At a time when Windows 10 is going End of Life and people are being forced to look for new PCs and laptops (they should go here to find the best new laptop for them), should you be avoiding Dell laptops or do other brands attract a similar amount of hate from disgruntled customers? Let’s see what they’re saying…

At the time of going to press, the most recent Dell laptop review comes from

I’ve been a Dell customer for over 15 years and appreciated their high quality products. But the “All in One” I purchased 15 months ago is really disappointing. As soon as it arrived (it was an online order like quite a few I ordered before) I noticed its cheap plastic appearance, which was a big step down from previous models. The computer struggled and lasted only 18 months before it died completely (previous models were used for 5-6 years before they needed to be upgraded). I hope I’ll be able to recover the data.. but it’s definitely the last Dell for me, so sad

It gets worse from there…

When we first started researching this articles, the top review was from Geoff who said:

Rubbish product & service – Worst laptop I have ever owned. I will never buy Dell again!…

Edd is a user with a similar view:

Rubbish computers – 2500 dollar computer 2 years 10 months old land it’s broken unfixable, what a rubbish product…

It doesn’t get much better with the next comment having had to be censored. It’s from someone who created a new account – called I hate dell 69 – just to gripe about Dell. They appear to have been angry when they typed:

snapped a keybaord – [Content Removed] useless takes skill to make something that hard to download congrats…

The following screenshot shows other reviews from Dell customers. All (very) negatrive…

Dell Support Problems

Many users are complaining about Dell’s support, which has drawn furious comments since its human teams were mostly replaced with Ai in 2024 (shortly after Dell’s Partner Conference keynote repeatedly saying that it wouldn’t do that).

would you believe I just had another service on my XPS15 as it broke down again, its not even a few weeks. Refurbished again i see, wow how much did i remember paying for it new, I think i will just go to NCAT for the claim, im sick of this thanks PAUL your service guys a fantastic.

This user appears to have fallen foul of Dell’s replacement of human support with Ai bots.

Bought a Dell Inspiron 16 less than a year ago. Screen decided to not power on two weeks ago. Contacted Dell who arranged a service call which they wanted me to wait over a week until I complained they rushed someone out to fix it. It was fixed that day and less than two days later the same issue again. I requested I want a replacement laptop as clearly there is a huge issue with such a new laptop and recurring issues. They denied my request and said they will only repair again (Mind you my 12 month warranty expires in a few weeks) knowing it will most likely fail again.

After another 4 days of arguing they know finally raised a request for service and I get told its another 5 days for parts to come in and then they will schedule.

I use my laptop for work purposes and have been left high and dry by Dell and not one care has been given.

They have been contacting me via their WhatsApp Assistant at crazy times of the night even at 3am with repetitive questions over and over by different staff. Absolutely would not recommend them, in fact a warning stay clear of Dell at all costs to save yourself some money and headaches.

Will be lodging formal complaints with Fair Trading/Consumer affairs to solve this matter.

Conversely, Gregory S. worked out that Dell’s support had been replaced with Ai and said that his experience showed it didn’t work. He’s complaining about both Dell’s support and its delivery failure:

NO customer service – Trying to solve a delivery issue but CANNOT talk to a human being??!? AI does NOT work!!!…

Delivery is a recurring theme. With Geoff B. saying:

Delivered to other side of city – Sent my package to the other side of the city. Took me 1.5 hours to bring it home.…

Another delivery complaint made some interesting anologies:

Smelly Dell – Ordered a $3,000 laptop. Taking longer to arrive than a VIC20 loading via cassette. Tracking information is useless.…

We’ve previously covered other issues with Dell laptops, here.

Even Dell Latitudes Aren’t What They Were

If there was a ray of light for Dell, it should have been with its (once) highly regarded, business-class Latitude line. Many Dell forums even go so far to recommend buying refurbished Latitudes over new consumer-grade Dell laptops because they are significantly more robust and reliable and many have simply been sat in an office docking station for most of their lives (they then get automatically replaced as part of fixed-term leasing programs).

Not anymore. Bridget writes:

Bought Dell laptop Lattitude 3430, owned it less than a year, had a technician come out last week as it just stopped turning on, was fixed and again today it is not turning on. I am beyond angry!!! I have all my work and university documents on there and they cannot get here until next week. Really frustrated and disappointed, never had this issue before with other brands!

Dell’s Confusing Laptop Rebrand Hasn’t Helped

In January, Dell tried to distance itself from its legacy laptop brands including Inspiron, XPS and even Latitude by copying Apple’s popular iPhone naming conventions – something it was mocked for at its own press conference.

The new tiers don’t even simplify things for buyers, because all three tiers are sub-divided into Base, Plus, and Premium variants. Is a Pro Plus better than a Pro Max Base? How about a Pro Premium versus Pro Max Plus?

Those products are now hitting the Australian market but Dell’s hostility to independent journalism means many of the country’s top laptop reviewers won’t touch them and positive coverage has often appeared from publications with commercial partnerships. This has coincided with Dell’s strategy of creating its own fake journalism whereby it’s publishing reviews created by its own employees and paid influencers while suggesting otherwise in the headlines. It’s also spamming social media with promotional posts that are propped up with fake engagements from bot accounts and shill posters (see here,too) as part of astroturfing campaigns to generate fake grass roots enthusiasm for the brand’s laptops.

It will be some time before the Product Review reviews of Dell’s confusing new laptop ranges – which are called the Dell, Dell Premium, Dell Plus, Dell Pro, Dell Pro Plus, Dell Pro Premium and Dell Pro Max – hit the site owing to their recent Australian release and the fact that fewer people are buying them. Nonetheless, we’ll keep this article updated as new dell laptop reviews drop on the site and check the validity of any shill reports that sound suspicious.

There Are Few Positive Reviews for Dell

At the time of going to press, 27 of the last 30 product reviews for Dell were negative and the three positive reviews had to be positioned in a special, automatically curated ‘Positive Reviews’ section of the page.

However, a closer look reveals that one is from a monitor buyer who is thrilled that his inherently unblurry Dell monitor wasn’t blurry. One that gushes about how good Dell support is and always has been with no details given. The third is from two years ago, back before Dell replaced many of its support staff with Ai.

Reddit Shows Dell’s Australian Horror Stories are Being Repeated Internationally

A quick look at the subreddits that frequently cover Dell and Alienware tell a similar tale of woe when it comes to Dell’s products, support and even delivery practices. Roughly half of the Reddit posts expouse problems with Dell with the most recent post (at the time of going to press) describing a critical problem with a Dell G15 laptop. Many of the problems with Dell are listed on the /r/dellcomputers subreddit.

Alienware laptops fare better thanks to posts from fanbois gushing about their battlestations and people posting cat pictures with their warm, cozy laptops. But there are plenty of posts regarding overheating, delivery and support (which can be found repeated in the /r/failienware subreddit). Troublingly, it appears that Dell shills have infiltrated Reddit and are locking threads after assuring complainants that they’re going to help.

Classic Dell Business Laptops Can Still Be The Way To Go… for Now.

If there’s one part of Dell’s brand that still stands out against the sea of derision it’s its Latitude business-class laptop brand which is now defunct. With thousands of Latitudes finding their way into offices and then (often) sitting in docking station without moving much of the time, the 2nd-hand and refurbished laptop market has traditionally been a great place to find a bargain laptop for work for a few hundred dollars.

Dell even sells them itself but the price (especially in Australia) is rising and you can buy brand new, faster, better business laptops for a similar price, especially in sales. Check out our Business Laptop Group Test, here.

Another area where Latitudes do very well is in the Rugged market where laptops are designed to be use outdoors in harsh environments. These are very niche, very low-powered products that cost around $10,000 in Australia, though.

We certainly wouldn’t recommend buying a refurbished consumer-grade Dell laptop considering the durability reports of new models and our experience with their cheap-and-cheerful models in the past – Inspirons, as just one example, have always been a cheap, no-frills brand. Old XPS laptops should also be avoided as they looked cutting-edge at the time and people overlooked their notorious overheating problems because of it. Nowadays, the likes of Lenovo’s Yoga Slim and HP’s Omnibook laptops both look better and fare much better in terms of performance, features and reliability.

The Problems Are Affecting Corporate Buyers and MSPs too

Another problem with Dell’s corporate laptops is that the third-party MSPs which often lease and support Dell laptops to the enterprise and vertical markets, are complaining that Dell is calling up their customers to undercut them and sell direct to make more money at their partners’ expense. We’ll be covering this in more detail at a future date, but for now it’s worth noting that many MSPs are moving to the likes of Dynabook (100 per cent channel) and Lenovo (over 90 per cent channel) to avoid having to be undercut by Dell.

Why Is This Happening?

Last year, we attended Dell’s Tech Partner Conference in Las Vegas along (along with many other vendor keynotes that year). We were all set to live-blog Michael Dell’s keynote only to find the short presentation amounted to him hugging technology partners while gushing about the company’s betting the farm on its new Ai Factory technologies which would allow companies to run their own Ai servers ‘on premises’ instead of sending sensitive intellectual property to public cloud-based Ai, like ChatGPT. New laptops barely got a mention. (Note: another theme of the keynote was that Ai wouldn’t take away jobs, they’d only help workers. Hmm).

It’s been very financially successful move for Dell so far in terms of share price. However, with Dell’s policy of betting the farm on its Ai Farm, it and its stock price is incredibly exposed in the face of the Ai bubble potentially bursting.

What’s Dell Management Doing To Fix The Situation in Australia?

Unfortunately, not much. The people who run Dell’s laptop business in Australia are constantly spewing-out internationally made fake news, podcasts and influencer drivel that is almost entirely produced or funded in-house. As we’ve seen previously, its own marketing team undermines actual journalism with former marketing manager Peggy Arsenis, PR Manager Kirsty Matta and the EssenceMediaCom media buying agency, having initially stated they’d support dedicated laptop journalism before hijacking it.

Arsenis has since been fired for unrelated reasons and now works for Microsoft in the USA. Matta got promoted to a Dell APAC role. We’ll be further investigating EssenceMediaCom and the dubious practices of other media-buying agencies in future articles.

Even Dell’s third-party PR agency, SBM PR, have been guilty of spreading bile among journalists (and creating division in the industry) while simultaneously promoting paid content. It makes us question how much they’ve sold out and can be trusted by journalists for anything nowadays.

We’ll be seeking marketing industry reactions to the marketing and PR practices of Dell and EssenceMediaCom in a future article. So, far other PR professionals have been scathing about their actions, though.

For now, though, Dell’s Australian management teams seem content to maintain the status quo in the face of attacks from all sides and treating its customers and partners with derision. So, we don’t expect the Product Review scores to improve any time soon. We wonder how long Dell’s US-based senior managers, like Jeff Clarke, will tolerate such performance from its failing, antipodean team though.

And finally…

This article focuses on Dell and its clear that other laptop vendors cop flack from disgruntled customers and we’ll be covering that in the future. Right now, however, it appears Dell is in a league of its own when it comes to poor laptop performance.

Updates

It’s been shown that Dell has inspired so much ire from its customers that there’s now even a dedicated hate site called “Don’t Buy Dell‘ which documents the problems with its laptops.

Last Updated on October 15, 2025 by Nick Ross