XPS 13 refreshed - now with 16GB RAM

I just heard about the "refresh".  I'm wondering what are the plans for the developer edition using the "refresh"?

We're working on it still. There are hardware enablement issues we're trying to resolve so what we do launch hopefully isn't a repeat of last time with the hardware support issues customers were seeing.

So all of us who got a XPS 13 were guinea pigs?

Don't get me wrong the XPS 13 is nice, but for the price I paid, I wished I wouldn't have to deal with some of the things (Wifi, trackpad, etc.)

I'm not at all saying that we consider you guinea pigs. On the contrary, we're not happy with the difficulties customers have had to face with the Broadwell XPS 13. There were gaps in the hardware enablement work that we did not foresee, and we're striving to learn from that mistake to improve on the customer experience so that in the future, what we release better matches our expectations and customers' expectations.

So all of us who got a XPS 13 were guinea pigs?

Yes this is how I feel. And if this were stated so that I knew this before I bought XPS 13, I actually still would have bought it. In fact I even might have paid *more* in order to be a guniea pig (I like to pretend like I am part of testing and benefiting future generations). But not having been told this, I do feel a little misdirected.

Don't get me wrong the XPS 13 is nice, but for the price I paid, I wished I wouldn't have to deal with some of the things (Wifi, trackpad, etc.)

Definitely understandable.

On the bright side, I'm happy that a new XPS 13 is out and hopefully the next developer edition will be an improvement over this one and we keep moving forward. Exciting times!

I'm not at all saying that we consider you guinea pigs. On the contrary, we're not happy with the difficulties customers have had to face with the Broadwell XPS 13. There were gaps in the hardware enablement work that we did not foresee, and we're striving to learn from that mistake to improve on the customer experience so that in the future, what we release better matches our expectations and customers' expectations.

Ok, since you guy are not happy and some of the things are not working what is the solution here? Are we seeing improvements to the WiFi (I bought a Intel card in the meantime) and the trackpad soon?

PS: I like my Xps13. Really I do. But some issues leave a sour taste.

Holy ***, the skylake one still has broadcom wifi... why!?!?!?!?

Holy ***, the skylake one still has broadcom wifi... why!?!?!?!?

The Windows one does. Once the Developer Edition releases, we're hoping to only use the Intel card for that.

Too bad, developer edition is usually not sold in Italy.

> So all of us who got a XPS 13 were guinea pigs?

Hmm. I'd not call it that way. It was well known to me that there were problems to be expected before buying. When looking for the xps13 DE on the net, you couldn't miss Barton George's blog that gave an indication of what to expect.

That being said: I of course also was shocked re boradcom wiFi - that was a complete mess at the beginning (being the cause for hard-lockups/kernel panics, not to mention the channel problems – thankfully these problems have been adressed in the meantime)

The other problems were easily solved by applying configuration changes (use trackpad in clickpad mode) or updates.

For me the only problem that remains is the double-space problem when using the spacebar at the outer edges - my hope is that the A06 bios will finally solve that.

So definitely early-adopter stuff, but not pig-in-a-poke style.

The out-of-the-box experience was terrible, but if you did a little research beforehand, you already knew what to do to fix them. At least in Germany you had to wait ages for it to finally be available, so there was much time to read about current status :-)

So you don't have any problems with the bluetooth, cloph? If I do manage to connect my bluetooth mouse, which doesn't always work, the connection is so bad that it is unusable. The pointer will move a second after the mouse, and in a seemingly random direction.

Broadcom is ***, period.

Is Broadcom bad on Windows also? People just use it because it is cheaper?

Right so the wireless card in the new xps 13 - DW1820A 2x2 802.11ac 2.4/5GHz, thats broadcom?

No, I don't have problems with  bluetooth, at least none that are the fault of the broadcom. But then I also  don't have bluetooth keyboard or mouse input devices, but only use it as a bluetooth audio sink and seldomly for bluetooth based tethering or connecting with the LO Impress Remote. But bluetooth and linux is somewhat a sad story, at least with GNOME (why do they have to copy the bad parts of Mac OS X…)

The only thing that can be attributed to being an issue that only broadcom users have is the following:

* broadcom cards needs to load firmware for bluetooth

cannnot be written often enough, as none of the UIs will tell you that it is not working because it couldn't load firmware, even with commandlinetools it looks as everything would work, but of course you never can manage to connect.

→ check your logs whether it failes because of firmware problem. Look for a line (using something like dmesg|grep -i blue) similar to

kernel: bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for brcm/BCM20702A1-0a5c-216f.hcd failed with error -2

it happend to me recently, as the file it looks for did change - previously it did look for cm/BCM20702A0-0a5c-216f.hcd so create a symlink or copy  the file accordingly (the firmware from dell's deb packages fw-0a5c_216f.hcd sill works). Nothing that can be blamed on the card though, at most to its unfree nature and thus lack of ready-to-install packages to install for other distros...

* pairing often is not enough, you need to "trust" the device

again something where the UI ***. No indication why connecting doesn't work even after successful paring. If you want to connect something that is not a hid device (mouse or keyboard), you likely need to use the commandline to trust the device to allow conneting/actually using the connection.

look for Access denied: org.bluez.Error.Rejected in your logs

Solution is to run bluetoothctl , show your  paired devices with paried-devices and then use trust to trust it. Try to  connect again and chances are that it now works.

Last but not least: If you want to use bluetooth-tehtering and it doesn't work: disable network-manager. It tries to be way too clever to be useful and then actually causes networkmanager to close the connection because the other device is "too stupid". Commandline to the rescue...