Aaron44126

Compared to the above, Pro Max Plus has Ethernet port on the left side (like Precision 7X80), full size SD instead of microSD, and overall less of a "wedge"-shape design going on.

Unfortunately, the keyboard layout seems the same as prior generations — Home/End sharing with F11/F12, and no dedicated PgUp/PgDn are my main complaints. (Precision 7X30/7X40 generations didn't have either of these problems.) Also, they have removed the right Ctrl key and slapped a Copilot key there. At least, in Windows 11 settings you can choose from a few options for remapping that button.

All “Pro Max” are mobile workstations. But, this announcement was only for the base “Pro Max” (akin to Precision 3000) and not “Pro Max Plus” (Precision 7000).

Noted. Thanks. Supposed to be simple, huh? How is someone supposed to wander onto the web site and chose between "Dell Pro" and "Dell Premium"? Seems like you have to gain some understanding of what each of these words actually means. And what do they mean? "Pro" apparently means "business system". (As opposed to iPhone, which they seemingly borrowed this from, where it just means "better".) "Max" is workstation? I had originally thought "Premium" meant "slim version", but that appears to be the case for Dell Premium and not Dell Pro Premium. ...But it is with Dell Pro Max Premium. "Plus" just means "higher performance than without Plus"? And it doesn't help that they all (Pro + Plus + Premium + Max) basically mean "the better/best version of something" if you just try to read them as English. I guess I want the system with the most superlatives in the name, but it doesn't look like they are planning to offer Dell Pro Max Premium Plus.

18" is coming. We have to wait for "Pro Max Plus". It was mentioned but not detailed in Dell's announcement, they stated it is coming "later this year". But... https://notebooktalk.net/topic/2514-dell-pro-max-18-plus-and-dell-pro-max-16-plusthis-is-the-name-of-the-flagship-dell-precision-mobile-workstation-for-2025/

If you haven't seen it, @song_1118 did a great deep dive on the naming convention and also the product model code. https://notebooktalk.net/topic/2516-your-name-analysis-and-speculation-on-the-dell-pro-max-18-plus-for-the-year-2025-part-1/

Err, quite possibly. I have never tried using Coreboot myself, and I can't remember seeing that anyone had tried that to work around this issue... Another thing to note is, if your M4800 has an LVDS display panel then a Pascal GPU will not be able to drive it directly. You will be forced to use Optimus if you want to use the internal display. If your system has an eDP display panel, this should not be an issue. M4800's with 1080p or lower resolution display could have either type of panel, so you'll probably want to be aware if which yours has.

Any Pascal GPU without engineering sample vBIOS is unlikely to work in Precision M4800 or M6800, at least if you want to run Windows, because of a BIOS bug you'll get an ACPI BSOD at boot every time (even if the NVIDIA driver is not installed). We only have working engineering sample vBIOS images for P3000, P4000, and P5000. (Any Pascal GPU should work with Linux, though...) Delta fans are indeed preferred.

Yeah, again, we have yet to see Pro Max Plus which would be the replacement for what we consider "Precision" (7000 series). But yeah, looking at the prices for "Pro Premium" which I understand to be the more-or-less replacement for the popular XPS laptops... The cheapest is Dell Pro 13 Premium at $1,829.00 USD. For that you get Intel Core Ultra 5 "V" CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and 256 GB SSD, and a 300 nit 1200p display. Basically the minimum I'd consider to be passable for a current-gen "OK laptop" for like... web browsing and office work. (At least they didn't try to squeeze it down to 8 GB RAM.) Guys, guys, guys. Not to hawk Apple, but I always thought that Apple was seen to be charging a "premium" for the specs that you get on a MacBook, compared to the price of a "typical" laptop. But it looks like that has been flipped around here. You can get a base MacBook Air 13" with the same RAM/SSD, probably better CPU/GPU, and definitely better display. For $1,099! It's a steal. (I do find it interesting that Dell is not doing that "fake discount" thing they've always done, where they have a higher price struck out to make it look like you're getting a deal. Are we getting to the point where the price is the price? Or maybe that will show up later once they get the store in order.)

Pro Max Plus still has not been announced. It should be available in 18". NVIDIA had their announcement, Blackwell / GeForce 5000 GPUs on the way, with the first desktop GPUs landing on January 30. Laptops with these GPUs will drop starting in like April? I think there is time for pro versions of the GPUs to be available just in time for an early summer Pro Max Plus launch. I don't think Pro Max (non-Plus) will need 240 watts...

Just poking for information, it looks like Dell has made the announcement, and this is the first article I found. https://mashable.com/article/ces-2025-dell-ai-pc-rebrand-pro-max There are three classes of Dell PC in the rebrand: "Dell" "Dell Pro" "Dell Pro Max" (Err, there also seems to be some "Plus" and "Premium" tossed in for good measure.) Dell Pro laptops will be available imminently. Dell Pro Max 14/16 Intel version will be dropping in March or April. Dell Pro Max *AMD version* will also drop later in 1H 2025. (@Ionising_Radiation) (Dell Pro Max 18 is not mentioned here...?) [Edit] Realizing that none of this is "Pro Max Plus" which was the leaked Precision 7000 replacement. [Edit 2] Dell has a promo page up. https://www.dell.com/en-us/plcp/lp/dell-pro-max-pcs And a blog post. https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/dell-transforms-ai-pc-portfolio-for-anywhere-productivity/ The blog post mentions Dell Pro Max "Premium" and Dell Pro Max "Plus" coming "later this year". [Edit 3] Dell Pro Max (non-Premium/Plus) will apparently have RTX Ada Generation GPUs, not new Blackwell ones or whatever NVIDIA is about to reveal today. Dell Pro Max = Precision 3000 Dell Pro Max Premium = Precision 5000 Dell Pro Max Plus = Precision 7000 Dell Pro (base) & Dell Pro Premium = Latitude Dell Premium = XPS?

Doesn't look like it has been "officially announced" just yet... and the GameStar article linked as the source has been pulled. I bet we have to wait at least until after NVIDIA's announcement (this evening) before the flood of laptop announcements will arrive. CES doesn't "actually start" until tomorrow, anyway...

New HX CPUs announced as CES starts up. Still waiting to see if Dell actually announces anything.

Well, macOS does allow for more mucking around than some other Apple products. If you want to go that way, you can disable SIP and then make changes to the sealed system volume, basically "doing whatever you want" to the OS (at the tradeoff of losing certain system protections). I'm not sure what it would take to get rid of Siri, there are probably people who have looked into that, but deleting built-in applications like the Chess app would be trivial. ...Though, they would come back every time you install an OS update, since that basically drops a whole fresh sealed system volume down. I wasn't sure how I would feel about the "immutable" nature of the OS. I was turned off from that idea when I read about it when poking around different Linux distros, before I bought the Mac. However, I can appreciate how it prevents rogue third-party apps from doing any sort of muckery with the underlying OS, short of exploiting a security vulnerability to get in there. And I really do like how macOS comes down on not allowing third-party apps to install "background services" without telling you about it and giving you an easy way to turn them off. Like Windows, so many apps want to have their own update daemons running (Edge/Chrome, Zoom, Acrobat) or "licensing monitors" (MS Office, Adobe CC) or who knows what else. This is me coming from Windows, where systems tend to get so crufted up with background junk. I get that coming from Linux would be a different story, there's less of that going on. I do think the "stock" macOS experience leaves a fair bit to be desired but can be boosted by the raft of third-party tools that are available. Some that I found that I appreciate: Homebrew (sort of Linux-style package manager, can manage both UNIX-y terminal tools and macOS GUI apps) Rectangle (proper window snapping, very configurable) iTerm2 (much improved terminal app, also very configurable) LinearMouse (fix mouse scroll wheel behavior, which I find to be terrible on macOS if you're not using an Apple mouse; can adjust behavior on a per-app basis) BetterDisplay (if you need to mess with things like screen resolutions that the OS doesn't want to offer as choices... more for gaming) Karabiner-Elements (used this to get "compose key" shortcuts going) Ice (menu bar manager, hide some of those unnecessary icons) Itsycal (better calendar widget for the menu bar) Carbon Copy Cloner (for backups... Time Machine seems to be very brittle) XMenu (I basically use the "Custom folder" menu option and used that to set up my own quick-access drop-down list of apps to launch, with nested folders and everything, so I can have the "app menu" be organized just how I want) I still wish I could find a better file manager app. Finder is... passable, but I used Directory Opus on Windows and it was just so much more flexible. There are some third-party options but none of them really seemed better than Finder to me. ...And I wish there were more "power user" options for the dock, like the ability to add separators or to hide certain running apps in a pop-out "overflow area" so that they don't always have to be there taking up space. As for privacy, I do find Apple to be the most trustworthy in this area among the "big tech" companies (Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.) — but certainly not perfect, I can see how this would also seem like a step down from Linux.

I watched this LTT ( — mixed feelings over the "quality" of LTT but this one is not bad — ); seems like Valve might be making a push this year to get modern SteamOS on things other than Steam Deck. If they could make it a bit easier to install and support more hardware out of the box then I think there is a sizeable segment of people who might give it a shot.