[rayiner]

This is the sort of thing that makes me afraid to buy non-Apple products. I know what coil whine is--my last Dell laptop (an XPS 15 from be P4 days) had a bad case of it too. It's also frustrating because PC reviewers never talk about things like that. They'll spend pages on benchmarks and not say a word about the trackpad or fan noise.

Which is a shame because the XPS 15 looks neat--way smaller footprint than the rMBP 15".

[vladimir-y]

Not true, coil whine is a very well known XPS issue. You just need to get familiar with the owners reviews, not the regular/advertising reviews.

[hbogert]

If you take all the laptops with those annoyances from being possible candidates for a new laptop; What is a good non-apple laptop? I always was anti-Apple, still do, but I just can't fault the Macbook Air 2012, which for the time had reasonable resolution/memory/cpu for the price. But more importantly, it had none of the annoyances.

[vladimir-y]

I'm going replace my current Dell Latitude 14 inch laptop and yes it's a hard to find something decent on the market to run Linux even if price is not the issue. So far my top candidate is Acer TravelMate P648, I mentioned it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12290096 I first need to find a chance to try it in action.