Let me preface this by saying that in all my years fixing computers--both personally and professionally--not to mention using them, I've never run into anything like this happening in otherwise normal circumstances.
So I ended up getting a new work laptop recently. I was using a Dell Precision M4800, a truly fine piece of kit. Drop-in dock-compatible (sorry, E-Port Replicator Docking Station compatible. Silly me), plenty of ports, solid build, 15.6" laptop with numpad...honestly, that system is the only reason I'm typing this on a Precision 7710. I'd never used a workstation class laptop and was quite impressed (the 7710 is quite nice, too, aside from when Windows decided to fuck things up for a while, but I can't exactly blame Dell for that).
My new work laptop is a Precision 5510. Or, should I say, was a Precision 5510. Yeah. It kind of let its magic smoke out spontaneously. I put the CPU under a mild load and then all of a sudden it went dead and the smell of fried ICs filled the air.
Yeah. Holy shit. Last time I smelled that was on a hard drive that got hit with a lightning strike (through the PSU, into the 4-pin Molex power socket, then all over the PCB).
That's not the type of failure that happens when a board simply has a delayed QC failure. That's what happens when the manufacturer fails to properly regulate voltages and current. In a system that essentially has a bomb inside of it (a Li-Ion battery that cannot be easily removed, since some idiot decided that an ultrathin laptop would make a great "workstation"), that sort of failure mode suddenly goes from an inconvenience straight into the "fucking scary" category.
Even if we overlook the fact that my laptop literally burned itself up after only two weeks of use, something that hasn't happened to even the cheapest laptops I've bought, this thing has some of the worst ventilation I've ever seen. It has an extremely difficult time cooling the quad-core processor and dedicated GPU because some bozo at Dell decided that venting from the thin slit near the hinge assembly was a great idea. I can only guess that they were copying the MacBook, but here's the difference between the Precision and a MacBook: the Precision is in a plastic case while the MacBook's chassis is basically a giant heatsink.
It's not even good plastic, either. On my 7710, you'd expect there to be a bit of flex on the lid due to it being a large 17.3" laptop with flexible plastic and, sure enough, there is a tiny bit of flex. What truly boggles the mind is that there's significantly more flex on the thinner, smaller 15.6" 5510. I'd say it's at least a quarter inch of flex. I was shocked by how cheap that ~$3000 laptop feels.
Oh, you know the best part about it? It lacks a numpad. My $700 Inspiron 5570 has a numpad, yet they couldn't manage to figure out how to get one on the expensive, "workstation class" Precision 5510. I guess it's just too small...oh wait, the Inspiron 5570 and my old Precision M4800 are also 15.6" and they had numpads. Hmm.
I mean, having to suddenly take my M4800 back and reimage it did get me off work early for a change (I usually work overtime, not undertime) but losing a bunch of unpushed git commits doesn't exactly put me in a great mood, and the fact that Dell refuses to let me pop the NVMe SSD out of the system to pull my data off of it seriously irritates me. I can understand why removing certain components could throw off their investigation into why their "workstation" failed so quickly, but the SSD? Really? Ugh.
At the very least, Dell enterprise support is far better than their home support. Small comforts. Hopefully the replacement I get doesn't fail the same way. :/