DELL Latitude 7370: First Thoughts

A while back I wanted to get my dad a computer so he could chat on Discord and check stocks. I originally planned to pick up a ThinkPad and upgrade it myself, but then I spotted something unexpected on Xianyu:

DELL Latitude 7370

• Intel Core M5-6Y57
• 8G RAM
• 256G SSD

The seller said it was in 9/10 condition and wanted 900 yuan, shipping included.

By any reasonable measure, 900 yuan is a bit much for this. But I looked closely at the screen and asked the seller what the resolution was. Turns out the seller didn’t even know how to check…

So I tried a different angle: is the screen a touchscreen? The seller said yes, it’s touch.

That’s when things got interesting. On the DELL Latitude 7370, a touchscreen version can only mean one thing: the same 3K wide-gamut touch panel as the top-spec XPS 13. If it really was that screen… then 900 yuan is a fair price, because the screen alone is worth more than 500.

So I bought it without tipping my hand. When it arrived, sure enough, it was the 3K glossy wide-gamut touchscreen. The machine itself even looks a lot like an XPS 13, and at first glance the condition really was mint.

Felt like I’d come out ahead.

Next came the tinkering. The stock battery health was only 50%, and the left touchpad button had worn paint. According to my research, the DELL Latitude 7370 actually has a high-capacity battery option, and after opening it up I found it can even take a 4G modem.

So I bought a cheap NVMe SSD from JD.com and swapped out the original junk drive on the SATA bus. I got a high-capacity battery from Taobao, picked up a 4G modem along the way, and bought a set of touchpad buttons. Aside from the drive being a little pricey, none of this stuff cost much at all.

I also discovered this laptop is purely passively cooled, and its default performance is terrible. DELL fixed this to some extent through several BIOS updates, and I also opened it up and replaced the thermal paste, bringing the whole thing up to an acceptable speed.

All in all, after all that tinkering I’d spent a bit over 1000 yuan. For that I got a laptop with long battery life, a gorgeous screen, and beautiful condition. The performance isn’t great, but it’s passively cooled and quiet—plenty for browsing the web and chatting on Discord.

Oh right, this thing even supports Thunderbolt 3. Really, it does everything except perform. Later I checked Xianyu again and that seller was still selling 7370s, except the cheap ones were no longer in good condition—they were truly battle-scarred. The ones in good condition weren’t cheap at all…

So I guess I scored a deal.