I guess it really depends on the era of Dell you are talking about. Nothing beats building your own but Dell made pretty good PCs through at least the Pentium III era (though I always preferred Gateway 2000 then) but have been more hit or miss since. I loved their Sandy Bridge to Haswell era Precision notebooks (portable workstations really). I have also liked certain XPS desktop models over the years but I don't know about recently. Certain older Precision and Optiplex desktops are really good as well. I did buy an Alienware laptop a couple of years ago and it seems to be decent quality. However, the newest Dell desktop I've worked with is probably 10 years old. All-in-one's are almost always a poor buy no matter who makes them, including Apple. Why confine yourself to laptop hardware in a desktop? Too limited, too hard to repair and too hard to upgrade.