Review: The Dell XPS 13 is the PC laptop to beat

Credit: Peter Bright

More than three years ago I wrote about Intel's $300 million investment plan to develop Ultrabooks. Lightweight long-lasting well-specced PC laptops to offer something approximating the MacBook Air experience, just not made by Apple.

It took PC vendors a long time to shape up, and there are still rough spots to the whole PC laptop experience—the proliferation of models and options remains more complex and confusing than it should be, for example—but with the 2015 edition of the Dell XPS 13, it's fair to say that PC vendors have not just matched the MacBook Air experience, they've beaten it.

The eye-catching highlight of the XPS 13 is what Dell calls its "infinity display." The name is a little silly, of course; the screen doesn't actually do the infinity pool thing of running all the way to the edge, and who knows what name Dell will conjure up when technology exists to actually do that, but right now what we have is a laptop with a slim bezel of about 5 mm all around. This narrow bezel means that the footprint of the machine is smaller, and as a result, the new XPS 13 is a lot more petite than your average 13-inch laptop.

From most angles, the XPS 13 is a slim and good-looking machine. It has a certain air of familiarity—a machined aluminum body isn't going to stand out from the Ultrabook crowd too much—but it isn't a slavish MacBook Air clone by any means. In particular, the inside of the machine is black, not bare metal, with the keyboard surround being a "carbon fiber composite with soft touch paint."

I'm not entirely sure what "soft touch paint" is, but I do know that the machine is comfortable to use. I find the MacBook Air particularly uncomfortable to use, with the metal edge digging into my wrists whenever I rest my hands on the keyboard. The XPS 13's soft touch paint is, in comparison, soft. To the touch. The only thing that concerns me is the "paint" aspect—a year or two down the line, will this look worn and tatty?—but right now, it's very comfortable.

Peculiarly, the only real visual flourish on the machine is on the bottom of the system. There's an XPS badge placed on the bottom. It's hinged, and folding it open reveals the various regulatory stamps and serial numbers.

Soft touch paint is soft.

Peter Bright

Soft touch paint is soft. Peter Bright

The keyboard layout is reasonable, though missing a few of the less commonly used keys.

Peter Bright

The keyboard layout is reasonable, though missing a few of the less commonly used keys. Peter Bright

Soft touch paint is soft. Peter Bright

The keyboard layout is reasonable, though missing a few of the less commonly used keys. Peter Bright

From left to right: power, mini-DisplayPort, USB 3, combo headphone/microphone, battery meter, speaker.

Dell

From left to right: power, mini-DisplayPort, USB 3, combo headphone/microphone, battery meter, speaker. Dell

From left to right: speaker, SD card, USB 3, Noble lock.

Dell

From left to right: speaker, SD card, USB 3, Noble lock. Dell

From left to right: power, mini-DisplayPort, USB 3, combo headphone/microphone, battery meter, speaker. Dell

From left to right: speaker, SD card, USB 3, Noble lock. Dell

The keyboard itself has a decent enough layout, an attractive backlight, good-size keys, and enough key travel to make typing effortless.

The touchpad is surprisingly decent, too. It supports Microsoft's Precision Touchpad spec, which means that its behavior is largely governed by built-in Windows drivers and not custom third-party drivers. This in turn means that it's a lot more predictable; it performs similarly to other Precision Touchpad hardware, taking "device manufacturer" out of the picture. Tracking accuracy is good, and the glass surface is smooth and low in friction. The only weakness, and this is as much personal preference as anything else, is the clickability. I would have liked a more positive click action, something with a little more bite to it.

The bezel really is very slim.

Credit: Peter Bright

And oh yeah, the screen. Dell has two screen options for the XPS 13, all with the narrow bezel. There's one with a 1920×1080 resolution and no touch, and one with a 3200×1800 resolution and multitouch. The higher resolution forfeits battery life, adds 0.2 lb to the weight, and $300 to the price, but I think it's well worth the trade-off. It's a good-looking screen, with decent viewing angles, and it's bright enough to use in most kinds of lighting. Touch responsiveness is good.

The XPS 13 resting atop the Yoga 3 Pro.

Credit: Peter Bright

The real joy of the narrow bezel is the system's size. This is a full 13.3-inch screen, but the footprint of the XPS 13 is markedly smaller than that of, say, the Yoga 3 Pro that I looked at last year. This has tangible benefits for any of us who have to use laptops when suffering the indignities of flying cattle class. I've long felt 13 inches to be the screen size sweet spot—11 inches is too cramped, 15 is bigger than I want to carry—so this pairing of a 13-inch screen with a (more or less) 11-inch form factor is a godsend for mobile users.

There is one downside to the narrow bezel and small size of the XPS 13. It has a 720p webcam, but instead of mounting that webcam at the top of the screen, it's mounted below it. Presumably there isn't room at the top. The position of the webcam means that its view is largely obscured by my left hand, and the part of the picture that isn't obscured is mainly looking up my nose.

I regard a webcam as an essential feature of any computer, and I'm not sure there's any situation in which I'd regard the XPS 13's to ever be good enough. With the narrow bezels, I don't know if there's any easy solution, either. It's the only aspect of the system that feels compromised, like Dell's designers knew they had to stick a webcam in there somewhere but couldn't find a good place for it, so they picked a bad one instead.

The view from the webcam is exciting and edgy, I suppose, but not entirely useful. Dat beard, tho', amirite?

Credit: Peter Bright

On the inside

The XPS 13 is one of the first wave of Broadwell-U systems. Intel's rollout of Broadwell is a long and protracted affair that's still ongoing; the full range of processors isn't out yet. The first Broadwells we saw were systems like the Yoga 3 Pro, which used the ultra low power Broadwell Y processors, branded as Core M. The XPS 13 uses a more conventional, higher power Broadwell-U processor.

The performance of the Yoga 3 Pro, which went from a Haswell-U (in the Yoga 2 Pro) to a Broadwell-Y, was somewhat disappointing. In a number of benchmarks, the older system was faster than the new one due to the change in processor category. That shouldn't be the case for the XPS 13, and indeed, it doesn't seem to be...

... but it doesn't appear to be a whole lot faster, either. Compared to its direct predecessor, the XPS 13 with the Haswell i5-4210U, the new system has near-identical performance to the old one. It's only in graphically intensive tests such as Cinebench that the new processor manages to distinguish itself from the previous model. The new GPU is certainly faster, but nobody is going to mistake the XPS 13 for a gaming laptop. It should be more than enough for Dota 2, the only game that matters, but I wouldn't dream of trying to play Far Cry 4 on this thing.

The i7 processor, which we didn't test, should provide a modest performance bump. Such a machine should be a decent mobile workstation, except for one disappointing aspect: RAM. The entry-level XPS 13s have 4GB. Once you hit $999, they switch to 8GB. That's fine, and I'm glad that Dell isn't offering $1K machines with just 4GB, but the processors support up to 16GB, and I think that should be available as an option. With the i7 processor and the high-end 512GB PCIe SSD, the XPS 13 is no performance lightweight. It should have memory to match.

The review system didn't have the 512GB SSD. The 128 and 256GB devices are both "mere" SATA devices, though the 256GB unit we tried was good and fast anyway, reading and writing at around 400MB/s in QuickBench.

Dell claims that the battery life of the XPS 13 is an impressive 15 hours for the 1920×1080 model and 11 hours for the 3200×1800 version. Our own battery testing is a little more punishing than Dell's, but the company's numbers seem to be in the right ballpark. In our test of light Web browsing, the XPS 13 came in just shy of nine hours, and in a more intensive WebGL test, it hit five hours on the dot.

For a 13-inch, high-resolution device, that's a very impressive showing. In fact, the only 13-inch device with a full strength (non-Atom) processor that compares is the previous-generation XPS 13, which in both cases ekes out a few more minutes of battery life. We don't feel that detracts from the new system's performance, however. The old XPS 13 had a slightly larger battery (55Wh) and a 1920×1080 screen. For the new system to all but match the old one, even though its battery is smaller and even though it's paired with a much more power-hungry display, is an impressive showing.

The system is pleasingly light on crapware. A few preinstalled apps such as Flipboard and an Office trial are unexceptional. The only thing I'd purge immediately is a trial of McAfee LiveSafe Internet Security, as that kind of software is almost invariably more trouble than it's worth.