Dell XPS 13 review: Skylake and Thunderbolt 3 make the best a little bit better

The touchpad continues to be great.

I liked the Dell XPS 13 an awful lot when I reviewed its initial Broadwell-based iteration last year. The keyboard and touchpad felt good, the high-resolution screen looked great, and the whole package was stylish, with its super-thin bezel and soft-touch interior. The only major flaw was the webcam placement driven by that thin bezel. Some other publications also felt that battery life wasn't what it should be, but in our testing it seemed decent even if it fell short of Dell's own estimates.

Almost everything in that review holds true of the new device, and that's a good place to start. The XPS 13 got all the important basics right. Once again our review model has the beautiful 3200×1800 IPS touchscreen and the same extremely narrow bezel.

This is as eye-catching as it ever was, and I'm a little surprised that other manufacturers haven't leapt on the same hardware. The XPS 13 is quite a bit smaller than systems with comparable screen sizes, or if you prefer, its screen is quite a bit bigger than that of systems with the same footprint. To quantify that: the XPS 13 is 11.98 inches wide. The 11-inch MacBook Air is 11.8 inches wide, and the 13-inch MacBook Air is 12.8 inches wide. Similarly, the XPS 13 is 7.88 inches deep; the Apple systems are 7.56 and 8.94 inches deep. This Dell with its 13.3 inch screen is much closer in size to the Mac with an 11.6 inch screen than the one with a 13.3 inch one.

That diminutive size means more room on your airplane tray table, more room in your backpack or briefcase. It's even slightly less heft to carry around; at 2.7lbs (without touch) or 2.9lbs (with touch), it's a touch lighter than the 13-inch MacBook Air.

In spite of the size, the keyboard remains competent and the touchpad remains first rate. Key travel is good for a laptop, the backlighting is effective, and overall the layout is reasonable. My personal preference would be to have a few more keys. Home/end and page up/down are doubled up onto the cursor keys, for example, and in an ideal world they'd have a dedicated button. There's also no way (or at least, no obvious way; it's possible that there's some unlabeled shortcut) to type the "break" key, which is an annoyance. But such are the norms of modern laptop keyboards.

The touchpad has a smooth glass surface, great accuracy, and Precision Touchpad support for the full range of Windows 10 gestures and shortcuts.

I just don't understand this trend of making the keyboard a rectangular block when it means squeezing in half-height cursor keys and omitting certain other keys entirely.

Surrounding all this is a palm rest covered in "soft touch paint." This feels extremely comfortable. Last year I was concerned that the paint may deteriorate, but I've since heard from others that it stands up well. It certainly feels better than the bare metal that some other laptops use for their interiors. The inside of the XPS 13 is, however, a tremendous fingerprint magnet. Even with alcohol wipes I failed to get it pristine.

The position of the webcam (again, driven as it is by the narrow bezel) remains awkward to the point of near-unusability. With no room at the top edge of the screen, it's placed instead at the bottom, creating a peculiar worm's eye view that tends to point right up your nose. It does technically work, but there is no circumstance in which I could ever see myself using it.

I'm also a little disappointed that Dell hasn't embraced Windows Hello biometric login. Although the webcam positioning would almost surely rule out facial recognition, a fingerprint sensor on the keyboard would have been good. HP's comparably priced Envy 13 manages a fingerprint reader on the keyboard, for example.

One eye on the future

The new parts to the XPS 13 are all on the inside. The processor is now Skylake generation, and with this comes an increase in supported RAM—now up to 16GB—and Intel's Alpine Ridge controller.

Alpine Ridge provides two things: the infuriatingly named USB 3.1 generation 2—which means 10 gigabits per second rather than five—and Thunderbolt 3. These are delivered over a USB Type-C port on the machine's left-hand side, replacing the mini DisplayPort of the Broadwell model.

That one with the little lightning bolt? It's the port of the future.

This port does just about everything, assuming you have something to plug into it—generation 1 and 2 USB, DisplayPort 1.2, 40 gigabit per second Thunderbolt 3, and even charging (though the XPS 13 does not use this for charging by default; it has a dedicated charging port and charger to match). This can drive one of the handful of new USB Type-C monitors directly, and with converters it'll drive DisplayPort and HDMI screens. Dell also has an adaptor that provides Ethernet, VGA, HDMI, and USB Type A ports, and more of these port replicators/docking stations are likely to materialize.

On a whim I plugged it into the Microsoft Display Dock used for the Lumia 950 phone. While it was detected, it didn't appear to actually work, suggesting that USB Type-C may have an undesirable dark side. Devices may appear to be superficially compatible with one another, but they won't actually do anything when connected.

While it once looked as if Thunderbolt was never going to catch on, it now looks like the capability is going to become much more widespread—primarily thanks to USB. As we noted at last year's CES, USB Type-C is going to spread everywhere thanks to the support for higher speeds, power delivery, and the ability to use it for non-USB data (such as DisplayPort or HDMI) via the Alternate Modes feature. Thunderbolt 3 is just another Alternate Mode.

It's still a good looking machine.

That alone wouldn't be enough to ensure Thunderbolt's spread; the second element in play is Alpine Ridge. While Intel's chipsets all have integrated USB 3 support, this is currently only generation 1 support, running at 5 gigabits per second. To get the faster generation 2 support requires the use of an external USB controller. Intel's Alpine Ridge isn't the only generation 2 controller around, but being an Intel chip, good operating system and driver support are all but inevitable, making it appealing to OEMs. And it just so happens that Alpine Ridge isn't just a USB 3.1 generation 2 controller: it's also a Thunderbolt 3 controller. Add Alpine Ridge to a system to get best-in-class USB support and you get Thunderbolt 3 coming along for the ride.

The multi-protocol nature of the port means that the port is inevitably going to be useful for something. Maybe it'll be useful for connecting USB devices; maybe it'll be useful for connecting monitors. Maybe, if the array of Thunderbolt hardware expands, it'll be useful for more exotic things such as external video cards.

Whatever it turns out to be, support for both USB 3.1 generation 2 and Thunderbolt 3 means that the XPS 13 is meaningfully future-proofed. But unlike the Type-C-only Spectre x2, Dell hasn't forgotten about the present; there are two regular USB 3.1 generation 1 ports on the XPS 13, too, so today's hardware is also well-supported.

Surprising disappointments

On the processor side of things, as we'd expect, the Skylake is a bit faster than the Broadwell. This time around our review system had a Core i5-6200U processor, running at 2.3GHz base, 2.8GHz turbo, compared to the Broadwell i5-5200U at 2.2/2.7GHz. The Skylake is maybe 10 to 15 percent faster in Geekbench and as much as 50 percent faster in GPU tests. It's faster, but not so much faster as you'd really notice.

Likely to be more noticeable is the disk benchmark. In the previous generation, only the top-end 512GB SSD used a PCIe interface. The 128GB and 256GB versions both used (slower) SATA. In the current generation, while the 128GB SSD remains SATA, the 256GB has made the leap to the (faster) PCIe interface. Its benchmark scores are unsurprisingly a substantial improvement.

The battery test was more of a concern. Although the battery is now a little bigger at 56Wh instead of 52Wh, it fared somewhat worse in our battery life testing. I'm not really sure why. One possibility is that the original tests were affected by Dell's adaptive brightness feature that automatically reduces the screen brightness under certain situations to extend the battery life. When I looked at the Broadwell XPS 13, there was nothing I could do to disable this (though I checked the brightness calibration during testing and it didn't seem to change particularly). Since then, Dell has provided a tool to disable it, and I used this on the Skylake system.

On the one hand I do feel that the battery life could and should be a bit better. I'm not really sure why it's not, especially as Dell continues to maintain that it should be best-in-class. On the other hand, it's by no means terrible. It's still a long-lasting system, longer still if you opt for the non-touch 1920×1080 screen. It lasts long enough for most of the domestic flights and international flights I take, and it's more than enough for going to meetings or spending an afternoon working in a coffee shop. This is battery life that's long enough so it doesn't feel intrusive.

When reviewing HP's Spectre x2, I was disappointed with the awful McAfee LiveSafe bundled software. The previous model XPS 13 had it too—though for some reason it didn't show me as many annoying alerts and messages—and so does this one. Each time I run into this program, my opinion of it is soured further. On the Broadwell XPS 13, I suggested that users uninstall it for fear that it would interfere with something. On the Spectre x2, I uninstalled it myself because it was so intrusive. On this Skylake XPS 13, I have taken the opinion that the software is actively user hostile. OEMs are doing a great user disservice by bundling it.

That's because it showed me this message when I opened the Edge browser.

This is a reprehensible message.

The notion that Windows 10 users should switch to Internet Explorer instead of using Edge solely because Internet Explorer allows poorly secured, highly invasive add-ons is beyond ridiculous. This software is making a really bad suggestion. Yes, it's annoying that Edge has no add-ons yet. They'll come soon enough, and when they do they'll be secure and restricted and sandboxed and all the good things that browser extensions should be. Microsoft didn't abandon the old Internet Explorer extension model because it was good; the company abandoned it because it wasn't good. For a "security" application to tell me to use the older, less secure, slower, less standards-compliant browser just to use a bad extension model is beyond the pale. It should be instantly uninstalled.

The best conventional Windows laptop is a little bit better

Although the battery life regression is something of a mystery, the new XPS 13 is every bit as likeable as the old one. The best bit is that even with the new processor and Thunderbolt 3, the entry price hasn't changed. It still starts as $799.99 for a Core i3, 4GB RAM, 1920×1080 screen, and 128GB storage. As before, I still feel that system skimps a little too much on memory and storage, but it has the same great form factor, good keyboard, great touchpad.