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the xps 13 plus looks like dell stole all of apple's worst ideas five years

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later but under the hood every design decision

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here supports a single ambitious goal to cram a 14 core processor into a 13-inch

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ultrabook yes this has a 14-core CPU in it that

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absolutely annihilates the m1 chip in the 13-inch macbook pro

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is that performance worth some of the interesting design decisions it took a

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lot of work for us to answer that question so first you'll have to sit and

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to accommodate an increased CPU TDP from 15 watts all the way to 28 watts without

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enlarging the chassis the first thing to get the ax was the function row and this

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might look like a touch bar rip-off but delve's implementation is actually both

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less functional and better

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the typical media control keys are now capacitive touch buttons and by hitting

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function you can bring up the function row or function plus escape to lock it

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we occasionally found ourselves wishing for tactile buttons especially for

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escape and delete but after a few short hours the whole thing works pretty well

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and comes with a huge upside the glass and capacitive touch button

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assembly is only 1.4 millimeters thick that is less than half the space that

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traditional buttons would have occupied which gives dell way more space for

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cooling an additional benefit is that this glass is transparent to rf which

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made the wi-fi antennas work way better they fire both up through the function

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keys and down through a little hole in the aluminum chassis now we're going to

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go into more depth on the CPU performance later spoiler alert it's

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absolutely unreal but below the function row there's a whole lot more weirdness

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that i want to look at first starting with the keyboard dell has

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eliminated almost all of the space between the keys

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it looks sick but i was very concerned

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about the typing experience having tried out a handful of devices like this in

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the past fortunately dell has a lot of money to

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spend apparently they built three production

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level prototypes of the keyboard just so that they could get the dish of the keys

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just right and that effort and the many thousands of monies that it cost to make

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three separate molds in my opinion paid off each key has a .3 millimeter dish

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that lets your fingers know exactly where they are and it only took me a few

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minutes to get darn near up to full speed it's possibly one of the most

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pleasing keyboards on an ultrabook right now and it's an easy a plus in my book

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at least if you have smaller hands mine they kind of hang off the edge and even

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though dell have chamfered the aluminum here i find it a little bit sharp

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fortunately i have a fix and it'll only take a couple seconds

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oh yeah i like that way more got a nice little radius here

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so much better uh anywho

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below the keyboard is presumably a touch pad

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yeah it is the entire palm rest area is a seamless

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piece of gorilla glass with a touch pad in the center spanning roughly this

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distance dell made prototypes with both physical

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and visual cues to show the user where the touchpad was but found that it

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wasn't actually necessary and i actually agree with them the trackpad is large

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enough that i've never managed to wander outside of it during normal use and to

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take care of clicking dell has 10 piezoelectric buzzers below the trackpad

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to simulate a click the strength of this feedback out of the

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box was a little much for me but it can be adjusted to your preference in

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Windows and feels really cool once you get it dialed in

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a sneaky benefit of this design is that if one of the piezo buzzers fails the

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others around it can actually increase their intensity and prolong the life of

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the trackpad which is super cool

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now to address the elephant in the room io you get a single Thunderbolt 4 port

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on this side and a single Thunderbolt 4 port on this side and that's it there's

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no other sides the biggest reason that dell couldn't

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fit a headphone jack that's right no headphone jack is that it's long so it

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used to be up here but that would force the hinge to be considerably wider like

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on the older model which would have cost us you guessed it valuable heatsink

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space no 28 watt processor

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according to dell's research then the majority of users now see the headphone

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jack as a nice to have instead of a must-have but that minority who doesn't

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agree gets really mad about it and here's why i think those people have a

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pretty good case first Windows

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microsoft's implementation of bluetooth pairing is arguably a full decade behind

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iOS and Android so using bluetooth headphones on a Windows machine can

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sometimes mean three to ten minutes of

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screwing around talk about an immersive audio experience

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over the years i've grown accustomed to dongles and in a laptop this size you

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literally can't fit most connectors but audio even now is a special case to me

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usb HDMI Ethernet all of them are fully

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digital signals but audio is analog

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which is why out of every single dongle in our office there are this many that

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have a headphone jack on them here's the thing for your headphones to

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sound good you need a quality dac or digital to analog converter that takes

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the bits from spotify or whatever and converts it into music in your ear holes

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and trust me a good dac doesn't come cheap so the vast majority of dongles

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out there completely omit the headphone jack as a cost saving measure also

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because everything has a headphone jack on it also because the usb implementers forum

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is more about chill vibes man than acting like a serious standards

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organization there are multiple optional

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mind you ways for audio to be implemented over usb type-c

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audio accessory mode for example turns two of the digital data pins into analog

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audio pins but that mode doesn't happen to be supported by the xps 13 plus

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unsurprisingly pins and wires that were designed for high-speed digital signals

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don't result in great audio anyway but the important thing for you guys to

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know out of all of this is that because of all of this tomfoolery many dongles

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made for phones simply will not work on

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the xps 13 plus graciously dell does include a dongle

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with a deck in it in the box but because of the lack of availability

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more broadly you better try not to lose it at least until apple also ditches the

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headphone jack and all of this becomes acceptable

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and they might just do that based on these performance results because if

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your goal in buying the xps 13 plus is to tell your friend their macbook is

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molasses slow i've got great news compared to the

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macbook pro 13-inch with an 8-core m1 the xps 13 plus with a core i7 14 core

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is 45 faster

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it's even faster than last year's xps 15

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albeit only by a hair and as for the 1260p model it might only have a mirror

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12 course but it still managed to blow past apple's best machine in this form

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factor it is an Intel processor so when loaded

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the temps do get into the 90s very quickly but the little xps 13 that could

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here managed brief spells of over 50 watts and consistently managed to

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dissipate a bit over 30 all without sounding like a hair dryer even better

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you get iris xc graphics with 96 execution units allowing you to play

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actual 3d games as long as you don't mind lowering the graphics or the

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resolution a bit or the occasional driver issue

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also it is fast but i'm not ready to crown it king of the 13-inch laptops yet

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because the ASUS flow x13 which harnesses the power of AMD and liquid

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metal just arrived in our studio make sure you're subscribed for that review

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the screen of the xps 13 plus is both excellent and annoying the 4k OLED model

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is fantastic to look at not only do you get deep blacks but 500 nits peak

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brightness means that it's useful in bright rooms as well they even managed

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to cram a decent webcam with Windows hello facial recognition into this tiny

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little bezel here but the OLED screen has a big problem

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battery life with the OLED the xps 13 only managed

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six hours and eight minutes of battery life which is great

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for a full-size freaking gaming laptop with a GPU in it with the lcd screen we

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were able to get a much more ultrabook like 9 hours and 43 minutes that's

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certainly enough for all-day use but even some AMD gaming laptops can last a

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bit longer and apple will keep you away from an outlet for literally twice as

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long fortunately the speakers are another area where dell has vastly improved the

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xps 13 plus over the last generation the speaker count was doubled to four with

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two down firing and two shooting up through the keyboard

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don't expect to be feeling incredible bass notes but for a 13 inch laptop they

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are much more than acceptable until you go past about 70 volume where

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things get a little weird between 500 and 700 hertz there's this rattle that

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shows up from the upward firing speakers exciting the keys

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so in a future revision i hope that dell adds some kind of damper to the keys to

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prevent this but for now it's loud enough at 70 and sounds good enough that

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you shouldn't need to pack a bluetooth speaker anyway

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one major concern i had with the xps 13 plus though is repairability thankfully

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dell hasn't just glued the whole thing together though disclosure by the way as

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i discussed repairability here i am invested in framework laptop

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opening up the bottom you've got easy access to both battery and storage

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neither of which are glued in nice the RAM is soldered on but frankly i

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think that that's actually justifiable in a machine like this given how thin it

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is and with the removal of the motherboard and battery surprisingly the

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keyboard and the trackpad are also both replaceable unfortunately the trackpad

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is glued in so it can be replaced but i doubt any

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non-professionals are going to attempt it they haven't released any specifics

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on the xps lineup and what that's going to look like going forward but i think

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it's safe to assume that this won't be the only xps 13 they're going to sell

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for the last couple of years they've been selling the old chassis along with

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the new one if you wanted a cheaper or a more expensive version and i imagine

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that now they'll slap a 12th gen processor into the old chassis for

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everyone that isn't sold on the radical design changes of the 13 plus

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as for us it starts at 1300 though the one you'll actually want will

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likely be a bit more expensive than that and it is a great little powerhouse of

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machine unless you cannot accept the removal of the headphone jack

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