the xps 13 plus looks like dell stole all of apple's worst ideas five years
later but under the hood every design decision
here supports a single ambitious goal to cram a 14 core processor into a 13-inch
ultrabook yes this has a 14-core CPU in it that
absolutely annihilates the m1 chip in the 13-inch macbook pro
is that performance worth some of the interesting design decisions it took a
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
enlarging the chassis the first thing to get the ax was the function row and this
might look like a touch bar rip-off but delve's implementation is actually both
less functional and better
the typical media control keys are now capacitive touch buttons and by hitting
function you can bring up the function row or function plus escape to lock it
we occasionally found ourselves wishing for tactile buttons especially for
escape and delete but after a few short hours the whole thing works pretty well
and comes with a huge upside the glass and capacitive touch button
assembly is only 1.4 millimeters thick that is less than half the space that
traditional buttons would have occupied which gives dell way more space for
cooling an additional benefit is that this glass is transparent to rf which
made the wi-fi antennas work way better they fire both up through the function
keys and down through a little hole in the aluminum chassis now we're going to
go into more depth on the CPU performance later spoiler alert it's
absolutely unreal but below the function row there's a whole lot more weirdness
that i want to look at first starting with the keyboard dell has
eliminated almost all of the space between the keys
it looks sick but i was very concerned
about the typing experience having tried out a handful of devices like this in
the past fortunately dell has a lot of money to
spend apparently they built three production
level prototypes of the keyboard just so that they could get the dish of the keys
just right and that effort and the many thousands of monies that it cost to make
three separate molds in my opinion paid off each key has a .3 millimeter dish
that lets your fingers know exactly where they are and it only took me a few
minutes to get darn near up to full speed it's possibly one of the most
pleasing keyboards on an ultrabook right now and it's an easy a plus in my book
at least if you have smaller hands mine they kind of hang off the edge and even
though dell have chamfered the aluminum here i find it a little bit sharp
fortunately i have a fix and it'll only take a couple seconds
oh yeah i like that way more got a nice little radius here
so much better uh anywho
below the keyboard is presumably a touch pad
yeah it is the entire palm rest area is a seamless
piece of gorilla glass with a touch pad in the center spanning roughly this
distance dell made prototypes with both physical
and visual cues to show the user where the touchpad was but found that it
wasn't actually necessary and i actually agree with them the trackpad is large
enough that i've never managed to wander outside of it during normal use and to
take care of clicking dell has 10 piezoelectric buzzers below the trackpad
to simulate a click the strength of this feedback out of the
box was a little much for me but it can be adjusted to your preference in
Windows and feels really cool once you get it dialed in
a sneaky benefit of this design is that if one of the piezo buzzers fails the
others around it can actually increase their intensity and prolong the life of
the trackpad which is super cool
now to address the elephant in the room io you get a single Thunderbolt 4 port
on this side and a single Thunderbolt 4 port on this side and that's it there's
no other sides the biggest reason that dell couldn't
fit a headphone jack that's right no headphone jack is that it's long so it
used to be up here but that would force the hinge to be considerably wider like
on the older model which would have cost us you guessed it valuable heatsink
space no 28 watt processor
according to dell's research then the majority of users now see the headphone
jack as a nice to have instead of a must-have but that minority who doesn't
agree gets really mad about it and here's why i think those people have a
pretty good case first Windows
microsoft's implementation of bluetooth pairing is arguably a full decade behind
iOS and Android so using bluetooth headphones on a Windows machine can
sometimes mean three to ten minutes of
screwing around talk about an immersive audio experience
over the years i've grown accustomed to dongles and in a laptop this size you
literally can't fit most connectors but audio even now is a special case to me
usb HDMI Ethernet all of them are fully
digital signals but audio is analog
which is why out of every single dongle in our office there are this many that
have a headphone jack on them here's the thing for your headphones to
sound good you need a quality dac or digital to analog converter that takes
the bits from spotify or whatever and converts it into music in your ear holes
and trust me a good dac doesn't come cheap so the vast majority of dongles
out there completely omit the headphone jack as a cost saving measure also
because everything has a headphone jack on it also because the usb implementers forum
is more about chill vibes man than acting like a serious standards
organization there are multiple optional
mind you ways for audio to be implemented over usb type-c
audio accessory mode for example turns two of the digital data pins into analog
audio pins but that mode doesn't happen to be supported by the xps 13 plus
unsurprisingly pins and wires that were designed for high-speed digital signals
don't result in great audio anyway but the important thing for you guys to
know out of all of this is that because of all of this tomfoolery many dongles
made for phones simply will not work on
the xps 13 plus graciously dell does include a dongle
with a deck in it in the box but because of the lack of availability
more broadly you better try not to lose it at least until apple also ditches the
headphone jack and all of this becomes acceptable
and they might just do that based on these performance results because if
your goal in buying the xps 13 plus is to tell your friend their macbook is
molasses slow i've got great news compared to the
macbook pro 13-inch with an 8-core m1 the xps 13 plus with a core i7 14 core
is 45 faster
it's even faster than last year's xps 15
albeit only by a hair and as for the 1260p model it might only have a mirror
12 course but it still managed to blow past apple's best machine in this form
factor it is an Intel processor so when loaded
the temps do get into the 90s very quickly but the little xps 13 that could
here managed brief spells of over 50 watts and consistently managed to
dissipate a bit over 30 all without sounding like a hair dryer even better
you get iris xc graphics with 96 execution units allowing you to play
actual 3d games as long as you don't mind lowering the graphics or the
resolution a bit or the occasional driver issue
also it is fast but i'm not ready to crown it king of the 13-inch laptops yet
because the ASUS flow x13 which harnesses the power of AMD and liquid
metal just arrived in our studio make sure you're subscribed for that review
the screen of the xps 13 plus is both excellent and annoying the 4k OLED model
is fantastic to look at not only do you get deep blacks but 500 nits peak
brightness means that it's useful in bright rooms as well they even managed
to cram a decent webcam with Windows hello facial recognition into this tiny
little bezel here but the OLED screen has a big problem
battery life with the OLED the xps 13 only managed
six hours and eight minutes of battery life which is great
for a full-size freaking gaming laptop with a GPU in it with the lcd screen we
were able to get a much more ultrabook like 9 hours and 43 minutes that's
certainly enough for all-day use but even some AMD gaming laptops can last a
bit longer and apple will keep you away from an outlet for literally twice as
long fortunately the speakers are another area where dell has vastly improved the
xps 13 plus over the last generation the speaker count was doubled to four with
two down firing and two shooting up through the keyboard
don't expect to be feeling incredible bass notes but for a 13 inch laptop they
are much more than acceptable until you go past about 70 volume where
things get a little weird between 500 and 700 hertz there's this rattle that
shows up from the upward firing speakers exciting the keys
so in a future revision i hope that dell adds some kind of damper to the keys to
prevent this but for now it's loud enough at 70 and sounds good enough that
you shouldn't need to pack a bluetooth speaker anyway
one major concern i had with the xps 13 plus though is repairability thankfully
dell hasn't just glued the whole thing together though disclosure by the way as
i discussed repairability here i am invested in framework laptop
opening up the bottom you've got easy access to both battery and storage
neither of which are glued in nice the RAM is soldered on but frankly i
think that that's actually justifiable in a machine like this given how thin it
is and with the removal of the motherboard and battery surprisingly the
keyboard and the trackpad are also both replaceable unfortunately the trackpad
is glued in so it can be replaced but i doubt any
non-professionals are going to attempt it they haven't released any specifics
on the xps lineup and what that's going to look like going forward but i think
it's safe to assume that this won't be the only xps 13 they're going to sell
for the last couple of years they've been selling the old chassis along with
the new one if you wanted a cheaper or a more expensive version and i imagine
that now they'll slap a 12th gen processor into the old chassis for
everyone that isn't sold on the radical design changes of the 13 plus
as for us it starts at 1300 though the one you'll actually want will
likely be a bit more expensive than that and it is a great little powerhouse of
machine unless you cannot accept the removal of the headphone jack
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