when apple dropped the macbook pro 16-inch there was just nothing really in
the pc world that compared to it like sure we had stuff that was way more
powerful or lighter or with longer
battery life but there was no laptop in existence that compared as an
all-rounder that i could point at be like there pc peeps just go buy that one
until today right out of the gate the xps 15 and 17 mean business look at them
the tall screen the aluminum wrapping around the edges if the long-term
experience holds up to the first couple of glances at these things then they
might just be the best laptops on the
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for a laptop to be truly excellent it has to nail all of the parts that you
interact with the keyboard the trackpad the screen and of course the chassis
if any one of these parts sucks it doesn't matter how light or powerful or
long lasting it is you will eventually grow to hate using it and the xps 15 and
17 are a master class in nailing these
features starting with the chassis it's not like the old xps 15 is bad it's
just that it and every other Windows laptop now feels distinctly last gen
compared to the xps 2020 lineup their screens are shockingly rigid considering
their size and thinness the reassuring resistance of the hinge feels quality
and without sacrificing a smooth one finger lift
and the carbon fiber topped deck gives the keyboard an incredibly rigid surface
to rest on and it makes such a big difference on something like the macbook
pro or the xps 13 with their short
snappy keys i can absolutely blast out a
quick instant message but sometimes i struggle getting into that flow like i
can on say a thinkpad that i prefer for long form writing like a video script
these xps somehow manage to be perfectly
tuned for both and they're an absolute joy to use with 1.3 millimeters of key
travel it's a bit more than the xps 13
but it maintains the excellent snap at the top of the stroke and it's just
but here's the thing even if this is the best keyboard on the
market the likes of microsoft hp and
lenovo have been putting out a-plus keyboards for some time now so having a
good keyboard isn't nearly as much of a differentiator as what lies below it
the absolutely gargantuan track pad
thank you dell i now finally have
something concrete to point at while i'm yelling at all the other Windows laptop
makers to improve their track pads it still isn't quite as big as the
macbook pro 16-inch but in fairness to dell they didn't have the extra space
created by apple's larger bezels to work with and to my hands the tracking is every
bit as accurate and easy to use and compared to Windows alternatives this
trackpad just well it just blows them all out of the
water with the only one in the same league being the razer blade 15 but even
that is a b plus plus or an a minus
compared to the a plus that we're looking at right here
one note by the way some of the xps 15s in the very first batch have a slight
wobble on the bottom so if this happens to you call up dell for a replacement
that is a defect and that problem has since been fixed up top though really is
the shining star and i mean shining because this display hits 500 nits
the way that it reaches all the way from the top down to the bottom of the device
really i mean i've talked about this before but i found it changes the way i
use it making me treat the xps 15 and then especially the 17 much more like
a small desktop compared to a big laptop
out of the box the colors are over the top vibrant with 107 coverage of the
adobe RGB color space and delta e values of over 20
yuck but by simply opening up the dell color
checker and selecting adobe RGB for the color space those values dropped to an
average delta e of four and a maximum of six that's color accurate enough for
basically anyone other than a professional photo or video editor and
if you're one of those you probably already have your own calibration tool
anyway my one complaint about the display is
the options come on dell please give us a 1200 p touch option
right now the 4k touch option is a 300
adder and like yeah sick display but that is really steep
for something that i've felt for a long time is not really necessary at these
screen sizes at the top of the display we find Windows hello facial recognition
still my favorite way to unlock a laptop but what's cool is if you're more into
fingerprint sensors dell included a snappy one of those on the power button
as well and that's been super useful what with wearing masks being all the
rage these days by the way if you're wondering how the heck they got a webcam
into that tiny bezel up top the answer is by just making it really bad like to
be clear it's a lot better than having it you know down under the screen so
it's looking up my nose all the time or whatever but
come on how am i supposed to shout out lttstore.com on my video calls like this
they can't properly appreciate the merch what i can properly appreciate though
are the speakers both models are excellent in this regard
with a surprising depth of bass and clarity of treble for a laptop i think
it's pretty safe to say these are among if not the best speakers on a Windows
laptop even if they don't quite match up let's be fair to the incredible sound
that apple was able to get out of the macbook pro so
as a laptop that you interact with then dell has crushed it and if this was a
thin and light we'd basically be able to call it here but with the xps 15 coming
in at four and a half pounds and the 17
a full pound heavier we need some real horsepower in order to justify the heft
so why don't we crack them open and take a look at what's inside to open up either
of the xps all you need to do is remove the eight torx t5 screws do a little bit
of spudging and off comes the bottom panel now
normally i wouldn't look twice at a bottom panel but these
oh these are pieces of art they're cnc
milled from a single piece of aluminum and between the curves that are sculpted
with a ball end mill and the surface finish that they got on the outside i
think it is pretty safe to say that this is not a cheap part both units have
massive batteries relative to their size which i consider to be a mandatory
upgrade by the way from the 56 watt hour base model battery with the 15 getting
up to 86 watt hours and the 17 getting
close to the maximum allowed on a plane in the us with 97 watt hours this netted
us about 9 hours on the xps 15 and
closer to 10 hours on the 17. although with the brightness of the display and
the power of these components how you're using these laptops is going to greatly
impact your real world battery life i mean there were times with the screen
brightness up with solidworks open that the battery would die after just four
hours but then also there was this one time that our battery test glitched out
after a couple of hours on the 17 and it kept idling along for over 17 more hours
above the battery there we go both of them have easy
access to dual m.2 SSD slots and dual
sodium slots to make storage and RAM upgrades easy but that's where the
similarities stop now inside the xps 15
we find pretty much what we'd expect in a laptop of this class we've got two
heat pipes and two fans that make for a total of around 50 watts of cooling
capacity in optimized mode this solution kept our CPU around 90 degrees with
solid performance but dell also provides
an ultra performance toggle that pushed our a core core i7 10875h to deliver
more performance than a top-tier desktop from two years ago at the expense of
thermals and possibly longevity but hey
we did say it was a macbook pro competitor didn't we
the gtx 1650 will allow for a pretty decent gaming experience if you're
willing to drop the settings and set your resolution to 1080p
but this isn't a gaming laptop and i imagine it's going to get more use speeding up
renders in premiere and it also manages solidworks quite well
moving over back to the xps 17 though dell has really stepped up their game
and this is honestly a different class of machine look
at this cooling system attached to these two huge fans is a
massive vapor chamber that is straight from the wet dream of a thermodynamics
professor even with a hundred watts of cooling though the core i7 10875h still
gets toasty in ultra performance mode so we wouldn't recommend using it all the
time but with this cooling it managed a cinebench
r20 score of nearly 4 000 making this thing 20
faster than a macbook pro 16 inch not to
mention that it's rtx 2060 max-q shreds
the AMD gpus that apple stubbornly continues to use at least for now while
also delivering good performance in games
i mean that's the thing of course a dedicated gaming laptop of the same
price is going to destroy either the xps 17 or 15 both in terms of graphics
performance and responsiveness with high refresh rate displays being pretty much
standard on anything over a thousand dollars but i think that almost anyone
besides a full-time gamer or video editor or 3d modeler is going to be more
than happy with the performance that's on tap here which doesn't mean that we
don't have any complaints notebook check discovered that the xps 17 actually dips
into its battery when it's under full load because the included 130 watt power
adapter can't quite keep up so if you're hitting the CPU and GPU
hard at the same time you can actually lose battery charge even though the
laptop is plugged into the wall now we've confirmed this behavior both with
our unit and with our dell rep who said that it was a decision to keep the size
of the ac adapter down and like okay fair enough
but i do wish that in the configurator there was an option for a heavier and
more powerful adapter so the customer can decide which trade-off they want to
make bringing us to the other big trade-off
the Intel CPU this right here ah there it is is the
zephyrus g14 i feel like we pulled this out a lot lately it houses a ryzen 9 4
900 hs an eight core processor that puts Intel's current mobile chips to shame
with a less sophisticated cooling solution we're seeing higher multi-core
performance higher single core performance and longer battery life from
a physically smaller battery now i'm gonna give dell a pass on this
generation for only including Intel in their xps lineup i don't think anybody
saw AMD's mobile 4000 series being as good as it is but next time around i'm
not going to be so forgiving i expect to see an AMD version of the xps 15 and 17
for those of us who want the maximum performance from our devices next time
also in fairness to dell if they had gone with AMD they would have missed out
on all these juicy Thunderbolt 3 ports of which the 15 has two and the 17 has
four and in turn they would have missed out on one of the coolest use cases of
the xps now i personally would have liked to see at least one usb type a but
still this is pretty cool so this is the dell
wd19tb a Thunderbolt dock that over a single
cable lets you turn your xps into a full-fledged desktop experience we're
talking dual 4k displays gigabit Ethernet mouse and keyboard along with a
dongle or two technology connections recently created a 27 minute love letter
to this approach and for many people it's an awesome way to nearly seamlessly
transition from a great portable experience to a great less portable
experience whether it's for work or for gaming now as you've probably guessed by
now these computers don't come cheap
like we're talking full blownsies apple pricing here i mean they start at
thirteen hundred and fourteen hundred dollars but the thing is
if you're shopping in that price range in my personal opinion there are better
value options so by the time we get to a config that i would actually recommend
you can expect to pay at least 2 grand for the xps 15 and
getting closer to 3 for the 17.
but i also can't really complain because sure they're expensive as all heck but
you're also getting what i think is the best Windows laptop that money can buy
and if dell can figure out how to get AMD and Thunderbolt into the next one i
might even be ready to call it perfect
if it also had an HDR OLED display maybe high refresh rate 5g mobile
connectivity would be nice better webcam caching functionality on the fingerprint
sensor so you have to touch it again once you get to the login screen i think a better GPU on the 15-inch would be
pretty nice and how about like an illuminated dell logo on the back like
when did that become not cool anymore then it would be perfect just like my
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