Dell has been on a roll the past few years with their XPS lineup, which is
why I'm excited that they were able to sponsor this video for us to show you
their latest XPS laptops as a CES
preview. We got the 14 and the 16.
Welcome to Dell. Let's do great things together. Sure. Inside both of the
boxes, it's pretty identical. You get your laptops in a cloth bag. And here is
the documentation, or at least where it would go. There's nothing in here. I
imagine it's just because it's CES. The documentation has been finalized. And
here are the charging bricks. They are 100 W adapters for both size. Same size
charging brick. Nice and pretty small. I tend to like the Dell charging bricks.
And they also both terminate in a USBC. There's no proprietary standard here,
which is a bummer if you're somebody who likes the Mag Safe kind of stuff that
you can find on a Surface or a MacBook.
But nice because now you can just charge anything else that's USBC with these. I
love the simple packaging. Way to go, Dell. Let's un sheath these.
Wow, these are nice. And look at these.
Thin and light, I guess, is the way. Dell says that these start at 3 lb or
3.65 lb on the 16-in. And um honestly,
it's like really easy to manipulate. It's a very
lightweight laptop, which is pretty crazy because these are some pretty
powerful laptops. We'll talk about that later. One impressive thing is that this
is basically the same size as a 13-in
MacBook Air and you're getting a full extra inch of screen. Dell actually
claims that this is smaller by volume, though the difference is so slight that
you probably wouldn't notice. This feels like they're lying, you know? It feels
like they're like this can't be 14 in. It does feel so much more compact and
you just get that much extra space from the smaller bezels around the entire edge of the display. That's uh that's
pretty neat. But before we look too closely at the insides, let's take a look at the ports we got on the outside.
On the right hand side, we get [music] one USBC port, a combo audio jack, and
on the other side, two more USBC ports. All are Thunderbolt 4. So, it doesn't
matter which port you're plugging into. You will get full 40 GB per second
speeds and DisplayPort out, which is pretty sweet. Though, I would like at
least one USBA, but there's not a whole
lot of space. Maybe the bigger one gets it. No, these have the exact same IO, so
it's more just a preference of [music] size rather than of functionality.
Dell's XPS lineup is taking advantage of the latest Intel processors. That's
right. We got Panther Lake in these babies, which plans to take the power of
AeroLake plus the efficiency gains of Lunar Lake and combine them into one
super great mobile chip. And the fact that these are Ultra chips means that
these are going to be AI ready if co-pilot is your thing. And these can
both be specked with the top-of-the-line Intel Core Ultra X9 processor 388H.
The ones we have today are a little bit more modest. That doesn't mean that those are weak processors. But let's
take a look inside of these. Yes, they got rid of the worst part
[music] of their previous XPS laptops. We have our actual function row with
actual buttons. It's not capacitive for
no reason. Thank you, Dell, for going back [music] to the way it should be.
Capacitive buttons are no good, and I'm glad they got rid of it. Whether or not
you like the lack of gaps in your keyboard is probably a preference. I find that these still type quite well,
though, I think they lack a bit of tactile [music] click that I would like. They're a
little bit more subtle than other Chicklet style keyboards that I've used. Not bad, just not my preference. The
keyboards are in fact backlit. They are not RGB. These are sturdy with their CNC
aluminum unibody construction. And let's see. Oh, yes. You could do the one hinge
open. That only went up because I went too far. They don't lay flat. They're
not lay flat, but they are touchcreens. And the hinge stays pretty well where
you want it to, even when you're writing on it, which is good. [music] And while
the body itself is CNC, the trackpad is
actually glass. I don't know if it's the same Gorilla Glass 3 that makes up the
displays on this. It is a nice hand feel, but let's talk about the displays.
They use Dell's OLED infinity edge touch
displays, which are tandem OLEDs. And what is tandem OLED? Well, kind of like
how there's two of you on a tandem bicycle. On a tandem OLED panel, there
are two OLED layers. What that means is you can boost brightness and color
volume without affecting the lifespan because you don't need to drive these
things with as much power. and that lowers their burn-in risk. Despite that,
these are not the brightest displays, but boy are they pretty. Both of these
are Vasa Display HDR true black 500
certified. And interestingly, they have a variable refresh rate that can go from
20 to 120 Hz, and that's a first for laptops according to Dell. Think about
the LTPO displays that you have on your phone that allows your phone to go down to 1 Her Herz. So, when you're looking
at static content, this can instead change its refresh rate to 20 Hz to save
battery life. And that's going to make a big big [music] difference. Even cooler
is that if you get the LCD display, which is of course not going to be quite
as beautiful as the Tandem OLED, you can actually get the full 1 to 120 hertz
just like you would have on your cell phone. And that's another first. And
also, I don't think I've heard of that being applied to an LCD before. But what
does the lab say? Well, on these pre-production units where things could
change, the displays are pretty good. Testing them out of the box, we saw in
SDR that the peak brightness is around 420 nits, which is a bit above what Dell
quotes, and that their gamma tracks at around 2.3 across the board. By default,
these have 100% coverage of the P3 color space, but that results in most colors
being too saturated for sRGB, even when we compensate by trying to clamp to the
sRGB color space. For color accuracy, we did find a Delta E2000 averaging around
1.5ish when clamped to sRGB and 2ish in
its out-of-the-box profile when comparing to Display P3. In HDR, when we
calibrate to the EOTF target, we found that the peak brightness was around over
500 nits at a 10% window and 400 nits at a 100% window size, hitting the true
black 500 certification. The displays cover around 85% of the BT 2020 color
space with a very impressive Delta ETP of around 8.1 on average despite a
little bit of oversaturation. Overall, surprisingly good for HDR, even if the
SDR is like eh. Between the two laptops, the differences that we saw can
basically just be chocked up to panel variants. They're all within
manufacturing tolerances. They're both good displays. [music] The webcams on
both of these seem pretty good. Honestly, they're very small is
something that Dell wants to point out. [music] The first ultra narrow 8
megapixel webcams, it they're trying to maintain the quality of their older
laptop webcams while fitting it into an even smaller bezel. And I think that
these do a perfectly admirable job for anything you'd want out of a webcam from
a laptop. Like there's no real complaints here. You get a little bit of
blown out in the highlights sometimes. If you're on the go and you just need to
take a video call, this is a perfectly serviceable webcam. And speaking of on
the- go, Dell claims that this is going to have 27 [music] hours of battery life
for general use and up to 40 hours for
local video playback. That is crazy. That's better than like MacBook good.
Okay, it's probably in no small part due to the tandem OLED plus the low refresh
rate. Maybe they're playing like a 20 FPS video, so the frame rate only has to be 20 Hz. But you know what's going to
kill your battery is playing shim games. Now, this is not a gaming laptop. In
fact, the laptops in front of me don't even have a GPU proper in them. We're
running on integrated XE graphics, but the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 does come
with 12 XE cores. Listen to speakers.
[music]
You know, they get decently loud, but I'm not going to say it's a uh it
excels, especially on the 16-inch. Let's see what the 14-inch sounds like.
[music]
Honestly, I'm pretty impressed by the 14-in laptop. I guess both of these have
10 watts of speaker power, and that's coming in a hidden design where it's
like uh you can't really tell where the speakers are. Adele wants me to mention that these are omniirectional speakers
that you can't even see. Wow. So, we're playing Witchfire. It's a
UE4 based game. >> It's an early access and we're playing at full screen 1920 x 1200s. We're on
medium settings and things are looking and running pretty good. And this is
integrated graphics. Like I don't know if you can see that how well you can see that from the top down. It's looking
pretty good to me. Honestly, I'm quite impressed especially cuz this is not one
of the SKs that has the additional arc graphics on it. This is just the new
Intel graphics, the XC3 graphics that are forms the baseline of all of the
Panther Lake CPUs, which means that if I wanted to, I could do some upscaling
with XESS. That's kind of one of the most exciting parts of this latest
generation of Intel processors is the massive improvements that they've made
to the GPUs in these things. You're going to see some pretty powerful, thin,
and light laptops coming really, really soon, and the XPS is no exception. So,
where does that leave us at the end of this unboxing of the new XPS lineup? I'm
honestly pretty impressed. They've taken everything that they did right about the
last gen, got rid of what they've done wrong, and provided a super premium
feeling, super performant package in a classy chassis that just feels great,
and was honestly pretty quiet, sounds great. I mean, pricing remains to be
seen and especially in these hard times when it comes to RAM and stuff, who
knows what pricing is going to be like, but I will assure you, regardless of the
price, you are getting a high quality premium product that is super nice. So,
where does that leave us with the Dell XPS lineup? Well, it's not quite done
yet. The XPS 13, which they didn't send us today, but they're going to be
showing off at CES proper, is poised to be the thinnest and lightest XPS ever,
and still going to maintain the same premium quality, [snorts] as well as be
a pretty bit more accessible in terms of price is what they're saying. Thanks
again, Dell, for sponsoring this video. If you enjoyed this video, why don't you watch some more of our CES coverage.
There's going to be so much cool stuff. Riley's going to be showing you cool stuff. David's gonna be showing you cool
stuff. I'm going to be showing you cool stuff. So, keep your eyes peeled because there's a lot more awesome tech coming
your