Dell XPS 13 (Snapdragon)
The slickest and most customisable Copilot+ PC yet, but the screen is poor and competition tough
SCORE ★★★★
PRICE As reviewed, £1,041 (£1,249 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk
While Dell’s Inspiron brand focuses on value, the XPS range is all about luxury. That should be immediately obvious from the photo, with the sleek and chic XPS 13 designed to turn heads. There’s no visible touchpad, the function keys light up, and the edge-to-edge keyboard and superslim bezels add yet more visual flair.
It’s also highly configurable. Most Copilot+ PCs come in a handful of configurations, but here you can choose between 16GB, 32GB and
64GB of RAM; 512GB, 1TB or 2TB of storage; and from a trio of screens, two supporting touch (one OLED, one IPS) and one not. You can even choose between graphite and platinum colour finishes.
Dell chose to send us the platinum version – with an attractive metallic, almost white finish – complete with 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage and the most basic non-touch panel. It’s the cheapest configuration, with a list price of £1,249 inc VAT, but as is a common theme this month you can currently enjoy a big discount: £1,099 as we went to press. However, if you wanted to match the specification of Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7x ( see p57) – so 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 3K OLED panel – you’d have to pay £1,579, down from its £1,849 RRP.
Sadly for Dell, the supplied IPS panel doesn’t compare well to others. I can live with a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, as text remains sharp across its 13.5in diagonal, but I expect better quality from a Dell XPS laptop. It only covers 69% of the DCI-P3 colour space and whites are impure. The literal bright spot is its 523cd/m2 peak luminance, and colour accuracy is excellent, but I never enjoyed using it.
Then we come to the keyboard, which is divisive. Perhaps after a few weeks of use I would stop making stupid typing errors, but due to its off-centre design (for no good reason) I found my fingers kept hitting the wrong keys. I had less of an issue with the invisible haptic touchpad, with my only misfires being when I tried to drag and drop folders.
Not everyone will be a fan of only having two USB-C ports, either, with one on each side. At a desk, it’s a non-issue thanks to the affordability of USB-C port replicators and docking monitors, but there will be times when you’re stuck with a USB-A thumb drive and nowhere to put it.
One of those USB ports is needed for the compact USB-C charger, but if there’s one area where the new XPS 13 excels it’s battery life. It lasted for a lung-busting 19hrs 50mins in our light-use test, and I wouldn’t think twice about shoving this slim, compact 1.2kg laptop into a bag. When it does come time to recharge, you won’t be kept waiting: zero to 88% in an hour is excellent.
The XPS 13’s performance throughout the rest of our benchmarks was predictable, with superb results in every area other than gaming. Opening up the base – held in place by six tiny Torx T5 screws – reveals a pair of fans to keep air flowing, all dispelled by a discreet vent at the rear. In general use the XPS 13 is almost silent, but you can choose the Ultra Performance option in the MyDell Console if you need to push it. It’s further
“The supplied IPS panel doesn’t compare well to others. I expect better quality from a Dell XPS laptop”
helped by a speedy SSD that returned 5,027MB/sec sequential reads and 4,391MB/sec writes. Dell earns yet more bonus points for the webcam, which produces vivid and detailed images, and the microphone setup is well tuned to pick up your voice even in the hubbub of cafés. My sole audio criticism is for the speakers, with trebles dominating, but that feels like a tuning issue as their quality is top-notch otherwise. Bass is terrific for such a tiny laptop.
With a solid one-year warranty that’s easy to upgrade, the XPS 13 leaves me in a quandary. On one hand, £1,099 for such a well-designed, high-quality laptop is a bargain (assuming the discount still applies); on the other, the supplied IPS panel doesn’t do the rest of this laptop justice. But switching to the OLED panel immediately adds £300, the IPS touchscreen a barely credible £450.
All of which means that I can’t recommend the XPS 13, especially when it has such strong competition from the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.
SPECIFICATIONS
12-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E-80-100 SoC Qualcomm Adreno graphics 16GB LPDDR5X RAM 13.4in 120Hz IPS non-touchscreen, 1,920 x 1,200 resolution 512GB M.2 PCI-E Gen4 SSD Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth 5.3 1080p IR webcam 2 x USB-C 4 55Wh battery Windows 11 Home 295 x 199 x 14.8mm (WDH) 1.2kg 1yr Premium on-site warranty