The Dell XPS 13 has been one of – if not the – best laptops on the market for years. A brilliant design and excellent performance made it one of the easiest devices to recommend to anyone. But at CES 2022, Dell took this classic design and tried to transform it into something even more portable and modern – and ruined its best laptop completely.
The Dell XPS 13 Plus at CES 2022 is Dell’s attempt to make a laptop that was already as thin and light as it needed to be, and make it even thinner by sacrificing utility and accessibility. And because it’s more expensive than a standard XPS 13, you’re essentially paying for less – even if the CPU is going to be marginally faster.
It’s cliche at this point to say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, but it really applies here. Dell took trends started – and since abandoned – by Apple, and tried to work them into its most iconic product, rather than trying them out on a new product line. And in the process made our favorite line of Ultrabooks, our least favorite.
Price and availability
The Dell XPS 13 Plus will be available a little later in 2022, and Dell hasn't shared much about pricing, only that it will start at $1,199 (around £900, AU$1,600). Given how this is clearly supposed to be an even more premium version of the Dell XPS 13, we’re going to go ahead and say it’s going to be a bit more expensive than other versions of the laptop when you start configuring it with more powerful processors and extra RAM.
You do get a higher-power P-series Intel processor with a power budget of 28W, but that likely won’t make a big enough difference in day-to-day performance to be worth it for most people.
Design
The Dell XPS 13 Plus is more thin and light than ever before. It measures just 0.60-inches (15.28mm) thick, and weighs in at just 2.73lb (1.24kg). That might sound amazing, and it might even prove so if you need something super lightweight to fit into your bag. But it’s led to plenty of cut features and the implementation of the lamest feature Dell has ever put into a product.
The Dell XPS 13 Plus has a Touch Bar. It’s not called a Touch Bar, but rather a “capacitive touch display”, but anyone that has seen a MacBook Pro that’s come out between 2015 and 2019 will recognize it as a Touch Bar, only without the OLED and any actually useful features. You don’t have anything that can change, so you can’t get a volume slider to come up like you could on the Touch Bar, and you can’t pull up emojis – and you can just forget about having it work natively with apps like Photoshop.
Instead you have dimly lit functions, like volume and brightness controls, that never really change, and are easy to accidentally hit when typing normally. Even when we tested the keyboard, we accidentally opened little windows when we were just trying to type in Notepad. This is probably something that will be less of a problem as time goes on and you get used to the layout, but why would you put yourself through that learning curve in the first place when there are hundreds of thin and light laptops out there that won’t make you do that? Just buy a regular XPS 13 instead, at least you’ll get a headphone jack and a microSD Card reader.
Oh yeah, Dell got rid of those. Anyone that has watched headphone jacks slowly disappear from their favorite phones, worrying about it happening to laptops too – well apparently it’s happening now, at least with the XPS 13 Plus. Dell tells us that most people are using Bluetooth now and that it justifies taking out a 3.5mm headphone jack. We disagree.
The only ports you get now are two Thunderbolt 4 ports on either side of the laptop. These ports are still as flexible as ever, but it’s a shame that this laptop is going to be so dependent on a docking station to get any meaningful work done.
The other major change is to the touchpad. It’s completely borderless now, and while it’s still technically the same size as the touchpad found on the Dell XPS 13, there is no clear distinction where the pointing device ends and the rest of the chassis begins. You can’t really feel where the borders of the touchpad are, either.
We obviously haven’t got this laptop in for a full review, but we already know we’re going to accidentally stray off of the touchpad, and the only way we’ll know is that the mouse has stopped taking input. This would have been fine if Dell had found a way to make the whole section beneath the keyboard into a touchpad somehow, but instead it’s just confusing.
It’s not all bad, though. As always, the keyboard is extremely comfortable to type on, and now extends to the very edges of the laptop. We could see this presenting a problem long-term with things getting caught on the outer keys, but only time will tell.
The display is also brilliant, and Dell managed to improve the webcam a bit, but not quite in the way you would expect. Rather than raising the resolution to 1080p like a lot of competing Ultrabooks are doing, Dell instead implemented split IR camera and light sensor, which improves low-light performance. This was definitely needed, but we’ll need more time with the device before we can tell if it was worth going for rather than just upping the resolution.
Performance
Until we get the Dell XPS 13 Plus into our labs for testing, we won’t be able to say anything conclusive about the new laptop design and how it impacts performance, but Dell has shed a bit of light on it.
The laptop is using the new Alder Lake-P processors, and is configured with a 28W chip, rather than the 14W configuration you would usually see in a laptop of this class. This should lead to slightly better performance, but it’s something we’ll have to test for ourselves. Dell claims that the new design choices, particularly the capacitive touch buttons above the keyboard, were in the name of fitting this more powerful chip in there, so we just hope it was worth it.
Early verdict
We’ll have to get this laptop into our labs to see how everything comes together, especially in daily use, but our first impressions of the Dell XPS 13 Plus have not left us impressed. The changes to the chassis design are quite frankly the worst thing Dell could have done to its most iconic laptop. The Touch-Bar-But-Not-A-Touch-Bar immediately strikes us as completely worthless at best and actively counterproductive at worst. And don’t even get us started on the new trackpad.
If the changes really do lead to better performance, that will be a nice silver lining, but somehow we doubt that slightly better CPU performance is going to be worth the huge concessions made to usability.
It definitely looks like a flashy device, but it’s not something we’re looking forward to actually working on any time soon.
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