"t should surprise no one that the RAM is soldered to the board; there's also a black sticker layer that sits between the mSATA SSD and the inside of the bottom panel. It's good to know that you can replace the mSATA drive and wireless card, though, should you need to/desire to."
Is there anyone who's more interested in swapping the wifi card than they would have been in upgrading the ram in a few years? The former's something that IMO should have been at the top of the list when looking for ways to shave a few cubic mm.
The problem is not integrating the WiFi card to the motherboard. The problem is with regulatory for each country. If the WiFi card is with antenna connectors, then the regulatory certification is handled by the card vendor, in this case Intel, paying millions of dollars to every country where they want to sell the card. If the WiFi is integrated in the motherboard, then the regulatory will be handled by Dell. Regulatory certification is all about where the antenna connectors are.
Absolutely. If RAM is soldered then it should be 8GB RAM at the very least. There may be some cons to 1080p in a few situations (touchscreens with items too small to accurately touch) but I'm betting on Microsoft improving Windows pixel scaling soon. Ideally I would vote for 1200p, which I have had for many years on my Dell Laptops but unfortunately it's out of fashion.
Nope, lower spec is fine for a low price point. Windows 7 and 8 both run great on 4 gigs of ram, so only people who run ram intensive programs require 8gigs. But yeah if I'm spending over $700 I want core i5, 1080p, and 8 gigs of ram, and I don't care about touch.
I may just be sheltered from the reality of windows use as a result of using Linux, but I find it hard to see why any one would need more than 8GB of ram when using a current generation ULV processor. I don't see how you could run the sort of work load to eat up 8GB of ram with out being CPU limited first. If you try to just have lots of applications open and idling I guess you could run into ram limitations but is anyone going to do such a thing on a 13" laptop.
Needing >8GB is probably not a common today anymore than >4 was a few years ago; but for power users using a laptop as their primary computer it probably will be in a few more years.
With IVBs improved boost levels the gap between ULV and standard mobile/desktop processors has gotten much narrower. On the road thermal throttling will limit sustained peak boost times somewhat; but when it's on a desk an external cooling pad can mitigate the heating.
At least on my MacBook Air, I nearly constantly bump up into the 8GB RAM limitations. All I really need to have open are Xcode, VMWare Fusion and a few Chrome windows.
I agree, If you are going to do that level of intense work you will want a nice 22"+ 1080p monitor, full keyboard, and a mouse. This is why I don't think desktop computing will disappear, we will probably loose the big tower but not everything else.
PS this is also why metro will stink for productivity. You can't have a large monitor with multiple windows spread out on it. MS is going to shut this crowd out.
Would be nice if the price was 900.00. At this price, one could get a windows tablet and a conventional laptop for heavier use. Or you could get a nice gaming laptop. Or a MacBook Air.
For someone on the go though, like a student, I could see paying the price. Wonder what battery life is like?
I got to play with one of these for a day setting it up for one of our users... REally great laptop in every way except the screen. The res was great at 1080p, but still a crappy screen. Like most Dell internal LCD's it was too dim even at max brightness and the colors were washed out. IT looked like a TN panel to me.
I thought the same thing when my colleague got his the other day. Both him and me were appalled by the horribly low brightness. We tried maxing the brightness on the laptop, in Windows power management settings and in another location (don't remember exactly where). It wasn't until we entered the advanced settings for the power scheme and disabled a power saving setting under the monitor section that we got full brightness. And boy is it bright! It's considerably brighter than my Mac Book Air at max.
Comparing the colors to a 27" Dell U2713HM, the XPS 13 looks excellent as well. So, no, this is definitely not a crappy display.
Did you read the article? This thing achieves 477cd/m² which is nearly enough to operate in full sunlight. It also says that by default the option for the adaptive brightness is on. If you don't disable that in the energy options, you will not be able to get the real brightness. *facepalm*
chill out man. I did all that and had it at absolute max brightness in the driver as well as power settings and and the physical controls on the keyboard and it was still shitty. Maybe an anomaly.
Isn't winblue "barf" a new windows version. I think I heard windows wants to lesson service pack roll outs and increase the rate of windows version roll outs. Which is fine but they need to have pricing similar to OS X releases at that point.
Sorry, but 1080p is no longer enough. I'm tired of PCs being held back by the restrictions of a television standard that dates back to 1995. After using my iPad 4 for a while, reading text on a PC looks smeared and pixelated. If Google and Samsung can manage to put a 2560x1600 panel in the $399 Nexus 10, then why on earth can't laptop vendors do it in a $1,299 ultrabook? The only excuses I've heard are that people are too stupid to find the DPI setting or that some poorly-designed apps don't respect it. So why should everyone be punished for these shortfalls?
To my eyes 1080p looks great, even on my 22" monitor. My 1366x768 laptop doesn't even bother me that much but I could see 1080p as being a huge improvement.
I don't have a problem with the pixel density here. But i am annoyed by the trend of 16x9 displays. People who do work on computers are scrolling up and down. Vertical Resolution is king, and the wide screen doesn't help there. I would much prefer 16x10 displays with the pixel density of this Dell laptop.
IMHO 1080p on a 13" laptop isn't that great because windows is still utter crap in term of font size vs resolution. Works for Touch Screen UIs like on iOS or Android or Modern UI but not normal desktop windows. Increasing font dpi in windows is entering a world of hurt.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Too many app developers don't bother supporting high-DPI settings because not many people currently have the necessary display technology installed, and manufacturers then use the poor state of software support as a justification for not offering the displays. It's sort of like the state of Windows security before Microsoft finally got around to putting UAC in place: everyone knew that requiring programs to run as admin was bad practice, but software developers didn't care because it was easier not to bother with security and everyone else was doing the same thing.
Windows 7 has good support for DPI scaling. But there are some things that no third-party system is going to be able to do. If the app developer only provides fixed-size bitmap resources, the OS can't magically make those scale perfectly and create information that isn't there. Apple got around this by making each block of 4 real pixels equivalent to 1 old-size pixel, so that if scaling wasn't properly supported, simple pixel doubling could be used and it would look exactly the same to the end user as on an older system. It's harder to do this kind of transparency with non-integral scaling factors. Once we get reasonably sized, affordable quad-HD monitors (3840x2160) perhaps a similar feature can be added to Windows.
The intel 6235 is a wifi/Bluetooth card with BT 4.0 not 3.0. I know cause its the same one I put into my laptop. It's a good card and much better than what usually gets put into into laptops. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/wireless-pr... You can see BT 4 low energy on the website
"Despite operating at roughly the same clocks, the Ivy Bridge i5-3337U runs absolutely roughshod on last generation's high end i7-2637M."
That's where the real benefits of Intel 22 nm process show up: at low to medium voltages much higher frequencies are possible now, which means the Ivy ULV can hit considerably higher Turbo bins than Sandy ULV, despite featuring comparable clock speeds on paper.
"Dell XPS 13 (Q1 2013) Ultrabook Review: What a Difference 1080p Makes"
You make it sound as if it's "1080p" making the difference, whereas each and every positive aspect you quote is caused by the display being (supposedly) IPS. What about that ultra-high pixel density, now with Win 8 being a few months old? I know fonts will look crisp and everyone is crying for it now.. but what about the drawbacks? Still there? Any other answer than "well, it depends on your software, obviously"?
Shortfalls of this laptop IMO: 1. Vent on the bottom getting blocked. I'm rarely at a desk on my LAPtop. 2. No SD Card or HDMI out 3. No dedicated Home/End/PageUp/PageDown 4. 16x9 screen dimensions aren't optimal at this price point. 16x10 would be preferred.
Frankly I'd like to see a XPS 14 that had this same look and feel as this XPS13 but with the above issues fixed.
Why do you need HDMI? It has mini-DP which you can easily dongle to HDMI. Plus DP supports higher resolutions than HDMI's maximum of 1080p.
My complaint would be that it should have *two* mini-DPs so I can drive two higher-than-1080p external monitors (as the chipset allows) when not working mobile.
+1 to the various complaints about the vent, crappy touchpad and lack of 16:10/1200p option. It beggars belief that I am typing this on a 6-7 year old Dell laptop purely because it has a 16:10/1200p screen and a great touchpad, areas in which Dell etc have gone so far backwards since then. Which unfortunately also leaves me stuck with its Pentium-M CPU and 2GB RAM, and unable to take advantage of the great strides that Intel and DRAM/Flash vendors have made in in getting the guts of these machines up to scratch in the same period.
Come on Dell get your act together. Its not like your sales are booming and you can afford to ignore the professional part of the market (or those who just want to see more vertical space in their desktop and web pages). The casual user side of the market (those who originally wanted the now ubiquitous 16:9 1080p for their light browsing and movies) has spoken, and they increasingly want phones, phablets and tablets anyway, hitting your sales. So get back to thinking about us!
while having to tolerate its Pentium-M CPU. All because Dell etc have gone so far backwards in that time, I can't buy a product with the former features all these years later
Why does every computer manufacturer insist on removing the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys from their keyboards these days? It sure makes life for developers and writers miserable. And Fn+Arrow keys doesn't count... it makes it a two-handed operation, which becomes very difficult when doing multi-key combinations like Control+Home or Control+Shift+End.
After being pretty disapointed with current crop of Win8 convertibles, I decided to get this machine for uni. Generally I agree with the review which is pretty spot on. It is hard to convey just how frustrating the trackpad experience really is, must be one of the worst trackpads I have ever used. Except for that I think it is one of the best ultrabooks on offer at the moment albeit a few shortcomings (SD card reader and lack of dedicated home row are the 2 things that jump to mind the most). The keyboard (as well as the screen) should be mentioned as top performers IMO.
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DanNeely - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
"t should surprise no one that the RAM is soldered to the board; there's also a black sticker layer that sits between the mSATA SSD and the inside of the bottom panel. It's good to know that you can replace the mSATA drive and wireless card, though, should you need to/desire to."Is there anyone who's more interested in swapping the wifi card than they would have been in upgrading the ram in a few years? The former's something that IMO should have been at the top of the list when looking for ways to shave a few cubic mm.
moep - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Dell is more interested in selling you a new laptop than letting you swap the RAM, so that’s that.baldun - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
The problem is not integrating the WiFi card to the motherboard. The problem is with regulatory for each country. If the WiFi card is with antenna connectors, then the regulatory certification is handled by the card vendor, in this case Intel, paying millions of dollars to every country where they want to sell the card. If the WiFi is integrated in the motherboard, then the regulatory will be handled by Dell. Regulatory certification is all about where the antenna connectors are.nportelli - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Agreed. That goes for ANY manufacturer. 8GB ram should be the minimal anymore. Same for 1080p.Silma - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Absolutely. If RAM is soldered then it should be 8GB RAM at the very least.There may be some cons to 1080p in a few situations (touchscreens with items too small to accurately touch) but I'm betting on Microsoft improving Windows pixel scaling soon.
Ideally I would vote for 1200p, which I have had for many years on my Dell Laptops but unfortunately it's out of fashion.
jeffkro - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
You should be able to increase the size of icons and text without lowering the screen resolution, this is bad design.jeffkro - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
Nope, lower spec is fine for a low price point. Windows 7 and 8 both run great on 4 gigs of ram, so only people who run ram intensive programs require 8gigs. But yeah if I'm spending over $700 I want core i5, 1080p, and 8 gigs of ram, and I don't care about touch.PS win7 even runs fine on 2 gigs of ram.
GNUminex - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
I may just be sheltered from the reality of windows use as a result of using Linux, but I find it hard to see why any one would need more than 8GB of ram when using a current generation ULV processor. I don't see how you could run the sort of work load to eat up 8GB of ram with out being CPU limited first. If you try to just have lots of applications open and idling I guess you could run into ram limitations but is anyone going to do such a thing on a 13" laptop.DanNeely - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Needing >8GB is probably not a common today anymore than >4 was a few years ago; but for power users using a laptop as their primary computer it probably will be in a few more years.With IVBs improved boost levels the gap between ULV and standard mobile/desktop processors has gotten much narrower. On the road thermal throttling will limit sustained peak boost times somewhat; but when it's on a desk an external cooling pad can mitigate the heating.
bkiserx7 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
I do on my 13.3" 3830TG with 2630qm, but I have much more cpuExelius - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
At least on my MacBook Air, I nearly constantly bump up into the 8GB RAM limitations. All I really need to have open are Xcode, VMWare Fusion and a few Chrome windows.jeffkro - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
I agree, If you are going to do that level of intense work you will want a nice 22"+ 1080p monitor, full keyboard, and a mouse. This is why I don't think desktop computing will disappear, we will probably loose the big tower but not everything else.jeffkro - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
PS this is also why metro will stink for productivity. You can't have a large monitor with multiple windows spread out on it. MS is going to shut this crowd out.jeffkro - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
The life of a laptop is a few years, buy, use, forget about it.frozentundra123456 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Would be nice if the price was 900.00. At this price, one could get a windows tablet and a conventional laptop for heavier use. Or you could get a nice gaming laptop. Or a MacBook Air.For someone on the go though, like a student, I could see paying the price. Wonder what battery life is like?
retrospooty - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
I got to play with one of these for a day setting it up for one of our users... REally great laptop in every way except the screen. The res was great at 1080p, but still a crappy screen. Like most Dell internal LCD's it was too dim even at max brightness and the colors were washed out. IT looked like a TN panel to me.Brunnis - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
I thought the same thing when my colleague got his the other day. Both him and me were appalled by the horribly low brightness. We tried maxing the brightness on the laptop, in Windows power management settings and in another location (don't remember exactly where). It wasn't until we entered the advanced settings for the power scheme and disabled a power saving setting under the monitor section that we got full brightness. And boy is it bright! It's considerably brighter than my Mac Book Air at max.Comparing the colors to a 27" Dell U2713HM, the XPS 13 looks excellent as well. So, no, this is definitely not a crappy display.
Death666Angel - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Did you read the article? This thing achieves 477cd/m² which is nearly enough to operate in full sunlight. It also says that by default the option for the adaptive brightness is on. If you don't disable that in the energy options, you will not be able to get the real brightness. *facepalm*retrospooty - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
chill out man. I did all that and had it at absolute max brightness in the driver as well as power settings and and the physical controls on the keyboard and it was still shitty. Maybe an anomaly.ghm3 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
"Windows 8 64-bit SP1"That was fast... Isn't this due in August or something? (which is still less than a year...)
edwpang - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Is there Win8 Sp1? or it's called WinBlue?Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
I told myself I'd fix that in the chart.And then totally didn't do it.
Well it's fixed now!
jeffkro - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
Isn't winblue "barf" a new windows version. I think I heard windows wants to lesson service pack roll outs and increase the rate of windows version roll outs. Which is fine but they need to have pricing similar to OS X releases at that point.robvas - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
I can't believe a big deal wasn't made about the short battery life. Dell falls almost 3 hours short of the 13" MacBook Air.MrSpadge - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
You did notice that it's a new test, where every unit will score much lower than previously, didn't you?jeffkibuule - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
People don't seen to read anymore.nerd1 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
My MBA13 won't last more than 5hrs.tipoo - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
It's a new far more intensive test with the screen brightness up and so on. I'd like to see the MBAs tested with the new method.JDG1980 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Sorry, but 1080p is no longer enough. I'm tired of PCs being held back by the restrictions of a television standard that dates back to 1995. After using my iPad 4 for a while, reading text on a PC looks smeared and pixelated. If Google and Samsung can manage to put a 2560x1600 panel in the $399 Nexus 10, then why on earth can't laptop vendors do it in a $1,299 ultrabook? The only excuses I've heard are that people are too stupid to find the DPI setting or that some poorly-designed apps don't respect it. So why should everyone be punished for these shortfalls?retrospooty - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
" So why should everyone be punished for these shortfalls?"I like high res too, but 1080p is pretty good for a 13 inch laptop. How exactly are you being punished? If you dont like it, dont buy it.
jeffkro - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
To my eyes 1080p looks great, even on my 22" monitor. My 1366x768 laptop doesn't even bother me that much but I could see 1080p as being a huge improvement.wicketr - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
I don't have a problem with the pixel density here. But i am annoyed by the trend of 16x9 displays. People who do work on computers are scrolling up and down. Vertical Resolution is king, and the wide screen doesn't help there. I would much prefer 16x10 displays with the pixel density of this Dell laptop.robvas - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Google did it with the Pixel.beginner99 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
IMHO 1080p on a 13" laptop isn't that great because windows is still utter crap in term of font size vs resolution. Works for Touch Screen UIs like on iOS or Android or Modern UI but not normal desktop windows. Increasing font dpi in windows is entering a world of hurt.JDG1980 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Too many app developers don't bother supporting high-DPI settings because not many people currently have the necessary display technology installed, and manufacturers then use the poor state of software support as a justification for not offering the displays. It's sort of like the state of Windows security before Microsoft finally got around to putting UAC in place: everyone knew that requiring programs to run as admin was bad practice, but software developers didn't care because it was easier not to bother with security and everyone else was doing the same thing.Windows 7 has good support for DPI scaling. But there are some things that no third-party system is going to be able to do. If the app developer only provides fixed-size bitmap resources, the OS can't magically make those scale perfectly and create information that isn't there. Apple got around this by making each block of 4 real pixels equivalent to 1 old-size pixel, so that if scaling wasn't properly supported, simple pixel doubling could be used and it would look exactly the same to the end user as on an older system. It's harder to do this kind of transparency with non-integral scaling factors. Once we get reasonably sized, affordable quad-HD monitors (3840x2160) perhaps a similar feature can be added to Windows.
nerd1 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
That's actually NOT true. OSX got rid of UI scaling AFAIK (It didn't work very well anyway) and the only scaling they provide is 2X (for retina MBPs).yllanos - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Cool Starfleet logoZeratul56 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
The intel 6235 is a wifi/Bluetooth card with BT 4.0 not 3.0. I know cause its the same one I put into my laptop. It's a good card and much better than what usually gets put into into laptops.http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/wireless-pr...
You can see BT 4 low energy on the website
MrSpadge - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
"Despite operating at roughly the same clocks, the Ivy Bridge i5-3337U runs absolutely roughshod on last generation's high end i7-2637M."That's where the real benefits of Intel 22 nm process show up: at low to medium voltages much higher frequencies are possible now, which means the Ivy ULV can hit considerably higher Turbo bins than Sandy ULV, despite featuring comparable clock speeds on paper.
MrSpadge - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
"Dell XPS 13 (Q1 2013) Ultrabook Review: What a Difference 1080p Makes"You make it sound as if it's "1080p" making the difference, whereas each and every positive aspect you quote is caused by the display being (supposedly) IPS. What about that ultra-high pixel density, now with Win 8 being a few months old? I know fonts will look crisp and everyone is crying for it now.. but what about the drawbacks? Still there? Any other answer than "well, it depends on your software, obviously"?
wicketr - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Shortfalls of this laptop IMO:1. Vent on the bottom getting blocked. I'm rarely at a desk on my LAPtop.
2. No SD Card or HDMI out
3. No dedicated Home/End/PageUp/PageDown
4. 16x9 screen dimensions aren't optimal at this price point. 16x10 would be preferred.
Frankly I'd like to see a XPS 14 that had this same look and feel as this XPS13 but with the above issues fixed.
jeffkibuule - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
16:10 has sailed. 16:9 won. End of story. Move on. Sorry.Modernape - Friday, April 5, 2013 - link
Except the MacBooks, which are all 16:10 apart from the 11"NeBlackCat - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
Why do you need HDMI? It has mini-DP which you can easily dongle to HDMI. Plus DP supports higher resolutions than HDMI's maximum of 1080p.My complaint would be that it should have *two* mini-DPs so I can drive two higher-than-1080p external monitors (as the chipset allows) when not working mobile.
+1 to the various complaints about the vent, crappy touchpad and lack of 16:10/1200p option. It beggars belief that I am typing this on a 6-7 year old Dell laptop purely because it has a 16:10/1200p screen and a great touchpad, areas in which Dell etc have gone so far backwards since then. Which unfortunately also leaves me stuck with its Pentium-M CPU and 2GB RAM, and unable to take advantage of the great strides that Intel and DRAM/Flash vendors have made in in getting the guts of these machines up to scratch in the same period.
Come on Dell get your act together. Its not like your sales are booming and you can afford to ignore the professional part of the market (or those who just want to see more vertical space in their desktop and web pages). The casual user side of the market (those who originally wanted the now ubiquitous 16:9 1080p for their light browsing and movies) has spoken, and they increasingly want phones, phablets and tablets anyway, hitting your sales. So get back to thinking about us!
while having to tolerate its Pentium-M CPU. All because Dell etc have gone so far backwards in that time, I can't buy a product with the former features all these years later
NeBlackCat - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
oops, last time was a mis-edit.NeBlackCat - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
oops, that should have been "last line" damn these tiny pixels... ;-)Can we have an edit function Anand?
doubledeej - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Why does every computer manufacturer insist on removing the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys from their keyboards these days? It sure makes life for developers and writers miserable. And Fn+Arrow keys doesn't count... it makes it a two-handed operation, which becomes very difficult when doing multi-key combinations like Control+Home or Control+Shift+End.Th-z - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Windows 8 SP1? It must be a typo.darwinosx - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Who cares about 1080p? Where are the retina display PV laptops? Also you couldn't give me a Dell.Mitch89 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
The comm badge on the Acer wouldn't happen to be from the TNG VCR board game would it?Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
Why yes, yes it is!Mitch89 - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - link
Haha awesome!!!AncientWisdom - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - link
After being pretty disapointed with current crop of Win8 convertibles, I decided to get this machine for uni. Generally I agree with the review which is pretty spot on. It is hard to convey just how frustrating the trackpad experience really is, must be one of the worst trackpads I have ever used. Except for that I think it is one of the best ultrabooks on offer at the moment albeit a few shortcomings (SD card reader and lack of dedicated home row are the 2 things that jump to mind the most).The keyboard (as well as the screen) should be mentioned as top performers IMO.