Dell XPS 13 (Q1 2013) Ultrabook Review: What a Difference 1080p Makes

Conclusion: Generations Change

I don't think I'm out of line for being disappointed that the fundamental flaws of the Dell XPS 13's chassis design that I cited a year ago haven't really changed. Maybe I'm the only person that uses Intel's Quick Sync, but I've found it to be a tremendously useful tool in the field as a videographer just for making it easy to hand off YouTube ready clips to anyone who wants them, and the lack of an SD card reader in the XPS 13 is aggravating. Personally I'd rather have that than the battery meter on the right side, but maybe that's just me.

The bottom vent continues to be an awful idea that's still regularly implemented in ultrabooks and notebooks. A system this light should be pretty portable and usable wherever, and a bottom vent really flies in the face of that. The bumped feet on the bottom of the notebook just aren't enough to keep that vent clear on any soft surface.

Finally, the clickpad's performance under Windows 8 leaves an awful lot to be desired. Gestures that were easy to perform even on the budget Acer Aspire V5-171 are difficult to do consistently on the XPS 13's pad

Obviously what I'm trying to get at is that the XPS 13's chassis still needs work, almost every bit as much as it did in 2012, and we're not in the business of handing out awards for companies that stand still. The XPS 13 is an attractive ultrabook and certainly distinctive compared to the competition, but there's a lot of room for improvement that was essentially ignored in the refresh. The best we can hope for is that Dell will revisit the XPS 13 again soon and fix the existing problems.

Of course, for all my griping, Dell still did an awful lot right with the newer XPS 13. They benefit handily from the improvements Intel made with their 7 series chipsets, but especially with the improvements from Ivy Bridge. The primary benefit of Ivy Bridge in both notebooks and on desktops hasn't been raising the performance ceiling, but lifting the floor. At the top, in the quad cores, you get a minor bump in IPC and clocks, but the HD 4000 is less relevant. Down here in the ultrabook/notebook sector, though, both IPC and clock bumps see larger improvements, and HD 4000 throws a haymaker at Sandy Bridge's HD 3000.

Hardware historically has a proof of concept generation that precedes the generation where that concept's potential is essentially fulfilled, and that's evident here with the two XPS 13s. Sandy Bridge fulfilled the promise of quad core CPUs in notebooks where Clarksfield merely proved it could be done affordably, and Ivy Bridge fulfills the promise of powerful CPUs in ultrabooks where Sandy Bridge merely proved it could at least be done.

Dell can't really take credit for Intel's achievements here, but they do themselves a major solid in offering a 1080p IPS display in the XPS 13. High quality displays are vital to the continued survival of notebooks as a collective species, but especially to ultrabooks, whose market can be encroached upon by the x86 tablets that will undoubtedly share shelf space with them. The ASUS Eee Pad's keyboard dock was far ahead of its time and dockable tablets are proving to be very popular. When I see a notebook come through that uses a ULV processor from Intel, has no dedicated graphics, and employs a crappy display, that's a notebook that could be very easily eaten alive by a convertible tablet.

The changes under the hood coupled with the pristine display give Dell's current generation XPS 13 a fighting chance in the ultrabook market. The crappy 720p display of old is only available on the entry-level $999 XPS 13; starting at $1,299, they all have the 1080p one. Our $1,399 model is solid, but the sweet spot in Dell's lineup is actually the $1,299 version, featuring the i7-3537U, 8GB of DDR3L, and the 128GB SSD. This model is price competitive (if not better) on NewEgg with everything but the entry level ASUS Zenbook Prime, but Dell smartly includes 8GB of DDR3 instead of the more common 4GB, an important distinction when you can't upgrade the system memory.

We're not at Editor's Choice level yet (the chassis design needs to be fixed for that), but at least the Dell XPS 13 is now far, far easier to recommend.