Dell XPS 13 Plus (2023) Review

What do you call the flagship of a flagship? A year ago, Dell introduced an even more premium version of its legendary ultraportable the Dell XPS 13. The first Dell XPS 13 Plus flaunted an edge-to-edge keyboard with elegant LED function keys and an invisible touchpad. Today's second-generation XPS 13 Plus model 9320 (starts at $1,199; $1,499 as tested) is the same slick design with a 13th Generation Intel processor and a spiffy OLED screen. It's a flashy status symbol, but its lack of ports and battery life keep it from toppling the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 and HP Pavilion Plus 14 as our Editors' Choice holders.

Actually Pretty Affordable 

Available in silvery Platinum or dark gray Graphite machined aluminum, the XPS 13 Plus is one of the most attractive laptops you can buy. The bezels around the 13.4-inch display are ultra-thin, with Dell citing a 91.9% screen-to-body ratio. Meanwhile, the palm rest is a single pane of glass with no lines or buttons to mark the touchpad, and the zero-lattice keyboard has no spacing between its slightly enlarged keys.

Plus, the top row of function keys is absent. In its place is a capacitive touch strip with glowing LEDs that show volume, brightness, microphone mute, and other controls. (Pressing Fn+Esc toggles them to F1 through F12, as on many laptops.)

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The ultraportable measures 0.6 by 11.6 by 7.8 inches and weighs 2.71 pounds with an IPS screen, or 2.77 pounds with an OLED panel. That's the same weight and a hair thicker (but otherwise trimmer) than the 13.6-inch Apple MacBook Air (0.44 by 12 by 8.5 inches). The 13.3-inch Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED is about the Apple's size but half a pound lighter than the XPS 13 Plus. 

Dell's $1,199 base model comes with an Intel Core i7-1360P processor, 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, Windows 11 Home, and a non-touch IPS screen with 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution. Opting for a touch screen adds $100, as does stepping up to a 1TB SSD. (A 2TB drive is $150 beyond that.) Windows 11 Pro adds $50. Doubling the RAM to 32GB is $150.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The Intel Core i7-1360P (four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 16 threads) is the only CPU choice. It's notable because most ultraportables opt for one of Intel's 15-watt (W) U-series chips; the P-series draw 28W, packing more performance while posing more of a cooling challenge.

For $200 more than the full HD touch screen, you can choose either of two touch-capable upgrades with the same 16:10 aspect ratio: a 3,840-by-2,400-pixel IPS display rated at 500 nits of brightness or our test unit's slightly dimmer (400-nit), slightly lower-resolution (3,456-by-2,160) panel with ultra-high-contrast OLED technology. With the OLED screen, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage, our review model rang up at $1,499 when we wrote this (a “Christmas in July” sale, down from $1,699). 

The XPS 13 Plus has both a fingerprint reader built into the power button and a face recognition webcam for password-free Windows Hello logins. But, like the MacBook Air, it's short on ports: All you get are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one on each side. The AC adapter also uses a USB-C connector, further limiting port availability.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

That means no USB Type-A, no HDMI, no Ethernet, no SD or microSD card slot, no available 4G or 5G mobile broadband—not even a headphone jack. The system has Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth, and you can plug an external monitor into a USB-C DisplayPort dongle. Plus, Dell puts USB-A and 3.5mm audio adapters in the box. But the X1 Carbon's six ports plus optional WWAN put the XPS 13 Plus to shame.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

A Not-So-Cheap Camera 

Along with its modern-art keyboard, the OLED touch screen is this laptop's prime attraction. It's definitely bright enough, with rich and vivid colors. (The display came in at just under its rated 400 nits in our testing, but OLED's sky-high contrast means we're satisfied with lower numbers than we ask of IPS panels.)

White backgrounds appear scrubbed by Mr. Clean himself, and blacks are India ink. Viewing angles are broad, and fine details are sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. The minuscule bezels make sure nothing detracts from the enjoyable view, though the screen doesn't tilt back quite as far as I'd like.

The XPS 13 Plus has a decidedly retro 720p webcam instead of the 1080p or higher resolution we look for nowadays, but its images are actually quite decent—well-lit and colorful, with minimal static. A special-effects option lets you blur the background, but it puts a fuzzy halo around you. While the webcam is capable of face recognition, it unfortunately has no security shutter. 

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Maxx Audio Pro software provides an equalizer and bass, treble, and high dials for tinkering with sound from the quad speakers (two upward-firing beneath the keyboard, and two downward-firing on the sides). Sound is fairly loud and clean, but with some boom or echo at high volume, while bass is minimal, and you can barely make out overlapping tracks. 

The keyboard is all right, but it gives your digits the feeling it was built more for looks than utility. Ridges on the F and J keys help you place your fingers on the home row but, with only thin slits separating the keys, it takes some time to feel comfortable. Relax and trust your typing, and you'll actually make few if any errors, but the keys seem to blend or blur together. The typing feel is comfortable but extremely shallow. As with too many laptops, the cursor arrow keys are in an awkward row instead of inverted T, and you must pair the up and down arrows with the Fn key for Page Up and Page Down, though you'll find dedicated Home and End keys on the top LED row.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Similarly, the borderless, buttonless touchpad takes a little getting used to. It actually glides and taps quite well with haptic feedback, but your fingers may slip past its unseen edges a few times, and right-clicking feels like guesswork. But as with the keyboard, just tap where you'd guess the right-click button would be, and you'll be fine nine times out of 10. 

An included MyDell app can launch Maxx Audio Pro, allow you to choose bright, dark, or vivid Dolby Vision screen profiles and power/cooling modes, and control webcam presence detection to lock and wake the system as you leave and return. SupportAssist software handles driver updates, performance and network optimization, and clutter removal, as well as listing warranty information. A 12-month McAfee LiveSafe subscription fights malware.

Testing the Dell XPS 13 Plus: Competing for the Featherweight Title

For our benchmark charts, we pitted the XPS 13 Plus model 9320 against premier ultraportables: Lenovo's 14-inch ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 and Apple's 13.6-inch MacBook Air M2. Two 13.3-inch direct competitors—each lighter than the Dell at 2.2 pounds—are the MSI Prestige 13 Evo, which has the same price and processor as the XPS 13 Plus but settles for a lower-resolution IPS display, and the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED, which comes packing a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel OLED panel.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while HandBrake 1.4 is an open-source video transcoder we use to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Geekbench by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. 

Finally, we test content-creation chops with PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, an automated extension to Adobe's Creative Cloud image editor. It executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated tasks ranging from opening, rotating, and resizing an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Judging by their PCMark 10 scores, these ultraportables are overqualified for everyday apps like Microsoft Word and Excel. The XPS 13 Plus joined the Prestige 13 Evo and MacBook Air at the head of our CPU tests in most cases, but missed out on a few first-place wins. Regardless, its speed and screen make the XPS 13 Plus an ideal choice for Photoshop image editing. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

To further measure GPUs, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Apple M2 chip's integrated graphics comfortably topped the Intel Core i7's GPU inside the XPS 13 Plus, but neither comes close to the 3D performance of a dedicated GPU. These light laptops are fine for casual gaming and video streaming, but not suitable for shoot-em-ups or workstation-level rendering. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Our review rating fell from four to three and a half stars at this point. Even admitting that the top-row LEDs don't turn off with the rest of the keyboard lighting, its battery life is far short of today's ultraportable standard. Its extra-bright OLED screen gets some of the blame (and joins the Asus and Apple in nailing our color quality tests), but unfortunately the XPS 13 Plus won't get you through a full day's work unplugged.

Verdict: Cute and Compact, But at the Cost of Convenience 

The Dell XPS 13 Plus is an attractive laptop, even a stunning one when you admire its trim size, glorious high-res OLED touch screen, and seamless palm rest. However, unless you settle for the base IPS screen, this XPS's battery life is sadly just not competitive with other ultraportables, and its lack of ports beyond Thunderbolt is a nuisance, adapters notwithstanding. The Dell earns more points for style than for execution, but the Plus needs more pluses than this for another chance at the top spot.