Dell XPS 13 Plus Review

Year in and year out, the XPS 13 is consistently one of our highest rated laptops, but not content to rest on its laurels, Dell undertook a forward-looking redesign of its flagship ultraportable. The result of this project, the XPS 13 Plus (starts at $1,299; $1,949 as tested), certainly looks the part. At just a glance, its edge-to-edge flush keyboard, LED function row, and seamless touchpad appear futuristic. The device is, simply, super-sweet eye candy.

Most of these elements work, but between a somewhat finicky touchpad and the removal of the headset jack, the XPS 13 Plus isn’t necessarily an improvement on all fronts. Still, its pricing for the base model is reasonable, given the unique super-slim build, and the Core i7 CPU and so-called “3.5K” OLED display in our model make for a well-performing beauty. The traditional XPS 13 (and some competing alternatives) still take our top spots and will continue to be sold separately, but this attempt at innovation is both intriguing and a qualified success.

The Design: Meet the XPS of the Future

The traditional XPS 13’s design is something we’re well familiar with at PCMag, having reviewed many iterations of it over the years. If you’re less well acquainted with it than we are, the highlights are a slim build with a metal lid, a carbon fiber keyboard deck, and a nearly borderless display. All combine for a highly portable, premium feel. In short, it’s as close as Windows machines get to the Apple MacBook Air.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

That makes a rethink of the same base design exciting, and it’s immediately clear what the XPS 13 Plus has changed versus the “standard” XPS 13. As I wrote in my initial hands-on with the Plus back in January, it strives to look like a laptop beamed in from the future. The fully flat wrist-rest strip, with no visible touchpad, the flush keyboard with no lattice between the keys, and the LED function row are all elements that tweak our traditional expectations of laptop design.

Before getting into the details and function of these alterations, I should emphasize: The design is striking, especially the first time you see it. It may wear off on subsequent views—none of those changes truly reinvents the use or purpose of these elements, mostly just the appearance—but the XPS 13 Plus remains a sleek eye-catcher. Our unit is the platinum color, but it also comes in a much darker graphite option.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Despite the differences, the signature slim build is still intact. The XPS 13 Plus measures 0.6 by 11.63 by 7.84 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.77 pounds. (The non-OLED model is a few feathers lighter, at 2.71 pounds.) This is extremely similar to the existing OLED XPS 13 (9310), which comes in at 0.58 by 11.6 by 7.8 inches and 2.8 pounds. The design changes have not altered the footprint or weight much, leaving this system as a slick little ultraportable.

Now, let’s dive in to each of the major design changes.

Reinventing the Keyboard Deck: An Invisible Touchpad, and Much More

The most different aspect is the touchpad, embedded in a single piece of glass running across the whole wrist rest. There is no demarcation of where the active area actually is, which is likely to be divisive (though it does look and feel cool to use). When you first open the box, a paper insert marks where the sides of the touchpad lie, but after you remove that, you’re on your own.

Generally, I didn’t find this to be an issue. The touchpad boundaries are pretty much directly under the spacebar, which is where I naturally put my hand and where I expect the touchpad to be, anyway. Now and then, my hand moves or starts too far beyond the boundaries, but rarely. Right-clicking is probably what suffers most from this lack of a border, as I occasionally pressed too far to the right (that is, off the pad) while trying to find the right corner without looking.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

I generally found the touchpad’s responsiveness to be good, but making presses and clicks were more troublesome than the location-finding. There were times where I didn’t mean to, say, click-to-drag on the desktop, but was apparently exerting enough pressure to register a held press. The opposite happened, as well.

It worked most of the time, but if a touchpad can’t match the 100% hit rate of a traditional one, it’s going to be noticeable. The line between pressing and dragging when you only intended to pan is just a bit too fine. Overall, this aspect looks cool and mostly works well, but it isn’t a functional improvement over the ordinary XPS 13.

Next, the keyboard and function row. The fully flush keys and LED row forward of it add to the futuristic look of this laptop, something like a prop computer you may see in a sci-fi series. The upside of having that row for the keyboard is that the key caps are larger, providing more typing area. It takes some getting used to—the positioning is slightly different from standard laptops, because the lack of a lattice between the keys changes the spacing—but I found the extra room to be a positive after adjusting to it.

As for the typing feel, I can see that aspect being more divisive. Myself, I find it oddly satisfying, and I say “oddly” because the feedback falls somewhere between a click and a soft press that may not be to everyone’s liking. The feeling and relatively shallow travel may be too mushy for some users, and it’s no replacement for mechanical key switches, but I found it pleasant overall.

The LED row also feels cool to use. By default, these backlight symbols show up as screen and media-control keys, including volume, mic control, and brightness. Expect no physical buttons or textures here to mark the keys; they’re completely flat and flush with the keyboard deck. But they still respond to my finger taps every time I press them. If you have any concerns, you don’t need to worry—unlike the touchpad, they work as intended every time.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

You’ll notice, though, that the layout lacks dedicated function (“F”) keys. If you hold the physical “Fn” key in the bottom left corner of the keyboard, the LEDs up top will switch to the traditional numbered function row, so you can tap F-keys as needed. If you’d rather this behavior be the default for the LED row rather than the media keys, you can tap the persistent “Escape” LED button while holding Fn to lock the LED row to that view instead, and vice versa. (Whenever you’re holding the Fn key, a lock symbol appears next to the “Esc” icon in the LED row to indicate this feature.)

One small negative is that the lighting on this row is always on. Even when running on battery, and even when you turn the keyboard backlighting off, these LEDs stay lit, which can be intrusive in the dark.

The main concern with making major changes to classic UI elements is making sure they still work, and in that, the XPS 13 Plus is mostly successful. It may not have the best laptop keyboard we’ve used, but it provides a roomy typing experience on a compact laptop—and, hopefully, future revisions will make it even better.

The LED row looks cool and works perfectly well, but it’s the no-boundaries touchpad that stops the input-device rework from being a full success. While I don’t want to overstate it—panning and pressing work the vast majority of the time—any crucial component on a laptop acting even a little finicky is a negative.

A Brilliant OLED Display, But Limited Connectivity

Part of the XPS 13’s top-notch design is its nearly edge-to-edge display, called InfinityEdge in Dell parlance. That’s maintained on the XPS 13 Plus, too, and if it hadn’t been, the streamlined look would have been greatly diminished. The bezels are tiny, making this 13.4-inch display look as big as possible on the compact form. The aspect ratio is such that the resolutions are not what you’re used to, meaning the 4K and the full HD equivalents, for example, are 3,840 by 2,400 pixels and 1,920 by 1,200 pixels, respectively.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

There are naturally a few panel options, and we were sent the most stunning of the bunch, a “3.5K” (3,456 by 2,160 pixels) OLED touch panel. The display is vibrant, crisp, and fairly bright. It’s rated at 500 nits, though we found it measured 354 at maximum brightness in our testing (formatted results are in the testing section below). Colors pop to an extreme degree with OLED, and you’ll probably be hesitant to go back to a non-OLED panel after using one; this is no exception.

The other panel options include the FHD equivalent in both touch and non-touch variants, as well as the 4K touch display. The 4K panel is DisplayHDR 400 compliant, the 3.5K panel is DisplayHDR 500 compliant, and all panels feature Dolby Vision and Eyesafe technology.

What remains is one of the more divisive aspects of the redesign. The laptop has only two physical ports, both USB-C connections, one on each side, both with Thunderbolt 4 support. A small, easy-to-lose USB-C-to-A adapter is included in the box.

I do mean that these are the only two ports of any kind: The laptop uses USB-C for charging, and there is no headphone jack. That choice is a bold one, and a consequence of the super-slim design. Recognizing this, Dell also includes a USB-C-to-3.5mm-headset adapter in the box.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The lack of a jack for the slimmer design is a conscious tradeoff; Dell figures that the type of shopper the XPS 13 Plus is aimed at is the same shopper already embedded in a world of wireless earbuds and jackless iPhones. This may be true for some, but a headphone jack is something you’d really like at least the option to use.

If your earbuds die, or you need to be charging them rather than using them for when you get on the road again, there’s no replacing a wired option. I personally do own wireless earbuds (mostly for commuting and travel), but prefer wired sets when I’m at a computer—I know I’m going to be sitting for a long period draining the battery, and prefer to save juice for the road.

Some people may be able to overlook this (as many do with their phones these days), while others may find it a deal breaker. While I can see the logic in embracing this modern design, I don’t think the compromise is worth what it adds to the build. Super-slim laptops like the standard Dell XPS 13 and even the Apple MacBook Air still manage to include a headset jack. The adapter will have to do, but it’s more of a pain to carry with you, and it takes up one of two ports.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Outside of the ports, connectivity includes Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, a fingerprint reader in the power button, and a 720p webcam. Both the fingerprint scanner and camera are Windows Hello enabled for fast sign-in.

I can’t help but feel the camera should be 1080p at this price, whether paired with the higher panel SKUs or by default, to drive home the premium, forward-looking concept. That said, not all 720p cameras are created equal, and the video quality is better than average. The picture is sharper than most others (even if still well short of a 1080p camera's), though it doesn’t handle especially bright or dim lighting super well.

Testing the XPS 13 Plus: Configurations, Components, and the Competition

The XPS 13 Plus is configurable in a number of ways, starting with the $1,299 base model. That unit comes with Intel's 12th Generation Core i5-1240P processor, 8GB of memory, a 512GB SSD, and the full HD non-touch display. From there, you can jump to a middle-of-the-pack Core i7-1260P, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, a 1TB or 2TB SSD, and the various display options outlined before. Integrated graphics are the only option for this laptop—no discrete GPUs here, so you’ll need to check out a gaming or creator system for more graphics power, if that's what you're after.

Our configuration is toward the top end. At $1,949, our model includes a Core i7-1280P processor, 16GB of memory, a 512GB SSD, and the 3.5K OLED touch display mentioned earlier. This is the top CPU option, a 14-core chip (with six Performance P-Cores and eight Efficient E-Cores, per the Alder Lake platform). So, apart from bumping up to 32GB of memory, this should be the top-performing SKU.

Now, to put these parts to the test. To judge the XPS 13 Plus’ benchmark results, we collected a group of similar laptops—all ultraportables of some kind with roughly similar specs—to compare against. Their names and components are listed below…

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon is a chic OLED competitor, while its ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10(Opens in a new window) counterpart is a great ultraportable business machine (and one of the best overall laptops we’ve reviewed in recent memory). The VAIO SX14 is a sleek, similarly priced competitor, while Apple’s iconic MacBook Air (this the new M2-based model) is the obvious foil. The IdeaPad is the sole AMD representative, while Apple’s M2 has its own complexities, but can run some of the same tests as these machines.

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, spreadsheet work, 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 boot drive.

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 Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The results from these laptops are all generally solid, and you can see the XPS 13 Plus is near the top of most tests, and even leads at Geekbench. As slim ultraportables, these won’t push the boundaries of laptop performance compared to larger machines, but the baseline has risen so much over the years that even these compact machines are generally quite proficient at these tasks.

In short, the XPS 13 Plus—despite its new design that stresses the new elements and thin form—doesn’t give up much in the way of performance relative to its class. If you need a pro-grade editing or content creation laptop, you’ll want to look a tier above these laptops, but generally this system can handle moderate home and office workloads of different kinds.

It's worth noting that the system does come with optional performance modes, somewhat buried in the “power” section of the My Dell application. The default mode is called “optimized” meant to balance cooling, heat, and performance, and on this the fan noise was minimal, while heat was focused on the bottom under load. This is the setting we tested the laptop on, but the other modes allow you to run the laptop cooler, or quieter, or in an “ultra performance” mode. The latter did provide a moderate boost to results (PCMark 10 didn't change much at all, but Cinebench improved to 9,724 points, Handbrake down to 8:23), but is probably not worth the added effort from the laptop unless you're crunching through a dataset or media workload.

Graphics and Gaming 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). We normally run two more tests from GFXBench 5.0, but they persistently failed to run properly on this system for reasons unknown.

As previously noted, the XPS 13 Plus employs only Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics (that is, part of the processor handles the graphics load, rather than shunting the work to a dedicated GPU). All of the competing laptops in our charts here use Iris Xe or a similar integrated solution. A discrete GPU requires more thermal headroom and brawnier cooling solutions, beyond the scope of these slim machines, so you should expect this level of performance in most of these laptops.

These two scores demonstrate roughly average graphics performance for this class, which is to say it’s capable of some light gaming (think simpler 2D titles, slower strategy games, or some more demanding titles with the visual settings turned way down). We previously tested a variety of games on a batch of integrated-graphics systems to see, generally, what to expect. You can complete some 3D work on here if you really need to, but wait times will be long; again, invest in a pro creator laptop if that’s something you will do often. Again, ultra performance mode did improve results, with Time Spy and Night Raid jumping to 1,955 and 18,399 points respectively.

Battery and Display Tests

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

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).

The battery life result is the first bit of disappointment outside expectations in the test results. Roughly eight hours of battery isn’t bad in the grand scheme of all laptops, but for this category, it’s pretty underwhelming. You can see that the others all clear at least 12 hours, the older XPS 13 we tested ran for 11 hours, and the MacBook Air is an extreme battery performer.

In that context, this result is mediocre, and undermines the ultraportable concept. You’ll be able to take the XPS 13 Plus with you easily, and it will even charge pretty quickly, but it’s not a system you can leave unplugged and use through a full day without worrying about the battery.

I should say that our particular display configuration is no doubt culpable here, at least in part—the full HD panels likely run for much longer, and 3.5K is draining. OLED technology should actually help battery life, though, so we really wish this were a longer result. But several repeat runs of our battery test to “check our work” reinforced these findings.

The Verdict: The Future Is Now (for Better and Worse)

The XPS 13 Plus is an interesting effort. On one hand, there wasn't much wrong with the XPS 13 (or most standard laptop design) that needed a radical overhaul. A few of the aspects, notably the touchpad, ultimately weren't changed for the better (even if it looks cool). So, to some extent, the XPS 13 Plus is a solution without a problem.

On the other hand, innovation keeps us moving toward improvement, and this premium device has a distinct forward-looking feel. The differences are obvious at a glance while still functioning in a familiar way, which is commendable. Redesigning several well-known laptop elements in a way where they're still functional isn't easy. Dell gets points for taking the plunge.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Still, while we can praise those efforts (the keyboard, LED key row, and chassis design get a thumbs up), it’s hard to completely endorse the full package if it isn’t an improvement on the existing version. The touchpad can be finicky, the lack of ports and especially a headphone jack is a minus, and the battery life (at least on our super-high-res model) is shorter than we'd like.

Ultimately if you love the new look, you’ll enjoy this shiny new device, even if it can’t replace the XPS 13 (still offered in its traditional form), the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, or the Apple MacBook Air. Hopefully, some of the positive new elements will make their way onto other laptops or an improved XPS 13 Plus. And we wouldn’t be surprised if some future laptops took cues from this machine. The future has to start somewhere. Why not today?