- When Apple droppedthe MacBook Pro 16-inch, there was just nothingreally in the PC world that compared to it. Like, sure, we had stuffthat was way more powerful, or lighter, or with longer battery life, but there was no laptop in existence that compared as an all-rounderthat I could point at and be like, "There, PCpeeps, just go buy that one!" Until today. Right out of the gate, theXPS 15 and 17 mean business.
Look at them: the tall screen, the aluminum wrapping around the edges. If the long-term experience holds up to the first couple ofglances at these things, then they might just be thebest laptops on the market, just like I deliver the bestsponsor segues on the market. Today's video is broughtto you by GlassWire. Instantly see your currentand past network activity, detect malware, andblock badly behaving apps on your PC or Androiddevice with GlassWire. Use offer code LINUS to get25% off at the link below. (bright upbeat music) For a laptop to be truly excellent, it has to nail all of theparts that you interact with: the keyboard, the trackpad, the screen, and, of course, the chassis.
If any one of these parts sucks, it doesn't matter how light or powerful or long lasting it is; you will eventually grow to hate using it, and the XPS 15 and 17 are a masterclass in nailing these features. Starting with the chassis, it's not like the old XPS 15 is bad. It's just that it, andevery other Windows laptop, now feels distinctly last gen compared to the XPS 2020 lineup.
Their screens are shockingly rigid considering their size and thinness, the reassuring resistanceof the hinge feels quality and without sacrificinga smooth one finger lift, and the carbon fiber topdeck gives the keyboard an incredibly rigid surface to rest on. And it makes such a big difference. On something like theMacBook Pro or the XPS 13, with their short snappy keys, I can absolutely blast outa quick instant message, but sometimes I strugglegetting into that flow like I can on, say, a ThinkPad that I prefer for long-form writing, like a video script. These XPSs somehow managed tobe perfectly tuned for both, and they're an absolute joy to use.
With 1.3 millimeters of key travel, it's a bit more than the XPS 13, but it maintains the excellent snap at the top of the stroke,and it's just, muah. But, here's the thing, even if this is the bestkeyboard on the market, the likes of Microsoft, HP, and Lenovo have been putting out A-pluskeyboards for some time now, so having a good keyboardisn't nearly as much of a differentiator as what lies below it: the absolutely gargantuan trackpad. Thank you, Dell. I now finally have somethingconcrete to point at while I'm yelling at all theother Windows laptop makers to improve their trackpads. It still isn't quite as bigas the MacBook Pro 16-inch, but in fairness to Dell, they didn't have the extra space created by Apple's larger bezels to work with. And to my hands, the tracking is every bitas accurate and easy to use. And compared to Windows alternatives, this trackpad just, well, it just blows them all out of the water, with the only one in the same league being the Razer Blade 15, but even that is aB-plus-plus or an A-minus compared to the A-plus thatwe're looking at right here.
One note, by the way, some of the XPS 15s on the very first batch havea slight wobble on the bottom, so if this happens to you, call up Dell for a replacement. That is a defect, and that problem has since been fixed. Up top, though, reallyis the shining star, and I mean shining becausethis display hits 500 nits. The way that it reachesall the way from the top down to the bottom of the device, really, I mean, I'vetalked about this before, but I found it changes the way I use it, making me treat the XPS 15,and then especially the 17, much more like a small desktopcompared to a big laptop. Out of the box, the colorsare over-the-top vibrant with 107% coverage ofthe Adobe RGB color space and Delta E values of over 20, yuck. But by simply opening upthe Dell Color Checker and selecting Adobe RGBfor the color space, those values dropped toan average Delta E of four and a maximum of six.
That's color accurateenough for basically anyone other than a professionalphoto or video editor, and if you're one of those, you probably already have yourown calibration tool anyway. My one complaint about thedisplay is the options. Come on, Dell, please giveus a 1200 P-touch option. Right now, the 4K Touchoption is a $300 adder, and, like, yeah, sick display, but that is really steep for something that I've felt for a long time is not really necessaryat these screen sizes. At the top of the display, we find Windows Hello facial recognition, still my favorite way to unlock a laptop, but what's cool is if you'remore into fingerprint sensors, Dell included a snappy one of those on the Power button as well, and that's been super useful, what, with wearing masksbeing all the rage these days. By the way, if you'rewondering how the heck they got a webcam intothat tiny bezel up top, the answer is by justmaking it really bad. Like, to be clear, it's a lot better than havingit down under the screen so it's looking up my noseall the time or whatever, but come on. How am I supposed toshout out lttstore.com on my video calls like this? They can't properly appreciate the merch. What I can properly appreciate,though, are the speakers. Both models are excellent in this regard, with a surprising depth of bass and clarity of travel for a laptop. I think it's pretty safeto say these are among, if not the best, speakerson a Windows laptop, even if they don't quitematch up, let's be fair, to the incredible sound thatApple was able to get out of the MacBook Pro.
So as a laptop thatyou interact with then, Dell has crushed it. And if this was a thin and light, we basically would beable to call it here, but with the XPS 15coming in at 4 1/2 pounds and the 17 a full pound heavier, we need some real horsepowerin order to justify the heft. So why don't we crack 'em open and take a look at what's inside? (air rushing) To open up either of the XPSs, all you need to do is removethe eight Torx T5 screws, do a little bit of smudging,and off comes the bottom panel. Now normally I wouldn't looktwice at a bottom panel, but these, oh, these are pieces of art. They're CNC milled from asingle piece of aluminum, and between the curves that are sculpted with a ball-end mill and the surface finish thatthey got on the outside, I think it is pretty safe to say that this is not a cheap part. Both units have massivebatteries relative to their size, which I consider to be amandatory upgrade, by the way, from the 56-watt-hour base model battery, with the 15 getting up to 86 watt hours and the 17 getting closeto the maximum allowed on a plane in the U.S. with 97 watt hours. This netted us aboutnine hours on the XPS 15 and closer to 10 hours on the 17, although, with thebrightness of the display and the power of these components, how you're using these laptops is going to greatly impactyour real world battery life.
I mean, there were times withthe screen brightness up, with SOLIDWORKS open,that the battery would die after just four hours. But then also there was this one time that our battery test glitched out after a couple of hours on the 17, and it kept idling alongfor over 17 more hours. Above the battery, there we go, both of them have easyaccess to dual M.2 SSD slots and dual SODIMM slots to makestorage and RAM upgrades easy, but that's where the similarities stop.
Now inside the XPS 15, we find pretty much what we'd expect in a laptop of this class. We've got two heat pipes and two fans that make for a total of around 50 watts of cooling capacity. In optimized mode, thissolution kept our CPU around 90 degrees with solid performance, but Dell also provides anUltra Performance toggle that pushed our eight-core Core i7-10875H to deliver more performance than a top-tier desktop from two years ago at the expense of thermalsand possibly longevity, but, hey, we did say it wasa MacBook Pro competitor, didn't we? The GTX 1650 will allow for a pretty decent gaming experience if you're willing to drop the settings and set your resolution to 1080p, but this isn't a gaming laptop, and I imagine it's gonna get more use speeding up renders in Premiere, and it also managed SOLIDWORKS quite well. Moving over back to the XPS 17, though. Dell has really stepped up their game, and this is, honestly, adifferent class of machine.
Look at this cooling system. Attached to these two hugefans is a massive vapor chamber that is straight from the wet dream of a thermodynamics professor. Even with 100 watts of cooling though, the Core i7-10875H still still gets toasty in Ultra Performance mode, so we wouldn't recommendusing it all the time, but with this cooling, it managed a CinebenchR20 score of nearly 4,000, making this thing 20% fasterthan a MacBook Pro 16-inch, not to mention that it's RTX2060 Max-Q shreds the AMD GPUs that Apple stubbornly continuesto use, at least for now, while also deliveringgood performance in games. I mean, that's the thing.
Of course, a dedicated gaminglaptop of the same price is gonna destroy either the XPS 17 or 15 both in terms of graphicsperformance and responsiveness with high refresh rate displaysbeing pretty much standard on anything over a thousand dollars, but I think that almost anyonebesides a full-time gamer or a video editor or 3D modeler is going to be more than happy with the performance that's on tap here, which doesn't mean that wedon't have any complaints. Notebookcheck discovered that the XPS 17 actually dips into its batterywhen it's under full load because the included130-watt power adapter can't quite keep up. So if you're hitting the CPUand GPU hard at the same time, you can actually lose battery charge even though the laptopis plugged into the wall. Now we've confirmed this behavior, both with our unit and with our Dell rep, who said that it was a decision to keep the size of the AC adapter down. And, like, okay, fair enough, but I do wish that in theconfigurator there was an option for a heavier and more powerful adapter so the customer can decidewhich trade off they wanna make, bringing us to the other bigtrade off: the Intel CPU. This right here, ah, thereit is, is the Zephyrus G14. I feel like we've pulledthis out a lot lately. It houses a Ryzen 9 4900HS,an eight-core processor that puts Intel's currentmobile chips to shame. With a less sophisticatedcooling solution, we're seeing highermulti-core performance, higher single-core performance, and longer battery life froma physically smaller battery.
Now I'm gonna give Della pass on this generation for only including Intelin their XPS lineup. I don't think anybody sawAMD's Mobile 4000 Series being as good as it is,but next time around, I'm not gonna be so forgiving. I expect to see an AMDversion of the XPS 15 and 17 for those of us who wantthe maximum performance from our devices next time. (imitates air rushing) (air rushing) Also, in fairness to Dell,if they had gone with AMD, they would have missed out on all of these juicy Thunderbolt 3 ports, of which the 15 has twoand the 17 has four.
And, in turn, they would have missed out on one of the coolestuse cases of the XPSs. Now I personally would have liked to see at least one USB Type-A, butstill, this is pretty cool. So this is the Dell WD19TB,a Thunderbolt dock that, over a single cable,let's you turn your XPS into a full-fledged desktop experience. We're talking dual 4K displays, Gigabit Ethernet, mouse and keyboard, along with a dongle or two. Technology Connections recently created a 27-minute love letter to this approach, and, for many people, it's an awesome way tonearly seamlessly transition from a great portable experience to a great less portable experience, whether it's for work or for gaming. Now as you've probably guessed by now, these computers don't come cheap. Like, we're talkingfull-blownsies Apple pricing here.
I mean, they start at 1,300 and $1,400, but the thing is, if you'reshopping in that price range, in my personal opinion, thereare better value options. So by the time we get to a config that I would actually recommend, you can expect to pay atleast two grand for the XPS 15 and getting closer to three for the 17. But I also can't reallycomplain because, sure, they're expensive as all heck, but you're also getting what I think is the best Windowslaptop that money can buy. And if Dell can figure out how to get AMD and Thunderbolt into the next one, I might even be ready to call it perfect. If it also had an HDR OLED display, maybe higher refresh rate. 5G mobile connectivity wouldbe nice.
Better webcam. Caching functionality onthe fingerprint sensor so you don't have to touch it again once you get to the login screen. I think a better GPU on the15 inch would be pretty nice, and how about like an illuminatedDell logo on the back? Like, when did thatbecome not cool anymore? Then it would be perfect, just like my segues to oursponsors like Squarespace. You may have heard about Squarespace. It's the easy way to makea website in minutes. Squarespace is a leader in website design, and they're all in one platform, means you can do everything,even buy domains through them. You can even create email campaigns. Your website can be anything from a personal portfolio to a resume, to a fan-fiction site, oryou can even sell stuff.
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