Eliminate all distractions to result in a tone-on-tone design and a form of supreme sobriety. This is how Dell explains that it has managed to find the inspiration to renew its iconic XPS 13
. The XPS 13 Plus, announced today at CES, is the result of this quest for aesthetic quintessence.
For this new product, which should lay the groundwork for the XPS range in 2022, Dell ensures that it has started from scratch and removed all unnecessary design elements.
Always more elegant, stripped down and powerful
The result appears minimalist, almost stripped down, and modern, but this new aluminum chassis above all allows Dell to optimize space to give as much space as possible to the really important elements: the keyboard, in the first place, but also the trackpad and the palm rests that the manufacturer has almost literally melted into each other.
On the new XPS 13 Plus, these two elements indeed share a single glass plate. The trackpad also benefits from haptic feedback to give “relief” to the interactions. Dell also explains having enlarged the keys on its keyboard and giving them a longer stroke than in the past, to improve typing comfort. Above the keyboard is also housed a touchscreen control bar dedicated to certain shortcuts.
Of course, the XPS 13 Plus relies on 12th generation Intel processors (Alder Lake) which can give voice here with a TDP configured at 28 W. The options range from the new Core i5-1240p (12 cores) to the powerful Core i7-1280P (14 cores). These chips are paired with 8, 16 or 32 GB of LPDDR5 at 5200 MHz and you can count on 256 GB at 1 TB of M.2 SSD for storage.
On the display side, Dell is once again putting the small dishes in the big ones this year. Its new XPS can thus count on a 13.4-inch Ultra HD + OLED panel in its high-end version. This thin-bezel Infinity Edge panel is DisplayHDR 400 certified, can go up to 500 nits of maximum luminance and covers 90% of the DCI-P3 spectrum. It is topped by a 720p webcam compatible with facial recognition via Windows Hello.
An XPS of the future, coming to you soon
On the power side, Dell mentions a fast charging technology allowing the 55 WHr battery to recover 80% of autonomy in less than an hour on the mains, with the 60 W block provided. The XPS 13 Plus, which does not exceed 295.3 x 199 x 15.2 mm thick for 1.24 kilograms, on the other hand, is still just as badly off in terms of connectivity. The device is again satisfied with two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports and visibly skips a headphone jack.
The XPS 13 Plus will arrive on the market in spring 2022, in a Linux (Ubuntu) or Windows 11 version. However, the final prices of the machine are not known. In one of its press releases, Dell mentions a starting price positioned at $ 1,199 (for the Full HD + version, Core i5, 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB of SSD), but the brand promises to say more about the prices when we approach the launch.
Source: Dell CES 2022 briefing, Dell press release
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