Meet the new Dell XPS 13: Stylish, Powerful and Better By Every Measure

Meet the new Dell XPS 13: Stylish, Powerful and Better By Every Measure

January 4, 2018

By: Frank Azor, VP and GM, XPS, Alienware and Dell Gaming

Technology has become an expression of style for those who use it – though fashion can be fickle. One thing we do know is elegance never goes out of style.

First unveiled at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, the XPS 13 immediately enhanced the legacy of XPS as the worlds most celebrated laptop and winner of more product awards than any other line in Dells history, most recently named a CES 2018 Innovation Award Honoree.

And how did it garner this latest honor? Vision and a lot of hard work.

In reimagining the XPS 13, Dell took inspiration from the realm of fashion, where rose gold remains a trending color and white accents have been growing in popularity, seen everywhere from watch bands to sneakers. However when turning our XPS white, we strived to achieve elegance and invested more than a dozen people, 11,520 hours and 50 trials to create a new system that was as stunning inside and out. The Dell design team didnt want to simply paint a system white they wanted to use authentic materials and make sure the system looked as beautiful on day 1000 as it does on day 1.

With the desire to give its white palm rest a weaved appearance, the team considered different materials beyond the color limits of traditional carbon fiber. The solution? An innovative new crystalline silica material with the white color literally woven in, like a fabric, in nine composite layers. Dell is the first to use this woven glass fiber in a laptop.

Complementing the new rose gold aluminum shell of the XPS 13, the alpine white glass fiber weave is elegant to the eye and silky to the touch. Durable as it is beautiful, atop its soft-textured lattice is titanium oxide for a pearlescent sheen and UV and stain-resistant coating to prevent yellowing or staining over time. In fact, if you get a pen mark or other stain on the white interior you can just wipe it off. And with a heat resistance superior to metal, woven glass fiber also stays cooler to facilitate longer performance.

Interesting fact: The glass fibers in one palm rest, if laid end to end, would extend for 117,500 miles, nearly enough to stretch halfway from Earth to the moon. Now thats one giant leap.

We not only worked to create the most beautiful laptop on the market, but extended that design ethos to its matching white power cords and USB-A/USB-C adapter. And moving from style, to lifestyle, we invested in sustainable recycled ocean plastics and bamboo packaging so you can purchase with confidence knowing that Dell is doing its part to help the planet.

Besides its head-turning exterior, the all-new XPS 13 is better by every measure. Now even more portable as the smallest 13-inch laptop on the planet, its stunning InfinityEdge display fits this 13-inch laptop in an 11-inch frame. Its a full 30% (3.4mm) thinner as well as lighter, starting at just 2.7 pounds, making the XPS 13 the ultimate in mobility and durability.

Running Windows 10 and powered by the latest Intel 8th Generation Quad Core processor, XPS 13 delivers superior mobile performance with fast booting SSDs up to 1TB. You can also expect the longest battery life of any 13-inch laptop, with almost 20 hours on FHD, up to 11 on UHD (Mobile Mark 14).

While we made the system smaller and lighter, we were able to increase the performance by 2x, over the original XPS 13 launched in 2015, and maintain the worlds most powerful 13-inch laptop in its class. So how did we do that? We have the most innovative performance and thermal engineering at Dell.

We developed Dell Power Manager to let you customize your balance of battery life, charging, thermals and acoustics and Dynamic Power Mode that intuitively delivers maximum power as needed, for such tasks as video rendering applications and advanced spreadsheets, while intelligently monitoring and managing system temperatures. This means the XPS 13 has sustained high performance while competitors performance declines with continued use, making the XPS 13 the most powerful 13-inch in its class (Tested by Principled Technologies in December 2017 using the Cinebench CPU (multi-core test)).

As for thermal engineering, XPS 13 is the worlds first laptop built with GORE Thermal Insulation, the same silica aerogels that have been used in high tech science and extreme engineering environments to diffuse and dissipate heat, such as insulation on the Mars Rovers and Hyper Velocity Particle capture in the Stardust Probe. This material directs heat out of the device, keeping your system cool while it works hard.

Now with a higher resolution display, incorporating 2.5 million more pixels with 4K Ultra HD compared to the previous QHD+, the 100% sRGB display on the XPS 13 gives you great, saturated and accurate color, whether for graphic professionals or watching your favorite Netflix show. In fact, Dell knows people today use their PCs to stream content, so the XPS 13 also delivers an unparalleled immersive cinematic experience with richer colors and details, crisper and stronger audio, and reduced buffering, so you really can watch Netflix and chill.

Activated by voice, touch or facial recognition, access to the new XPS 13 comes through a triad of biometric doorways. Log in with a look or a touch with the infrared camera and optional fingerprint reader in the power button for Windows Hello, or talk to your device from across the room, with four integrated digital microphones and Microsofts Cortana voice recognition capabilities.

The new XPS 13 is available globally beginning today on Dell.com, Microsoft.com and at your local Microsoft Store, starting at $999.99. Dell is also offering a Ubuntu-based developer edition with Linux preloaded starting at $949.99 beginning today on Dell.com in the US and Europe as well.