Review Dell XPS 13 (9350) review: Lunar Lake on defense

[Admin]

The Dell XPS 13 (9350) offers long battery life in a minimalist design, but it still has some usability issues with an awkward function row.

Dell XPS 13 (9350) review: Lunar Lake on defense : Read more

 

[cknobman]

Terrible design and a complete ripoff.

These models stay relevant purely because of companies buying them to hand out to employees.
And the employees hate them.

 

[Findecanor]

That keyboard looks awful, in so many ways.

For example, people are going to hurt their finger when they hit the edge of the fingerprint reader when trying to press Backspace.

 

[vink]

It looks very good, works excellently and Intel does its job OK. I'm still interested in a FANLESS model only for simple tasks such as office, audio, video, shopping and with a low consumption of 7W and necessarily with a 14" Display. It can be minimalistic with 2 USB-C, any known brand and cheaper one pic. If you have any information, I would appreciate it.

 

[Notton]

I never thought I'd say this, but maybe the left side of the keyboard doesn't need to be that... large.
Unless they added more keys for different language layouts.

 

[helper800]

It looks very good, works excellently and Intel does its job OK. I'm still interested in a FANLESS model only for simple tasks such as office, audio, video, shopping and with a low consumption of 7W and necessarily with a 14" Display. It can be minimalistic with 2 USB-C, any known brand and cheaper one pic. If you have any information, I would appreciate it.

I am not aware of any fanless laptops, not that I know all laptops, but especially with the other kinds of specs you are looking for.

 

[BillyBuerger]

I never thought I'd say this, but maybe the left side of the keyboard doesn't need to be that... large.
Unless they added more keys for different language layouts.

Good point. The left modifiers are an extra 1/2u wider than usual. They could have shrunk that and put a thin border along the sides of the keyboard. Having picked up a few of these for some of our employees, the edges along things like the keyboard are a bit harsh. It's noticeable when grabbing along the edge there.

 

[Mama Changa]

Terrible design and a complete ripoff.

These models stay relevant purely because of companies buying them to hand out to employees.
And the employees hate them.

Inagree, XPS13 has been trash for a very long time and in general XPS is crap now. I'd probably even by a Lenoblo now ahead of a Dell.

 

[Jame5]

I mean, Apple went through this cycle. They pulled the physical function row, then brought back the physical escape key as an appeasement, and now they have a full physical function key row again.

What part of that terrible series of events did Dell look at and think "We should totally do that. It worked out great!"

I have loved my Dell XPS 15, with it's headphone jack, physical function key row, and expandable memory options. Now that none of that exists in the XPS line, I'm looking for what my next laptop will be.

 

[dCasualGamer]

All these benchmarks are fine, but what exactly do they mean to an average users? Battery life of 8:40 is bad but a regular users probably won't really tell the difference between the 17:29 vs 19:31, especially if the battery life will change depending on the workloads.
The article made a casual reference to SW compatibility but without discussing it in details. What does it mean to a non technical PC buyers.. Which SW can the Qualcomm laptop runs and which it can't run ? Who would spend $1000 on a laptop to gamble if it can run some SWs ?
Geekbench scores are fine, but again, what does it mean to me ? When will i ever need to use ALL the cores for me to notice the lower Intel multicore score ?
What about casual gaming ? Can I play games casually ? Can the laptops even run the games ? There's nothing in this article..

At the end of the day, this article gives me a lot of info, but yet doesn't provide me any good guidance on what to pick.

 

[bigdragon]

[. . .]
And the employees hate them.

Can confirm! My office just got a bunch of XPS 16 systems to replace XPS 15s that predate Dell's current keyboard and touchpad design. Most people, including myself, have been complaining about the feel of the keyboard and the capacitive buttons. Having Escape and Delete as capacitive buttons is a big problem for people doing development and prototyping work. Several shortcuts are also a total pain in the butt to do too (particularly Blender's F3 search).

The Dell XPS laptops have some good hardware and displays. That keyboard and the borderless touchpad really hold them back though. Companies need to stop designing everything to look good in a magazine or ad and get back to designing things for users. If I didn't need the GPU in the XPS 16 then I would go back to using the XPS 15.

 

[cerata]

Using Fahrenheit makes sense when writing for a predominantly U.S audience, but please spare a thought for the rest of us

e.g. "The keyboard hit 93.2 °F (34.0 °C), while the touchpad… reached 88.7 °F (31.5 °C). The hottest point… measured 101.3 °F (38.5 °C)."

But back to the laptop, IIRC Dell introduced the capacitative function row (in part?) so they could squeeze in a more capable thermal solution. e.g. the 2022 XPS 13 Plus could be configured with a 28W CPU.

If Dell were sensible, there'd at least be a setting to let users type Esc with Fn+`, F1 with Fn+1, and so on. But we're three generations into this redesign, and the keyboard firmware is as limited as ever, if Dell's support pages are any indication.

Good point. The left modifiers are an extra 1/2u wider than usual.

Huh you're right. I wonder if some Dell engineer decided keyboards would be better if the Shift keys (and Caps Lock/Enter) were symmetrical. Also, the arrow keys are 1.25u for some reason.