When I do, I'm sure I'll tell you that I'm in awe of how thin and light it is – everything else, we'll need to test. I haven't had the chance to test out the latest XPS 13 yet. "I believe that companies like Qualcomm will help drive this trend forward with even smaller PCBs and deeper integration of components into the SoC. "I think this is a trend that will continue to move forward, especially as we see more PCs adopting Arm-based technology," Anshel Sag, the principal analyst for PCs at Moor Insights & Strategy, told me in an email. This future with super-thin laptops that the average person can't service may be inevitable, however, as companies move into new form factors and Arm-based chips get more popular. Raise your hand if you have a pair of USB Type-C headphones around in case your wireless buds run out of a charge. Even the 12-inch MacBook had a headphone jack.
I don't think I've ever seen someone say the MacBook Air isn't portable enough. "We were unable to fit a headphone jack within the chassis, based off the aggressive design and portability goals we chartered for XPS 13," Dell told Tom's Hardware in an email.īut even Apple, which makes money on AirPods, hasn't removed the 3.5 mm headphone jack from its laptops yet. But spokespeople for the company were far more frank than I expected: I assumed that when I asked Dell about it, I would hear about how everyone uses wireless headphones these days. Yes, the 3.5 mm headphone jack is gone from the Dell XPS 13. And Dell went so far with its new XPS 13 to remove the headphone jack. I've seen plenty of laptops from almost every OEM moving towards soldering RAM to save a few millimeters of thickness, though storage drives have often been accessible. Only recently has Microsoft started adding SSD doors to Surface devices, and even then only some of them.
Chamberlain said that while iFixit will have to do its own teardown to make a definitive call, that "from the specs it seems unlikely that we’ll be recommending this locked-down computer to our team as we have historically."Įven on the PC side, Dell isn't alone here. With our latest XPS 13 laptop, we are being responsive to consumers’ needs for portability and functionality."īut some customers want that mixed with repairability.
"Each product is a series of decisions based on what the customer needs, wants and will value. "While we strive to make devices that can be disassembled, repaired, refurbished, and ultimately recycled, customer desires for smaller, thinner, more capable devices can make this a difficult task - and in the case of the XPS 13 laptop, the streamlined size reduces material use while increasing efficiency, but limits some repairability," Dell representatives wrote to Tom's Hardware. Unlike Apple Silicon, Intel's Alder Lake chips don't have integrated memory. There's no technical reason, other than thinness, for the way Dell soldered the RAM down, for instance. (At least Apple's RAM situation is due to the fact that the RAM is part of the SoC.)īut in some ways, Dell has gone further. Sure, you can replace the battery, but other repairs are largely out of the question without going to a Genius Bar. But with the move to Apple Silicon, the storage has all been soldered down, too.
While the original MacBook Air had a replaceable hard drive, its RAM was soldered down (the MacBook Pro would follow in 2013). Now, Apple has beaten Dell to the punch here. But perhaps Dell has chased Apple a bit too far. In terms of thinness, this is somewhat of an engineering marvel.
It uses Intel's 12th Gen U-series processors at nine watts (going up to 12W depending on the use case), leaving the more powerful P-series parts to the XPS 13 Plus. But it's ditching the carbon fiber keyboard deck, and most of its ports, in Dell’s quest for a thinner, more portable design at just 0.55 inches thick. The Dell XPS 13 (9315), which was announced on Thursday, keeps the thin bezels. How much would Dell give up to shave 0.03 inches off the prior model? So when the XPS 13 goes thin enough as to be almost totally unrepairable or upgradable by users, I took notice. As other laptop manufacturers chased the MacBook Air, so did they chase the XPS 13. Thanks to that and a sturdy metal shell and mostly comfortable keyboard, the laptop became an icon. While the XPS 13 as an ultrabook dates back to 2012, the XPS 13 as most of us remember it started in 2015, the first time the company added its "InfinityEdge" display, reducing the bezels. But the new Dell XPS 13 (9315) is a drastic change from its predecessors.