Dell’s XPS 13 is one of our perennial favorites, a thin-and-light ultraportable with one of the best builds you’ll find on a Windows laptop. One way to make it better? A beautiful OLED touch screen.
This upgrade was first announced last month, and we’ve now received a unit with this stunning display and can offer a first look at the system. In the video below, we provide the spec details, touch on pricing, and talk about the advantages of the display. So watch along for more information. There’s also a quick written rundown if you scroll past the video.
Same Great XPS Base, New Specs and Pricing
One key thing to note: This unit is, by and large, the same as the XPS 13 9310 model that we reviewed in 2020. That’s a positive since, as mentioned, we love the build quality and style of the XPS 13, even if it’s a little pricey for the components. Check out that review, linked above, for a full rundown of the dimensions and feature set.
That unit we reviewed was priced at $1,649 as tested, which included an Intel Core i7-1165G7 11th Generation (“Tiger Lake”) processor, 16GB of memory, Intel Iris Xe graphics (built into the CPU), and a 512GB SSD. It also delivered great battery life (15 hours on our rundown test) and good performance. And while it did have an option for a 4K-resolution screen, our review unit had a nice 13.4-inch, 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS display. (Like our new unit in hand here, we also reviewed the white-and-silver version.)
This new unit is very similar, but the particular configuration we were sent is bumped up to a Core i7-1185G7 processor and, of course, the OLED screen. The bumped-up processor aside, the OLED display alone is a $294 cost increase from the screen on the XPS 13 9310 that we reviewed, and a $392 upgrade from the full-HD base model, with a non-touch panel.
OLED Advantage: Should You Upgrade?
So, is the display worth the buzz? If you already bought the XPS 13 9310, I wouldn’t upgrade just for the display, as nice as it is. If you’re normally shopping for a new laptop and have something older, though, I can definitely recommend the OLED screen.
It’s not strictly necessary if you’re already stretching your budget, but it’s difficult to state how nice it looks in person (which unfortunately won’t show to full effect in the video or photos). It’s amazingly bright. (The maximum brightness setting may even be too bright for normal use, especially if you’re in a dark room.) And, as you’d expect from OLED, the colors are extremely vibrant.
Beyond just the visual appeal, OLED screens also save power. This isn’t as relevant for TVs (though less energy consumption is good), but it is a big component of their use in phones, and offers the same advantage for laptops. You can read more about how exactly this works in our roundup of best OLED laptops, but the long and short of it is that it’s more energy-efficient.
This is especially clear when displaying black or dark colors, since a black pixel is truly “off” or using less energy on an OLED panel, which isn’t true of an LCD screen’s pixels. Dark scenes in videos and windows with black backgrounds will objectively extend your battery life, as we first extensively tested in the our review of the 2019 Razer Blade.
Because of this, manufacturers will often set Windows to dark mode on OLED laptops, as Dell did with this XPS 13. In our testing of the Razer Blade 15, this made a difference compared to light mode, even on top of the passive energy savings from OLED. We didn’t get a chance yet to test the battery life on the OLED XPS 13, but you can expect to get an extra couple of hours of battery runtime.
Be sure to check out the video for more details, and check back for future XPS 13 coverage.
