Dell XPS 13

Dell’s 2020 professional ultrabook might not be as good as expected.

The XPS range is considered by many to have been the class-leading ultrabook for years running now due to its Infinity Edge display, decent battery life and good balance of professional level components. This year’s XPS 13 builds on these strong points with a new 13.4-inch 500nit 4K display with such thin bezels that allow it to fit into a traditional 11-inch chassis form factor. You can choose from a 10th Gen Intel Core i5 or i7 CPU catering to your pricing and performance needs and this is complimented by either 8GB or 16GB of RAM and various PCIe SSD sizes.

The new CPU offers a five percent performance bump over its predecessors and landed somewhere in the middle of the laptops tested here in overall computing performance (even though raw CPU performance was the highest scoring quad core chip). GPU performance was about what you’d expect from the Intel Iris Plus Graphics, capable of handling browser-based gaming and essential graphical tasks easily enough.

At 1.5cm thick and just 1.27kg the XPS 13 is one of the most portable models here, but battery life is a little disappointing at just five hours and 50 minutes in 1080p movie playback. This means you won’t get a full day of working out of it without seriously tweaking brightness and power settings. Stack it up next to the other devices here and you’ll also notice it comes with a premium price tag, despite only offering quad-core CPU performance.

A decent ultraportable that is a little overpriced and under-specced to be the laptop to beat anymore.