Dell XPS 15 9500
The Dell XPS 15 9500 is a serious Windows 10 competitor to the MacBook Pro
DELL XPS 15 9500
With a premium build and ace screen, this laptop should have Apple sweating
Because of its heritage and its predecessors, the Dell XPS 15 9500 (2020) is immediately a best laptop contender: the XPS series has been a huge success for Dell, and the laptops from this sleek line are constantly impressing us.
The Dell XPS 15 9500 really is a gorgeous-looking laptop from every angle – the XPS line has been wowing users and winning awards for years now, and Dell very much knows what it’s doing with the look and finish. This is a premium-level laptop in every area, from the soft and tactile typing experience to the carbon fibre finish around the nicely backlit keyboard. It’s a computer that’s stylish but subtle, professional and polished, and it feels really solid in use too.
The screen is another standout feature of the Dell XPS 15 9500. With super-thin bezels all the way around (the top one hiding a titchy webcam), a resolution of 1920 x 1200 or 3840 x 2400 pixels, and 132% of the sRGB colour gamut covered, it shines: it’s crisp, it’s bright, and it makes use of the 16:10 aspect ratio that we much prefer for getting work done (it also looks fantastic when watching videos, after the working day is done). You can buy this laptop with or without a touchscreen, depending on what you need and how much money you want to spend.
The insides story
Obviously with a 15.6-inch display this isn’t going to be the most portable laptop in the world, and it’s not the thinnest nor the lightest model at this size – but it’s hard to
quibble considering the craftsmanship on offer and the quality of the components packed inside.
You can kit out the Dell XPS 15 9500 with a variety of internal specs, all the way up to a 10th-gen Intel Core i9-10885H processor, 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD drive at the time of writing. But whichever model you pick, this is a laptop that’s able to get through some serious workloads. There are very few compromises in terms of power.
GPU grunt is provided by an optional Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti with 4GB of VRAM that you can have fitted: now that’s not going to run the best games at the best settings – especially not at 4K – but it does mean that the best games are playable while you’re on the go.
There’s always a balance to be struck between performance and portability, and Dell has done well to get the components it has into a laptop that’s so thin, light and quiet. From working on images to sitting back and watching a selection of YouTube videos, we found the Dell XPS 15 9500 a delight to use with barely a hint of lag.
In terms of battery life, it will last you a day away from the office and then some, provided you’re quite careful with settings like display brightness. Our two-hour video streaming test – during which we put the screen on maximum brightness, by the way – saw the battery dip from 100% to 71%, suggesting around 6-7 hours of constant playback time. If battery life is important to you, consider downgrading from the 4K display option (the screen that our review model came with), as a lower resolution screen won’t suck up quite so much battery power quite so fast.
The Dell XPS 15 9500 is competitively priced for what it is: a premium-level Windows 10 laptop with top-tier specs. If you really max out the configuration you can pay close to £3,000/$2,500 for it but if you don’t need all of the high-end specs and the 4K screen then you can knock that down by as much as a half.
We were really impressed with the XPS 15 during our time with it, but then we expected to be considering the previous models in the range. The display is a stunner, the laptop is really well built and a pleasure to use, and it coped with everything that we threw at it without breaking sweat.
Of course no laptop can be the best for everyone, because we’re all doing different tasks with our computers. But for a lot of users, the Dell XPS 15 9500 really does hit a sweet spot.
Look and feel might not seem like big priorities when it comes to laptop buying – do you really need your laptop to look pretty? – but it really is the experience of using this latest XPS 15 that sets it apart from the rest. Whether you’re watching movies, editing video, or dabbling in a bit of gaming, it really is a joy to open up and interact with, and we’re happy to recommend it. It even reaches, dare we say it, MacBook levels of polish.