Dell updates popular XPS 13 laptop with 16:10 screen, IR camera | Hacker News Reader

Dell updates popular XPS 13 laptop with 16:10 screen, IR camera

arstechnica.com

46 pointsalphadevx63 comments

I love the 16:10 ratio screen but a bit disappointed that the page-up and page-down keys are still squashed above the left and right arrow keys. I have used the XPS 13 for about 6 months and just cannot avoid hitting the pg-up or pg-down keys when reaching for the arrow keys which is a nightmare for coding. I would much rather have those as function keys as they were on the previous model of the XPS 13.

When I looked into this issue, I found an old thread on a Dell forum where an XPS 13 user (of a previous model) was complaining that there were no dedicated page-up and down keys. As someone that uses those keys a lot I get that it seems Dell's solution to this has caused them to sabotage the functionality of the arrow keys and is definitely worse than having no dedicated keys for pg-up and down. I was hoping they would hear feedback from developers or anyone who uses arrow keys a lot and revert back to the old layout.

We've heard your complaints, and now those keys are backspace and forward delete.

Wait is this a joke or is it real? I've actually gone and taken another look and now I can't tell what the actual new layout of the keyboard is. I can't find any examples of photos of the latest model with a UK layout.

Edit turns out I was wrong and now the pg-up and pg-down keys are function keys again but the left and right keys are now full-size. From what I've heard from MacBook users, they prefer the inverted T layout that Apple went with with their latest 16" laptop as it's easier to find the arrow keys by feel. Oh well I guess it's still a big improvement from last year's design.

It's really funny how PC OEMs copied the broken Apple arrow-key layout from 2016-18...

I for one prefer having one-key access to the PgUp/PgDn keys to be able to Ctrl + PgUp/PgDn to move between browser tabs, but at least from the article, it looks pretty clearly like the PgUp and PgDn keys are not squished above the arrow keys in the new design and instead require you to press Fn + Up/Down. [1]

[1] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/xps13...

> Ctrl + PgUp/PgDn

I didn't know that hotkey. I use Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab (both options appear to be defaults in Chrome at least).

Yeah, pretty sure there are multiple other ways to switch browser tabs, not a good reason to put PgUp/PgDn there. You can always map keys as well, but having hardwired keys right next to arrows make them a bit useless.

The 2016 and earlier models had a fn based page up/down keyboard format. https://i.imgur.com/zTRSKXR.jpg They chose to move to the dedicated page up/down buttons by the '18 refresh I assume there was a bit of feedback asking for easy access to those keys.

I have a 13" XPS and a 15" Macbook Pro. I wanted to like the XPS but the Mac is just much better hardware. First, there is no comparison between the quality of the touchpads. The MacBook one works great but the XPS is terrible (imprecise movement, accidental movement/clicks from palm). The XPS wifi card is unreliable, it frequently disconnects. I understand a lot of people replace it with a better one. The screen is not great. There is no way to disable the automatic brightness magic going on (terrible for doing photograph processing). There is no way to turn of the eye blinding charge light on the front, under the touchpad. For a laptop that is premium priced, I'm disappointed with the hardware quality. I prefer my Lenovo X230 over the XPS 13.

Touchpads on Mac are stellar but have gotten too large. They often detect my palms as I type and move the mouse into the wrong spot.

This is what keeps me from switching. PC hardware is so far behind as far as fit, finish and touchpoints. I’ve been wanting to give a Nix based mobile machine a chance but nothing comes close.

Apple gets shit on HN constantly but their mobile hardware can’t be beat.

Get the XPS with the top end screen, it is amazing. Better than the MBP Retina screen.

I have the opposite setup - a 13" MBP and a 15" XPS and I really loved working on the XPS. It was just so fast and the screen was fantastic.

I say WAS, because yesterday I installed a new BIOS via the Dell tooling (and updated all of the drivers at the same time) and it bricked my machine. I spent the afternoon going through an increasingly crazy set of fixes which included dismantling the PC to remove the CMOS battery.

So now my XPS 15 is a $5000 paperweight.

I really hope that this is a known issue and Dell step up to fix it.

One issue with Windows laptops on WiFi that annoys me is that they aren't well-tuned to transfer from one access point to another. For example at work I will often have to disconnect from the network and reconnect to get my laptop to snap to a nearby access point. Otherwise it stays connected to a far away point but with weaker connection indicated (by the bars). This never seems to be an issue with iOS/MacOS devices.

Maybe Macs have gotten better, but on my MBP 2015 it would never switch seamlessly from one AP to another when moving around the office.

While I don't currently have a link, depending on which model you have, CABC (Content Adaptive Brightness Control) can be disable officially, as well as unofficially.

I have an XPS 13 9350 with a 1080P matte display, with CABC disabled through the display firmware version hack -- I completely forget the steps though, and it appears as Dell has released a version of the FHD [0] but I don't plan on reverting to the proper firmware just to patch it out again.

0. https://www.dell.com/support/home/ca/en/cabsdt1/drivers/driv...

EDIT: https://github.com/advancingu/XPS13Linux/issues/2

I might be wrong but I believe on the 13" XPS (not the 2-in-1 I have) you can change the automatic brightness in the BIOS. I can't do it in mine but I think this was a recent change to the 7390 2n1 only. It's CABC if I remember correctly.

FWIW, I have a 2016 MBP (maxed out) and now a 2019 XPS 13 2in1 4k and while I haven't used it anywhere near as long I think my XPS blows my MBP out of the water. I feel like I'm working on a 2005 laptop when I switch to the MBP and it's only saving grace is OSX. I also got the 4k/i7/32gb version for $985 from the Dell outlet during Black Friday. Insane price.

Not sure if your touchpad has the Windows precision drivers like mine does but I haven't noticed any issues with my touchpad compared to my MBP. I like it but I also use no gestures. I refused to even look at laptops that didn't use the Precision drivers/touchpad.

I'd say after a month of having it 100% of my issues/annoyances are Win10. I'm getting more used to it, Win10s tablet mode is actually pretty awesome but then 20% of your apps will be UWP (native tablet mode) while the others are regular exe/msis. It's bit of a jarring experience and I feel like I'm fighting Windows constantly.

And the thing that really blows my mind, this being a convertible tablet, the on screen keyboard is absolutely horrid. It takes less time for me to write things with the pen even factoring in my horrible penmanship that I have to slow down with for it to read it correctly. Course, this is another Windows issue. Microsoft owns Swiftkey now, it'd be nice if they integrated it.

That's awesome. 16:9 monitors only make sense for watching video, and are an abomination for pretty much any kind of work involving text.

I will be very happy when 4k 16:10 or 3:2 desktop monitors become widely available at an affordable price.

Microsoft's Surface has the perfect aspect ratio for screens (3:2), imo. Wide screen devices just look wrong. 16:10 is fine, but it still isn't quite right (this is also what Apple uses.)

I very reluctantly gave up my Thinkpad Yoga 2 for a new Surfacebook instead of sticking with Lenovo but I have no regretted the switch yet. Any chance you can recommend a USB C hub that retains a USB-C plug on it that will do DisplayPort out? I have a nice Anker USB-C hub but it only gives me HDMI out and even though it retains a USB-C plug on it it downgrades it to USB 3.0.

Unfortunately no, and I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't upgraded their dock to have USB-C ports. I have been holding out on upgrading my dock for this reason.

There's two Lenovo docks that do this. One has an integrated GPU that I guess you can use if you have thunderbolt, one doesn't. Both provide plenty of displayport/hdmi out.

I think this was it: https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-Thunderbolt-40AN0135U...

I bought one to use with my HP work laptop at home.

I dont know if I understood your need correctly, but I am using Dell D6000 usb-c dock with two displayport-connected monitors.

Dock works perfectly, cannot say the same on other Dell docks (TB15 and some other).

For anyone wondering, 3:2 is equal to 16:10.67

To make a screen with any ratios other than 16:9 seems to be very expensive nowadays though. I personally would rather a laptop be cheaper than to have a 16:10 or 3:2 monitor.

Then again, it would probably be only visible in greater margin for the manufacturer :/.

It's probably not that they're much more expensive to make, but there are much better economies of scale with a 16:9 ratio... the same panels work for TVs too

There isn't a market for 13-inch TVs... But mathematics support your reasoning about economies of scale: with constant, 13.3 inch diagonal, higher the aspect ratio, lower the screen area,thus less raw materials used, cheaper to produce.

Agreed. I got very used to 16:10 when I bought my monitors as a teenager. A couple of years ago I finally decided the 19" screens weren't cutting it anymore after 10 years of service and wanted to move to 24". Spent some time looking for 16:10 but ended up with 16:9 unfortunately. 16:10 monitors were way less common and way more expensive. And 144hz 16:10 monitors just don't even seem to exist. 16:9 feels so much more cramped than it should given the screen size.

The ars technica writeup does not mention the most significant upgrade of all in my opinion: 32GB RAM in February. See https://bartongeorge.io/2020/01/01/introducing-the-2020-xps-...

Does any Dell employee lurking have info about why I should consider waiting for the developers edition rather than just load up my favorite distro on the consumer hardware?

The reason to get the Developer Edition is to endorse OEM Linux support

Further to that Dell will also have configured it with Linux compatible hardware with solid driver support.

For example, the WiFi and Bluetooth support in dev edition XPS13 is solid.

You’re also paying for OEM firmware updates. I've had several over the life of my XPS13 even though it’s no longer the current model.

Isn't that one cheaper? I could've sworn it was when I got mine.

From what I can tell it is generally more expensive because the only place you can get it is from dell directly so you pay more than on other retailers which do not sell the developer edition.

However, on dell's website it is cheaper than the "normal" edition.

The developer edition ships with Linux (Ubuntu) instead of Windows.

This is why the parent comment asks for a reason to wait for the dev version, rather than simply install their own distro.

If one does not want to install a distro, then this might be a reason to wait for pre-installed Ubuntu. But the parent is happy to install their own distro, and so is asking for an additional reason, relevant to them, to wait for the dev version.

The linux laptop only ships with hardware that works with linux. In the past that meant no fingerprint reader. Similarly, the wifi cards could be different b/w windows and linux models. They seem to have added some support for fingerprint readers in linux in this generation. Also, you should wait for the icelake version (i.e., this version). Due to Intel's excellent naming convention, it may not be immediately obvious which laptop is which generation.

Looks nice, I'm torn about what my next laptop should be, but at this point whoever can offer me the most for 1k and I want 16GB of RAM minimum, if that's not possible, I'm holding back. I'm sick of paying ridiculous money for basically the same maximum RAM we've been able to buy for a decade (A 2010 MBP could hold 16GB of RAM, sure it's not DDR4 or better, but it's still useful and runs just fine).

Yeah, I replaced my wife's marginally upgraded 2011 MacBook Air recently with the 2019 MacBook Air because I got tired of looking at that shitty TN panel on the old Air.

8 years later and the base model $1100 MacBook still has 8GB of ram and 256GB of storage, just like the 2011 MacBook Air I wanted to replace.

What the fuck happened?

Meanwhile I can get a decent tower that costs about the base price of a Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM, a decent SSD, and so on, can play GTA5 and the new Tomb Raider (a buddy of mine built a rig for like under $400 and benchmarked with those games and was surprised).

Yeah, the HP Envy 13 I use has a sharper display, a 1TB SSD, and 16GB of RAM, and twice as many cores for $100 cheaper than the 2019 MacBook Air.

It got crushed by an airline seat reclining but other than some slight warping it's fine, so the build quality is actually pretty decent on it.

The only things worse about the Envy are the tiny trackpad and the lack of OS X, but I prefer Ubuntu to OS X these days anyways.

I got the 13" XPS 7390 2 in 1, 4k, 32gb, i7 for $985 from the Dell outlet during BF in 2019. Killer deal for the machine (I think it's MSRP was around $1800). Something you might want to look out for. It looks and feels brand new, not sure why it was returned.

This changes constantly (like, throughout the day) so watch this if you're interested. And don't use my price as your guideline, this deal was up for literal minutes when I got it and I've never heard of a better one. I'd happily pay $1300+ for the machine.

https://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/InventorySe...

"Dell estimates that this model will get up to 19 hours of battery life when configured with an FHD+ display."

I like this trend.

Up to means you don’t really do anything and set the brightness low.

The trend is actually to have smaller batteries. So if you do anything that uses the cpu 19 hours can become 3 pretty quick.

Maybe one day, the chipset gods at Intel will see fit to bless us with a 13" ultrabook that has 32GB of RAM.

I can't tell if it's Intel restricting it, but it's suspicious to me that every manufacturer simultaneously agreed to not ship larger RAM configurations in this form factor.

This XPS 13 is available with 32 GB RAM.

They probably don't want to do it because then everyone will complain that the battery life is garbage. My specced out 16 GB MBP barely gets 4 hours without being plugged in.

Why aren't hardware/motherboard vendors using RAM hotplug to power down some of the RAM when unused and save that battery life? OS's support RAM hotplug already because it's needed for server use cases, the one missing bit is hardware support.

The developer model has an option for 32gb!

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-XPS...

EDIT: the 32gb model isn't available for sale until next month I think

Oh wow, so the arstechnica article is mistaken. This is great news.

My 2019 XPS 13 2 in 1 has 32gb and an i7, it's a little power house except it's thermals are terrible and it will throttle quickly if you don't throttlestop it. My MBP work machine has 16gb so I definitely feel limited there.

The ultrabooks you want to watch at are the XPS 7390 2-in-1. HP Spectre x360 and Lenovo c940. I don't believe the latter 2 offer 32GB right now but I'm guessing they will eventually since the Dell has it now.

I'm hoping Thinkpad follows this lead and also moves to something not 16:9

Lenovo announced the X1 Carbon 2020 as well today, and it looks the same as the X1 Carbon 2019 and the X1 Carbon 2018. Max 16 GB RAM.

But hey, it has WiFi 6 now.

Kind of annoying that you can't get it without the windows logo on the meta key when buying it with Linux.

I'm surprised Microsoft would let them use that logo on a product not sold with Windows.

They didn't two models ago and there was a special kernel hack/package installed specifically to keep the windows key from doing anything since there wasn't an accompanying license, it took less than a minute to remove but still annoying.

The last model didn't have that keyblock though so I guess they got over it.

I don't think there is anything particularly different about my development environment than others, but I really struggle with only 16gb of ram. As much as I like being mobile, my MBP is "light duty" at best (real work relegated to my iMac). Thus, disappointing to see the 16gb limit on these new Dell models.

What is your development environment?

Are keyboards going to get so flat that at some point they are concave...

What a disappointing review. Core count? RAM clock rates? I guess it's really an "enterprise" laptop for people who don't care much about things like that.

It’s not a review. It’s just a press release/advertisement.

Why would someone want an IR camera?

I can't find any information online about why that would be useful.

It's for Windows Hello (facial recognition login).

This may seem like a minor issue, but the downward firing speakers are a ridiculous choice for 2020. There are laptops that don't have compromises like these. Yes we can use headphones or pair an external bluetooth speaker, but sometimes it is nice to just have your laptop fill your hotel room with sound and you may not have these other accessories on hand.

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