The following are my initial impressions of the third-generation Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition “ultrabook”, often called Sputnik 3 in reference to the Dell skunkworks project that produced the original machine and to distinguish it from its predecessors. It is a 13.3" slim Intel Core i7 laptop with a 1920x1080 touchscreen display, full-size keyboard, solid state disk, and large touchpad. It comes installed with Ubuntu 12.04, which is a little dated at this point, but generally functions.
This review comes after just a few hours of use. I'll try to do a follow-up later, with more experience, for perspective. I received the laptop on Thursday, January 30 2014, but really didn't have time to do more than make sure the parts were in the box until late on Friday, January 31, and I am writing this review on Saturday, February 1.
To put this review in perspective, I keep my laptops for their useful lifetime, which has thus far meant about 5 years. My first laptop was an Apple iBook 12" (the white kind, not the toilet seat) in 2001, on which I ran first Linux, then OS X, then Linux again. When it died in 2005 (the BGA graphics chip problem that killed most of them), I replaced it with a Dell Latitude d610. The d610 was much larger, heavier, and generally less elegant than the iBook, but it a) worked, b) was free, and c) ran Linux like a champ. By the fall of 2009 it was getting pretty long in the tooth, had a battery life of only about two hours, and was noticeably slower than other machines I had access to. I will note that it's the only laptop in this story that still works, however — I have it sitting on a desk where I occasionally need to pop up reference documentation and it can remain plugged into AC power. I replaced it with a MacBook Pro mid-2009 that just died in January of 2014. The MBP was down to about 2 1/2 hours of battery life and I had been thinking I either needed to get a new battery or replace it, and it took the issue out of my hands when its SATA controller apparently went South for the winter. Over the years I have also had a fair amount of experience with my wife's older MacBook and 2012-vintage MacBook Air, as well as other Dell and Lenovo laptops.
Given the above experience, and that my immediate previous laptop that I had been using for 5 years was a MacBook Pro, you're going to find a lot of Apple comparisons in this article. I think that's OK, because it seems to me that this machine's most direct competitor is the Apple MacBook Air 13".
Presentation and Initial Physical Impressions
The very first thing I noticed is that this machine comes in the nicest packaging I've ever seen, for a consumer laptop. It's nicer even than MacBook packaging, although similar in broad comparison. It's almost a presentation case. It has sharp, square corners and a mid-hinge design that provides an overall slick impression. I'm not really too concerned about such things, but it did make an impact when I opened the shipping box.
The next thing I noticed is that it's tiny. Footprint-wise, it's about 1" shorter than the MacBook Air, maybe 3/8" narrower, and a similar body thickness. It's overall a bit thicker because its “feet” are somewhat more substantial, but the body itself is similar. More on those feet later. The display is wider and shorter than the MBA, but total viewable space is very similar and the bezel is markedly smaller. The body width leaves enough room for a full-size (or close enough that I can comfortably touch-type, anyway, I haven't measured) keyboard, though the height dictates that the touchpad is somewhat smaller in the Y dimension than my MacBook Air.
I'm very much a function-over-form guy, and I'm more concerned about practicality than looks for the sake of looks. That said, the overall package is reasonably attractive. Dell makes a big deal out of the "magnesium and carbon fiber" construction, but frankly it might as well be "aluminum and plastic", because that's what it looks and feels like to me. Many of the plastic surfaces (including keyboard keys) feel somewhat rubberized, which is a bit disconcerting at first but rapidly fades from notice. They do seem to fingerprint very easily. The feet on the body are very much rubberized, and stay put nicely. Time will tell whether they present a problem for sliding in and out of a backpack without interfering with other papers and such. There's a reasonably classy but too-obvious for my taste Dell logo on the back of the display; at least it doesn't glow like my MBP did! There is also a weird metal plate on the bottom with an embossed XPS and laser-etched Ubuntu and Intel logos on it. It has a little finger groove under one side like it might be a cover or otherwise removable, but moderate tugging at it didn't move it, so I don't know what it is or what it's for. Decoration, I guess. Update: More concerted prying reveals that it does indeed open, and there's a service tag and some typical FCC/UL information underneath. So yeah, decoration.
Function-wise, an immediate positive design aspect jumped out the moment I saw the power adapter. It's similar in size to recent MBA power adapters (somewhat longer and thinner), but much better designed. The DC power cable is larger in diameter and wraps around the body of the adapter itself, rather than those stupid tiny stress-inducing ears that Apple has been using for a few years now. I don't anticipate spectacular, spark-throwing failures of this supply like I experienced with my MBP. Dell did pull a successful page out of Apple's book and supplies both a wall-wart style plug and a short AC cord for the brick. Again here, the design is somewhat better, with the folding AC prongs being mounted to a square-faced block that can be configured to protrude either out the broad side of the adapter for horizontal mounting or out the end of the adapter to stand in a power strip. Both configurations are better leverage-wise than the Apple plug block, which has a tendency for the AC adapter weight to try to fold the plug back into the body, dragging it out of outlets. (I have experienced this with two different Apple AC adapters of different sizes, so it's not a rare failure mode.) An additional nice design touch is that the DC cable exits the AC adapter through a hard molded channel that should provide very effective strain relief, instead of perpendicular from the body as is so common.
My primary complaint about the power adapter configuration is that it has glowing lights on the end of the DC cable. Apple does this, Alienware (now owned by Dell) does this, and probably other manufacturers. All I can figure is that the designers of this feature do not have small children. What does a small child do when they see a glowing light? PULL ON IT. Another minor annoyance is that the LED in the top of the DC power cable lights whether or not the cable is plugged into the laptop. I suppose this is so people will recognize that it's still energized even when the laptop isn't plugged in and unplug the adapter, but ... kind of annoying.
On the subject of power, the battery is non-removable. We'll treat battery life later, but it seems to be good. There is a recessed button and row of five tiny LEDs on the right-hand edge of the lower shell that shows remaining battery charge — a very nice feature. My MacBook Pro had this, and all of my laptops with removable batteries have had this, but for some reason the new MacBook Airs do not. Stupid.
There's a gauche Intel Inside™ CORE i7 sticker on the lower right palm rest that doesn't appear to readily peel off. A large Dell XPS horn-tooting sticker on the left palm rest has a fake folded corner indicating that it does peel off, and it removed easily without leaving behind any noticeable residue.
Initial Boot and Setup
On first boot (which is of course very fast, off the SSD!), the installed OS immediately goes into a song-and-dance routine like OS X. Also annoyingly like OS X, you actually have to watch the whole thing. It's probably only 30 seconds long or so, but it seems longer since it's stupid and useless. Once it finishes, a well-executed initial setup dialog walks you through creating your user and a few other settings, then drops you to the Unity desktop. The only glitch I experienced here was that I couldn't find a way to tell it about my hidden wireless network; I had to skip networking and configure that once I was at the desktop.
I am not thrilled with the choice of Unity as an interface. Obviously this is because Ubuntu is their operating system of choice (I would pick Debian, but I can't substantially fault them for this), but I'm really not a fan. I used it for a few minutes before the window placement became annoying and I switched to XFCE4. That was even more annoying, so I installed fvwm2 and slurped my config from another machine and got down to business.
Part of the initial setup process was an option to create restore media. Because I understand that installing Linux on this machine (as opposed to running it) is somewhat tricky due to requiring newer kernels than most distributions provide (or backported drivers), I elected to create a restore disk. This overwrote a 4 GB USB stick (they say you need at least 2 GB, and the actual ISO image is about 2.4 GB). I haven't tried to use it. That process also leaves the restore ISO image in ~/Downloads. Writing the ISO image took a few minutes; I'm not sure how long, because I was doing other things, but it was at least 5 or 10. Some of that is undoubtedly because my USB flash drive is a free drive from some conference.
The factory SSD setup leaves you with about 200 GB of free disk space. There is a small UEFI partition and a 3+ GB factory restore partition on the disk other than the primary installation, as well as a 16 GB swap partition and about 7.5 GB of preinstalled software. The disk is advertised as 256 GB, so I figure 200 GB of usable free space is pretty reasonable.
Throughout much of the initial setup process, there was an annoying squealing sound coming from the motherboard. This is very common with modern electronics, and usually indicates a coil or capacitor that is producing audio-frequency physical vibrations induced by whatever signal is passing through it. I noticed that it went away at some point, and assumed it was just startup weirdness and gone, but some poking online suggested that it was actually related to the keyboard backlight (see, for example, this forum thread), which I had turned off. Indeed, turning the keyboard backlight on causes it to come back with a vengeance. Some Dell forum posts suggest that they're working on this, and it's covered by warranty; I don't intend to use the keyboard backlight so I don't care too much for the time being, but it's something to keep in mind.
Basic Functionality
All advertised features seem to work, and work well. For Linux on a laptop, that's definitely not always the case!
The keyboard hotkeys for display and keyboard backlight work under all desktop environments, although the volume controls seem to require Unity. (They didn't work under XFCE4, and they don't work in Fvwm.) That's to be sort of expected, but they also don't seem to send normal Xf86 media key keycodes. They will require further analysis. Fn-key combos like page up, page down, etc. also work as expected — and as a bonus, are located on the same arrow keys in the same configuration as my MacBook Pro.
The touchpad is great. Apple has had the corner on amazing touchpads since the release of the glass clickable touchpad on the MacBook Pro half a decade ago. Nothing else has even come close. I'm pleased to say that the touchpad on this laptop is definitely getting there. It's a little bit more jittery than the Apple touchpad, but multitouch taps work as expected, left and right click by corner work as expected, and the sensitivity and accuracy are in general much superior to any PC touchpad I've used in a very long time. (NB: there are probably other machines with this pad on the market now, but I simply haven't seen one.) As mentioned earlier in this review, the touch pad is a little bit shorter than on my MacBook Pro, leaving it closer to the aspect ratio of the XPS screen — which is probably appropriate. If it's wider, it's not a lot wider; over all, I suspect the touchable area is slightly smaller. The only thing I'm missing so far is multitouch swipe gestures in my web browser, which Linux browsers (I've tried Firefox and Chrome) don't seem to support. I'm not sure if this is a driver problem, an X input model problem, or simply a limitation of the browsers. I haven't looked into it yet.
When I moved to Fvwm, I did lose three-finger-tap as a middle click. This is easily re-enabled with the Synaptics configuration utility by running synclient TapButton3=2. I put that in my Fvwm startup scripts and all is well.
The touchscreen seems to work OK. I am neither a big fan of touching displays nor particularly convinced that a touch laptop display is ergonomically a great idea. Time will tell if I find it useful. Touches seem to be accurate and mostly DWIM. I haven't really poked at it enough to say more.
Battery, Power, and Thermals
With limited data to work from, battery life seems to be great. As I type this, I've been on battery for about 3 1/2 hours, and the battery is sitting right at 50%. The power monitoring subsystem estimates another 3:20 of battery life, which tracks with those numbers. I have done a very little development work, some package management, a fair amount of web browsing, and a lot of editing (mostly this document!). I would say that the work load approximates my usual development work (I use remote build machines for big builds, which cuts down on absolute CPU usage), so I expect to get 6–7 hours of battery life on a typical charge based on what I've seen so far. That's less than Apple advertises for the MacBook Air, but in line with what I've actually seen it accomplish. More would be better, of course, but it'll get me to Europe.
Update: At approximately 3:30 PM, after about 8 hours on battery, the indicator light at the edge of the laptop (I guess I didn't mention it before, but there's a white indicator at the edge of the laptop) has turned orange and there's a reported 8% and 31 minutes of battery remaining. I was gone for almost exactly one hour with the screen shut off, and that hour appeared to cost me about 20 minutes of in-use battery life. As expected, the screen is a big part of the battery drain. At this point, I'm going to go ahead and plug the thing in. I would call the battery life under active use but with moderate CPU demands about 7 hours, and not worry too much about leaving it running for another hour or so if it's completely idle. Not bad.
Charge times appear to be reasonable, but certainly not particularly rapid. It took a couple of hours to go from a flat battery (under 5% charge remaining) to full charge under light load. The included AC adapter is a 45 W supply, I don't know if the optional larger supply would charge faster or if it's a limitation of the drive controller. Like most modern laptop batteries, it seems to take the bulk of its charge more quickly than the last few percent.
The fan has kicked on a few times, but it mostly stays off and the laptop is silent. Even relatively idle, the bottom of the case does get a bit warm, and I can definitely feel it on my lap. I would say that its heat impact on my legs is broadly similar to the MBP that it's replacing, although it does take longer to cool down when I set it aside — almost certainly because the MBP bottom cover is aluminum, while the XPS is carbon fiber.
Airflow appears to be drawn in a long, narrow recessed vent near the rear of the laptop behind the back “foot“ and pushed out the hinge under the monitor (like a MacBook). This is probably the reason for the larger feet on this unit compared to a Mac laptop; to raise that vent higher above the surface on which it sits so it can capture more air. The rearmost 1/4 or so of the laptop body (from about that vent to the hinge, as one would expect) appear to be where the majority of the heat is concentrated. The palm rests and lower keyboard keys remain quite cool, although the upper keyboard keys get a bit warm when it's working hard.
Display
The display is nice. Very nice. The only nicer displays I have seen are Apple Retina laptop displays. The dot pitch is a little more than half that of a Retina display (I calculate about 166 DPI); high enough to be visibly sharper than a typical laptop display, but not as smooth as a modern Android device or Apple Retina display.
I am disappointed that, in a trend that seems to be gaining momentum, either the GPU, display drivers, Ubuntu configuration, or X.org server ignores the actual panel size and reports a 96x96 DPI display. Historically, X11 has had much better display size and, with the advent of fontconfig and pango, better font rendering at more accurate sizes than any other platform I have used. However, this accuracy requires that the display drivers know how large the panel actually is. The result of lying to it in this fashion is that a logical 9 pt font on this display is more like 5 pt in actual height — much too small to be generally usable. This sort of lying is fixable in X configuration files, but I shouldn't have to do it. Panels know how big they are. Panel communication interfaces tell the GPU. The GPU can tell the driver, and the driver can tell the X server. I've seen it work. It works on my desktop. Get it right, people. When I say I want a screen font to be 9 pt high, I expect it to be 9 actual points high. I'll let you decide whether to use printer's points or 1/72" LaTeX-style points, I'm not that picky, but either way it ought to be close enough that I can't tell.
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Summary
I am very impressed. I bought this model of laptop sight-unseen, based on Internet reviews, personal recommendations (Rik van Riel, a coworker of Geoff Lane, etc.), and the stats off Dell's web site. I was a bit nervous about what I would actually receive, but the untimely death of my MacBook Pro coupled with a concern about the direction in which Apple is heading with OS X left me with few plausible options in the laptop market and a pressing need for a new machine. So far, it looks like the leap of faith was justified.
The price sticker is a little bit high. As configured, the total bill was a bit less than $1,700. That is price-competitive with the MacBook Air, as previously mentioned the closest market competitor, but it's more than I really wanted to pay for a laptop. As a laptop makes up a fair portion of my livelihood I can readily justify the expense, but I am not sure I would spend it if I didn't use a laptop for development work for hours a day every day. I think something closer to $1,000–1,200 would be more in line for that purpose. There is a cheaper brother to this model with half as much RAM and half as much SSD that might fit the bill more closely for other customers.