I’ve been on a long journey with Dell products that began back in the mid-1990s. I have continued buying Dell machines for my business and family, because they’ve been reliable, easy, and fast.
My latest computer is the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, which is just a gorgeous, light, and speedy laptop. I was excited to get this one as a gift from Dell to share my candid views of it.
I got a chance to meet a bunch of the folks at Dell in 2010 when I was selected to sit on their inaugural Customer Advisory Panel, so thank you to them for sending the XPS 13 my way.
Anyhow, on to the XPS 13 – it’s amazing to see how Dell has evolved from some of those back-breaking laptops I used to haul around years ago.
This beauty weighs less than 3 pounds and it’s less than a quarter-inch thick, which is not so much more than an iPad.
I think this is significant, because I’ve been hearing from lots of people that they travel with their iPad over a laptop these days. Personally, I want and need the power that comes with a laptop over a tablet.
Some other specs I like are the backlit keyboard, nearly 9 hours of battery time, and the HD display (Corning Gorilla Glass – nice when it encounters my rough travel and my 4 rough kids).
It’s also got a machined aluminum body and carbon fiber base. Now that doesn’t really mean anything to me, but I like the way it looks and the fact that this enables it to be light and cool to the touch.
Now for the guts of it – the XPS 13 boots super fast with its SSD (solid-state drive) and Intel Rapid Start Technology. They’re available with 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processors.
The base model runs $999 with 4 GB of memory, a 128 GB solid-state drive, and it runs on Windows 7.
As far as ports, it’s got two USB ports and one Mini DisplayPort.
I was going to say my one issue with the XPS 13 is that I often take my laptop to use for presentations with my projector, and the projector uses a VGA connector.
But I just searched and found that I can just grab an adapter for pretty cheap to run the XPS 13 to my projector. Nice.
I’m excited to make this my everyday laptop.