Dell 1P6KD - Battery 84Whr 6 Cell - Warranty: 6M

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As great as the MacBook Pro is right now, there's one important feature that's always been missing. A touchscreen. It's something Windows laptops have enjoyed for years now, and many have viewed it as a missing piece of the puzzle for the Mac.

Where the current version of the XPS 13 has drawn controversy is in the removal of some of its connectivity options. While Apple users will, by now, be familiar with (and occasionally frustrated by) the smaller number of USB-C ports, it does mean users of the newest XPS models will have to be dongle or hub-ready. What makes the XPS range great for musicians?

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7630): Affordable, Attractive And High-Performance Mobile Computing

The Inspiron 16 Plus came to us running Windows 11 Home with a relatively light software payload. Aside from the typical drivers and control panels, Dell only included a McAfee LiveSafe 30-day trial and the standard Dell applications, including Digital Delivery and MyDell. As you'd expect, the most important of these is the MyDell application because that's where the Color & Display and Power control features live. Images and text looked so sharp on the 3.5K resolution that I wouldn't recommend the higher 4K display option unless you needed a brighter display for outdoor use. The higher resolution isn't needed on such a compact screen and the added pixels will only decrease battery life. The 3.5K panel is rated for 400 nits, and my tests showed it a bit dimmer than its rating with a peak brightness of 369 nits. Each display option features touch support, which can come in handy when the haptic touchpad flakes out. Not surprisingly, the new XPS 15's OLED panel delivered wide color coverage bested only by the Samsung, and a more than ample max brightness of 422 nits (OLED screens' sky-high contrast makes anything over 300 or 350 nits a boon, whereas we usually look for at least 400 nits from IPS panels). The SpyderX Elite numbers confirmed our eyeball tests, which showed bright and brilliant colors.

No matter what you think of the overall design, you have to agree that the XPS 13 Plus boasts awesome build quality. It's really solidly constructed. The all-metal chassis is very rigid without even a hint of flex that can often be felt with a thin ultraportable. The 13.4-inch XPS 13 Plus weighs 2.8 pounds, which is slightly heavier than the 13.6-inch M2 MacBook Air that weighs 2.7 pounds. For a more portable OLED ultraportable, the 13.3-inch Asus Zenbook S 13 weighs a scant 2.2 pounds. High-res OLED display, low-res IR webcam As you can see in the benchmark charts below, this year's XPS 13 Plus finished behind the previous model on most of our tests. It topped last year's model on only PCMark 10. Its performance generally fell between the Acer Swift Go 14 that features a high-powered Core i7-13700H CPU and the Asus ZenBook S 13 that uses a more efficient Core i7-1355U chip. Meanwhile, a pair of HP Pavilions based on AMD Ryzen U-series chips generally outperformed the XPS 13 Plus, which isn't a great look for Dell's ultraportable. This year's XPS 13 Plus does offer longer battery life even though it features the same three-cell, 51-watt-hour battery as the previous model. It lasted a little more than seven hours on our online streaming battery drain test when last year's model petered out before the four-hour mark. Still, competing ultraportables run for hours longer than the XPS 13 Plus. Against most other laptops, the XPS 15 might come out on top. But it’s simply outclassed by the MacBook Pro 14 in performance, battery life, keyboard and touchpad, and overall display quality. All other products will be delivered via the fastest available method (excluding bank holidays and weekends) and generally within 3-5 days, depending on customer location.The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. The 720p webcam was outdated on last year's model and is now severely behind the times on this year's version. All but the most budget laptops these days feature crisper 1080p cameras and some higher-end models now offer 1440p cams. The XPS 13 Plus's webcam produces a grainy image with reddish skin tones. It could be a deal breaker by itself if Zoom calls are a regular part of your day. Just like most of Dell's performance laptops, the Inspiron 16 Plus starts with an Intel Core i7-13700H with six P-cores, eight E-cores, and a 5.0 GHz boost speed, strapped with a 45-Watt TDP. It's fed by 16 GB of DDR5-4800 memory in a dual-channel configuration, by way of a pair of upgradeable SO-DIMMs, with an official maximum capacity of 32 GB. There's also a 1 TB NVMe PCI Express SSD in the standard M.2 2280 form factor on board. Technology enthusiasts love premium PCs. Flashy machines made from ultra-premium materials, with the thinnest profiles or the fastest components, speak to us on a primal level that cause us to make caveman noises like Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor on Home Improvement. The problem with those PCs, of course, is that premium features usually come at a premium price. But if you don't want to part with the big money, the subject of this article -- the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7630) -- is an excellent alternative.

Of course, we're talking about a small percentage of the laptop's total cost, so the Dell's 40-watt ceiling is hardly a deal-breaker, though it's something to be aware of. You can learn more about wattage differences and the limitations of laptop versus desktop GPUs in our desktop versus mobile GeForce RTX 4090 testing piece. Battery and Display Tests Largely, you can overcome these issues and end up with a hugely capable, portable studio laptop but you should go with eyes wide open to the fact Windows laptops inherently need a bit of ‘optimising’ before they’re recording-ready. That said, with the XPS 13 being one of the most popular laptops on the market in 2023, it’s not like you’re buying into some obscure Windows ecosystem. Whatever issue you have, you can guarantee there’ll be another XPS user who had and then solved the problem online. After the introduction of the OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro, Apple is expected to push both features to MacBook Air models in 13.6-inch and 15.3-inch variants. This could happen starting in 2026 and beyond, depending on the tentative timeline of the MacBook Pro launch.The latest rumors, however, suggest that a solid road map is in place that could potentially end with touch-enabled OLED screens coming to the MacBook Pro. We tested the MacBook Pro 14 with the fastest CPU available, the M3 Max with 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores. That’s a monster chip that has achieved some of the fastest benchmark results we’ve seen. As you’ll see here, the XPS 15 configured with the Core i7-13700H can’t keep up in CPU-intensive benchmarks. It was only competitive in the Cinebench R23 benchmark in single-core mode. When all cores are engaged, the MacBook Pro 14 is much faster. The Power section of MyDell shows battery health statistics, and also provides access to different charging strategies designed to maximize the usable lifetime of the battery. There's also four thermal management profiles here, labeled Optimized, Cool, Quiet, and Ultra Performance. Optimized is the default operating mode, Cool will keep the surface temperatures low at the cost of performance and noise, Quiet will keep fan noise to a minimum, and Ultra Performance will ungate the fan speeds under load to ensure best performance. The MacBook Pro 14’s Mini-LED display is much brighter, both in its default standard dynamic range (SDR) setting and when running high dynamic range ( HDR) content. Add in its incredibly deep contrast and a maximum brightness of 1,600 nits and the MacBook Pro is the best laptop for HDR streaming. Where the XPS 15’s OLED display is better is in its coverage of the AdobeRGB gamut. But Apple’s display is slightly more accurate. The MacBook Pro 14 also has better connectivity, with both more Thunderbolt 4 ports and an HDMI connection. Both laptops have full-size SD card readers, which is welcome. The XPS 15’s wireless connectivity is a generation behind, giving the MacBook Pro 14 another win.

Non- gaming laptops with integrated graphics tend to plod through these tests, but the discrete GPUs in this group showed their graphics and 3D chops with impressive results. For super-heavy-duty animation or modeling workflows, you'll want something from the workstation aisle, but video editors and mainstream content creators will be more than satisfied. We didn’t test the MacBook Pro 14 in the same version of the PugetBench Premiere Pro benchmark, and so we can’t directly compare numbers. However, in this benchmark that runs in a live version of Adobe’s Premiere Pro and uses the GPU to speed up certain tasks, the MacBook Pro 14 with the M3 Max achieved the second-highest score we’ve seen in a laptop. Only the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 with an AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D and an RTX 4090 was faster. The XPS 15, even in its most powerful configuration, won’t come close to matching the MacBook Pro 14. Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Neither laptop has received any design changes in several generations. That’s a good thing, because both are among the best designed and built laptops available today.

The 2023 Dell XPS 15 is more or less exactly what you'd expect from the company flagship. Its fresh components deliver measurably superior power and longevity, while the machine's premium build and design remain intact. It may not be overly exciting, but XPS loyalists and upgraders should be more than happy. Terms Apply. Promotion ends 3 December 2023. Items are subject to availability. Max 5 units per customer. Hard drive retention: Hard drive retention is not available on models with a soldered hard drive, including XPS 9315 2in1, Chromebooks or Venue tablets, except the Venue 11 Pro.