First Impressions: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (2016)
Deceptively small and light, Dell delivers a laptop that packs a decent punch and lives up to its hype!
I recently took on a new contract which was going to require me to use my own equipment (not uncommon when contracting), and decided to use it as an excuse to obtain a new laptop. I decided that I wanted a 13" device this time — smaller, lighter, more geared to my work-from-random-places behaviour.
As fond as I am of Apple’s hardware, I had been hearing good things for years about Dell’s XPS series, and specifically their Developer Edition XPS 13 — a device that comes pre-installed with Ubuntu 16.04. While I remain a skeptic of Desktop Linux for the masses, Ubuntu’s user experience has come a long way. Linux is also the target environment of almost everything I do. Developing on the Mac and deploying to Linux is a well-established art by now, but there are still occasional oddities doing it that way.
Long story short, I ordered myself one, and these are my initial impressions after about three days living with it.
Specifications as reviewed for a Dell XPS 13 9360:
- Core i7–7500 CPU (2 real cores with hyperthreading)
- 16 GiB RAM
- 512 GiB SSD
- 13" QHD+ (3200x1800) display w/touch screen
- Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)
Hardware
Size and weight
Despite a 13" diagonal screen in 16:9 aspect ratio, this device is sized closer to 11" devices of the last few years. The reason this is possible is simple: Dell’s pushing toward nearly bezel-less screens. The crisp, bright QHD+ display has only about a half-inch border top, right, and left, and a 3" bottom border that includes the logo and the camera — an odd placement, but I wasn’t planning to use the camera much on this machine, so I’m not sure I care. The whole thing weighs just under 3 lbs.
Keyboard and Trackpad
Despite this squeeze, the keyboard is pretty close to full sized — just enough smaller than the keyboard I was used to on the 15" MacBook Pro that I needed a little time to acclimate. The keys feel good under the fingers, with good mechanical action. This is a laptop made for people will be typing a lot, after all. There’s none of the wobbling feeling that cheaper and smaller laptops often have.
One huge win, IMO, over Apple’s aluminium fetish is that the keyboard deck is covered in a rubberised material that feels much more comfortable under the wrists than cold, hard metal.
The trackpad is not quite the monstrous size of the latest Apple offerings, but it’s pretty spacious, and sensitive. One area where Apple wins hands down is palm-rejection. As always with both Windows and Ubuntu laptops, I found I had to turn off the tap-to-click feature because of random touches registering as clicks. My fat hands just roll over the edges of the trackpad too easily.
The trackpad is multi-touch, in as much as it distinguishes between one finger for moving the mouse and two fingers for scrolling. It does not appear to recognise pinch-to-zoom gestures, but that may be an Ubuntu driver question and not a hardware issue.
The key back-lighting is a no-frills white, with two brightness levels available. I find the dimmer setting more than adequate.
Screen
As I mentioned above, the screen is a real winner. While I really wish the industry would get over its gloss fetish and start offering matte displays again, that’s about my only complaint. At full brightness, a white background is almost painfully bright. Colour reproduction so far seems adequate, but I haven’t done much with it where I cared that much about colour fidelity.
Sometime while I wasn’t paying attention, Ubuntu became more adept at handling touch-screens. I didn’t really need a touch-screen on this device, but the higher end CPU and memory were only available on the touch-screen units, and I wanted those, so touch-screen it was.
I haven’t really used it much, but for example, while I was writing this, my eyes were getting a little tired, and I decided to experiment with the standard two-finger gestures to zoom the screen. It worked very smoothly and seamlessly. I have not really experimented to see what other gestures beyond the basics Ubuntu might support, but I was pretty pleased that the basics worked so well.
Ports
Ports have become a sticking point in a lot of newer laptops (cf. Apple and their all-USB-C all-the-time decision), There will probably be some head-scratching over Dell’s choices here.
On the one hand, the XPS 13 retains an SD Card slot, two USB-A/3.0 slots (one of which allows devices to charge from the laptop even when the laptop is off), and a headphone/mic jack.
On the other hand, they did away with HDMI or mini-DisplayPort in favour of a USB-C/3.1 port that supports Thunderbolt 3.0 and DisplayPort protocols. For many people, this means an adaptor if you want to add a second monitor. I obtained such an adaptor, but haven’t actually tried it yet, and have to admit I bought it without checking whether Linux would support it!
On the third hand, they retained their proprietary power adaptor port rather than having a second USB-C port that could double as power-in. On the surface, this seems an odd choice if they were going to commit to USB-C at all. On the other hand, they have other accessories, like the Dell Power Companion battery pack (which I may review separately — tldr: I like it), that accept the same power-in ports as their laptops so that they don’t need their own power bricks.
Basically, Dell appears to be hedging their bets, while Apple jumped into USB-C with both feet.
Speakers
I haven’t done much audio other than system sounds, but I did play a bit of music and a few minutes of a video at one point just to hear it. The sound was very well defined and clear, but that’s all about all I can say about it so far.
Battery life and heat
Battery life is quite satisfactory. My first full day working with it I deliberately left it off AC mains until the battery was nearly spent, getting about six hours of use that included a mixture of browsing, coding, and running parallel test suites that exercised all the cores at once, all with the brightness at middle-to-high settings. When plugged in, it recharged quickly — I didn’t actually time it but it seemed like only about 45 minutes to get back to full charge while I was using it.
As might be expected with a Core i7, when the machine is busy, the bottom gets a little hot. The fan grills are on the bottom, which might be problematic depending on what sort of surface you’re resting on. The base has two humps to elevate the unit while it’s on a flat, firm surface, though. The fan is loud enough to know when it’s running, but not terrible. In a noisier environment like a coffee shop, I have yet to hear it at all over the ambience.
Construction
The lid and bottom both appear to be aluminium, as has become common. The keyboard deck, as mentioned, and the sides, appear to have a rubberised coating that gives it a grippy feel and is more comfortable to rest the palms on when typing than a pure metal body. The whole feels solid enough that I’m pretty sure the frame inside is still aluminium, not plastic.
For those of you who care about user-serviceability and repair, the device appears to be held together just by screws, albeit TORX screws, and there is a maintenance guide available online. I have not really read through it, since I fervently hope never to have to open the unit up myself. Not my hobby!
Software
The installed OS is Ubuntu 16.04, and more or less just works out of the gate. Of course there was a round of updates to be done, given that Ubuntu updates its packages quite regularly, but those took very little time, given a speedy network at home and good WiFi hardware on the device!
The default application dock includes both full Chrome, and the slightly less capable but fully open-source Chromium. Firefox, the usual Ubuntu default, is not installed at all (although of course, you can fix that if you want it). Thunderbird, Mozilla’s well-worn POP/IMAP client is, however. I found Chrome to be surprisingly problematic, with window-flashing (especially when loading, say, Google Inbox) and very slow behaviour on image-heavy pages. Chromium seems to be much better behaved, which surprised me.
The initial boot-up sequence takes you through an abbreviated version of what you’d see if you installed Ubuntu from scratch — the software is already actually installed and the disk partitioned, so the main things it needs are language configuration and user information.
You also get an opportunity to create a recovery stick, which as far as I can tell is just a stock Ubuntu image. Some googling around seems to suggest that almost all of the driver code involved has found its way upstream, so there isn’t actually any Dell-specific magic on here.
I so far have experienced only one real oddity. Twice, now (but not every time), I put the device to sleep by closing the lid, and when it woke up, the WiFi would not come up properly, and I had to reboot — restarting network-manager was not sufficient. I haven’t found a correlation to any specific thing I did, so it appears to be random.
On the other hand, searching for issues turns up a lot more just a couple of months ago that I haven’t experienced at all, which suggests that the folks who are working on the drivers, most of which are open-sourced and being sent upstream, are working fairly quickly to ensure this device has a solid user experience.
Booting from power off takes less than a minute, as one might expect from an SSD-based device.
Performance
I’m not a benchmarker, although I may actually try running a few for a follow-up article. What I care most about is a very subjective notion of how responsive a machine is to my requests at any given time, and so far, I’ve been solidly pleased. I’m typing this while a three-process parallel test suite is running in the background and doing all the usual ADD web surfing one does while a test suite is chugging along and the entire system is perfectly responsive. Since the machine is aimed pretty much at this exact use case — a developer doing developer things on it — I’d say they hit the mark.
The test suite takes nearly two minutes less than it did on my older (2013) MacBook Pro (5m45s vs 7m30s, roughly), which is about what I’d expect. The MBP had more execution units (4 cores hyperthreaded to 8 units), but an older, slower CPU, an of course an older generation SSD and RAM. The balance of the newer, 7th-generation Core-i7, but the lower-power model with only 2 cores, results in a modest but noticeable improvement. in actual results.
As I mentioned above, the main negative surprise has been the performance of Chrome (but not the 100% open-source Chromium). A page that’s mostly text (like the Medium composer window I’m in right now) behaves great, but a more multi-media page, like Facebook, is kinda painful, and sometimes causes the entire browser to sort of flash. I don’t really know what Chrome could be doing special to cause this, but since Chromium both behaves better and works with everything I care about, I’m not sure how much I really care beyond curiosity.
Conclusion
Dell’s been receiving praise from the community for several successive generations of this device, and now that I finally have one, I’m pleased to say that it lives up to the buzz. The machine feels great both to carry and to use, has a respectable performance and a respectable battery life, and has a screen that’s a joy to look at (which is good since I look at the damned thing all day!).
This machine and I have a lot of work to do together. I’m looking forward to it!
