Ultrabook batteries are supposed to be better than that. Compare that to the MacBook Air, which can go weeks in sleep mode without a charge. If I left the XPS closed in sleep mode, the battery would still drain in about a day. Everything was buttery smooth. You won't have a problem running multiple apps or even doing some light video and photo editing.īut beyond the speed and performance, there are a few potential dealbreakers that come packaged with the XPS.įirst off, I wasn't able to get even close to the almost nine hours of battery life Dell says the XPS can get. And thanks to 4 GB of RAM, I never had the machine lock up on me. The unit I tested was running on one of Intel's i7 processors, the same energy efficient chip that drives many other Ultrabooks. Nice.Īnd the overall performance is great. That's very impressive for a Windows machine and on par with the bootup time on my MacBook Air. It also wakes up from sleep mode almost instantly. When I first turned on the XPS 13, I was surprised to see it booted up in less than 20 seconds. Unfortunately, the display doesn't look so great when it's on. That means Dell was able to pack more screen in less space. My eyes were immediately drawn to the display, which has an amazingly thin bezel. When you open it up, you'll see that the XPS has a few unique design elements. That's not to say the entire design is a complete ripoff. It has the same rounded corners, the same wedge shape, and even the same type of hinge attaching the screen to the rest of the body. When the XPS is closed and viewed from the top, its footprint looks almost identical to the MacBook Air's.

However, that's probably because Dell borrowed liberally from Apple's MacBook Air design. The XPS is one of the most attractive Ultrabooks I've seen so far. But with the Ultrabook space becoming more and more crowded, the XPS 13 has to do more than just wow us with aesthetics. With the XPS 13, we finally have some proof Dell can make an attractive product.

That means Ultrabooks can boot up quickly and run for several hours on a single battery charge.ĭell just released one of the latest Ultrabook models, the 13-inch XPS 13. Most forgo traditional hard drives in favor of a solid state drive, which is similar to the storage found in your smartphone or tablet. Ultrabooks are those thin and light laptops that are designed to compete with Apple's MacBook Air.

Dell xps 13 2012 ram