Its several Editors' Choice awards are the least of the Dell XPS 13's achievements. Since its debut in 2012, the compact laptop has been called the definitive ultraportable and hailed by some outlets as the best notebook, period. The new model 9345 ($999.99 as tested) is outwardly unchanged but radically different inside: It abandons Intel's x86 processors for Qualcomm's Snapdragon Arm CPU, the first to support Microsoft's Copilot+ PC initiative fully. The result scores high for curb appeal and price-for-performance, but isn't the most practical productivity partner. The Dell's archrival, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, is more expensive but has a higher-quality keyboard, more ports, and no-doubt Windows app compatibility.
Configurations and Design: We Miss the White Palm Rest
Dell earns points for pricing the XPS 13 base model at $999.99 with 16GB of memory and a 512GB solid-state drive instead of halving those amounts. It has a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 processor with Adreno integrated graphics and an AI-boosting Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU), Windows 11 Home, and a 13.4-inch non-touch IPS display with a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution. (You can still buy an Intel version, starting at $1,149 with a Core Ultra Series 1 processor or $1,399.99 with a brand-new Series 2 chip.)
The top-of-the-line configuration flaunts a 2,880-by-1,800 OLED touch screen for $1,549.99. It steps up to Windows 11 Pro, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD.
Visually, the XPS 13 peaked in 2021 with a white woven glass fiber palm rest. Now a thin black slab of CNC machined aluminum, the ultraportable measures 0.6 by 11.6 by 7.8 inches and weighs 2.62 pounds, landing between the 13.6-inch Apple MacBook Air (2.7 pounds) and the 14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 (2.47 pounds). Like its Dell XPS 13 Plus and Dell XPS 14 predecessors, it has a flush, lattice-like keyboard with a seamless haptic touchpad in the palm rest.
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Vanishingly thin bezels surround the screen, topped by a webcam whose face recognition tech supports Windows Hello logins—as does the fingerprint reader built into the power button—but which lacks a privacy shutter. The chassis is impressively sturdy, with almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.
Ports? We don't need no stinkin' ports. You'll find just one USB4 Type-C connector on either side, and both are suitable for the AC adapter. Anything else, from an external monitor to a USB-A flash drive or 3.5mm headset plug, will require a dongle. Jokes aside, this could be a major headache. Speedy Wi-Fi 7 is a minor consolation.
Using the Dell XPS 13 (9345): She Seems to Have an Invisible Touchpad
The 1080p webcam can use its face recognition feature to turn off the screen when you leave or dim it when you look away and wake the laptop when you return. It captures well-lit and colorful, if somewhat soft-focus, images and supports Windows' AI-enhanced Studio Effects such as auto framing and background blur.
Dell's lattice keyboard looks better than it feels. The top row of LED system shortcut keys (Escape, F1–F12, Delete) has zero feedback—at least the touch buttons on my washer and dryer have a membrane, so it feels like you're pressing something—and the primary keys are shallow and stiff.
While you'll find dedicated Home and End keys on the top row, Page Up and Page Down require pairing the Fn key with the hard-to-hit, half-height up and down arrow keys stacked between full-size left and right arrows in my pet-peeve HP-style row instead of the proper inverted T. The seamless touchpad takes some getting used to but is more successful, with slight haptic feedback and right-clicking where you expect it to be.
Dual woofers and dual tweeters, vented through slits in the sides, produce fairly loud but rather hollow and tinny sound. You'll find more bass than you usually hear from a small laptop, and you can make out overlapping tracks, but the audio quality isn't that high. You'll want headphones (Bluetooth headphones, since the audio jack is gone) for music listening. You won't find any audio tuning software, just SupportAssist for system scans and updates and MyDell for choosing power/cooling modes and display color presets.
The XPS 13's screen doesn't provide workstation-class color reproduction for cinephiles or prepress designers but is above average for a productivity-oriented portable, with ample brightness and decent contrast. Its fine details are sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters, and white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy or grayish. Meanwhile, its viewing angles are wide, and the screen's matte finish minimizes glare from room lights.
Testing the Dell XPS 13 (9345): Near the Front of the Snapdragon Pack
For our benchmark charts, we compared the Dell XPS laptop's performance with two other Qualcomm Snapdragon systems housing slightly larger screens, the Microsoft Surface Laptop and HP OmniBook X 14. We rounded out the lineup with two Intel-based lightweights, the 13-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3 and the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425).
Processing & AI Tests
Unfortunately, our primary productivity or office application benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, doesn't run on Arm processors, so we're obliged to focus on mostly CPU-centric tests. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene. Geekbench 6.3 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning.
We also use a third Arm-friendly app, the video editing tool HandBrake 1.8, to transcode or convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. Finally, UL's Procyon Computer Vision test is one of the first wave of AI processing benchmarks. We populated that chart with all Snapdragon systems since Procyon returns wildly different results for Arm and x86 systems.
The XPS 13 performed handsomely, finishing ahead of most competitors with a particularly speedy time in HandBrake's video editing exercise. The X1 Nano, with the oldest CPU in the quintet, brought up the rear. As for performance in AI tasks, the Dell is also quite competitive but not the best Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips offer. All in all, expect consummate performance in everyday productivity work from this particular XPS 13 variant.
Graphics Tests
We challenge laptops' graphics with a quartet of Arm-compatible animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life Unlimited (1440p) and Unlimited Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects.
The Asus laptop's Intel Arc integrated graphics took the overall win here, with the Dell a respectable runner-up. These systems cannot play graphically demanding games or handle CGI or CAD rendering like a laptop with a discrete GPU. Still, they're fine for video streaming and everyday applications.
Battery and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
This year's ultraportables have spoiled us when it comes to battery life. The Microsoft, Asus, and HP laptops all managed more than 20 hours of unplugged run time, with the OmniBook lasting an incredible 30 hours. The XPS 13 will easily get you through a full day of work or school, but it was uncompetitive by comparison. The Dell redeemed itself with impressive brightness in our screen tests, and its color coverage was first-class, if not quite OLED-class.
Verdict: Sacrificing for Style
The Dell XPS 13 has spent a dozen years at or near the top of the ultraportable pile, and its change from x86 to Arm processor architecture doesn't change that. It falls short of Editors' Choice honors, however, because it's more of a fashion plate than a productivity workhorse—rivals including the Lenovo X1 Carbon, the HP OmniBook X 14 (with a dimmer though adequate display but double the Dell laptop's battery life), and several Asus Zenbook OLED models provide more comfort and connectivity if less flair as conversation pieces, like our Editors' Choice award-holding Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch.
Dell's XPS 13 maintains its high style while switching to Qualcomm Snapdragon silicon. It's a reliable performer with decent speeds, but this XPS 13 variant is not the most practical ultraportable choice.
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