The aluminum front and back feel high quality and durable, like my MacBook Pro. The InfinityEdge display means the bezel is tiny, meaning the footprint is tiny. The Dell XPS 13 is a very nice piece of hardware-dare I say the best hardware of any PC laptop I've used or tried so far. I like a solid but light laptop, and the laptop against which I'll measure all others is still the 11' MacBook Air-if Apple would update it with a retina display and a larger 12' screen with a smaller bezel (so, basically, the 12' MacBook but with passable specs), I'd dump my MacBook Pro in a heartbeat! Note also that the XPS 13 is as wide as the 2016 MacBook Pro 13', but is very slightly thinner in the front (and slightly thicker in the back), and a little shorter front-to-back: The fit and finish of the XPS lineup was one of the major reasons I chose it over the other models on my shortlist. but that puts it in a price bracket I can't justify for a secondary computer mostly used for research and testing! Hardware Build Quality I would've preferred 16 GB of RAM since I want to do some development and testing on the laptop.

It's basically the base model, but I easily upgraded the SSD to a 500 GB model (see my experience upgrading the SSD here).

Intel Core i5-7200U - 2.50 GHz dual-core.

The model I purchased has the following specs: size and battery life (I really value a compact laptop, especially coming from the behemoth T420!), and especially finding a really good price on a used 9360 model. I settled on the Dell XPS 13 after reading through a bunch of reviews, looking at the features vs. With more of my stuff moving into the cloud and fewer software applications being exclusively tied to macOS or Windows, it's given me more freedom to do some amount of work from a tablet (currently iPad Air 2), Mac (currently 2015 (work) or 2016 (personal) MacBook Pro), and even my old PC laptop (a Lenovo T420 that I used mostly for testing).Īfter lugging the T420 with me to an open source conference a couple weeks ago, I decided I'd finally go ahead and acquire a modern, Ultrabook-style Windows laptop, and looking around at options for an open source developer more comfortable in Linux than Windows 10, I narrowed it down to: And though I continue to use a Mac for my primary workstation for both work and personal projects, my use of computers has evolved in the past few years quite a bit.

I've used Macs as my primary computing devices my entire life.

Windows 10 windows hello boot camp