I got a great deal on a Dell XPS 13 7390 on Black Friday this year. It’s a regular 7390, not the 2-in-1 model. Still, it’s a really fantastic machine.
I had never used any high-end laptop before. I spend most of my time on local desktops, workstations, and remote clusters, and I rarely need a laptop except when I am out of town. My travel laptop had been a $180 Chromebook with Arch installed for a couple of years before this Black Friday. It has a great keyboard. That means as long as internet access is good, I can work efficiently with my cheap Chromebook during trips.
But this year, since I was really having a difficult time, I decided to buy something luxurious on Black Friday to cheer myself up. I had been watching the XPS 13 for many years, ever since Costco started selling them in stores. Every time I was in a Costco, I spent a lot of time just staring at the XPS. I always convinced myself that there was no need for a new laptop, especially a fancy and expensive one.
The deal I got was around $840 for a 10th-generation i7, a 1080p display, 8 GB of RAM, a 256 GB NVMe SSD, and a less problematic Wi-Fi card. This is the developer edition, so it doesn’t have a fingerprint sensor or Windows. It is a great deal for me. After all, I only use Arch and don’t need Windows, and fingerprint sensors do not work well on Linux, at least from what I have heard.
The only unsatisfying thing is the RAM. The RAM is soldered onto the motherboard. It’s not easy, if it is even possible, to upgrade soldered RAM. Some people also complain that the RAM is DDR3-2133, which is kind of old by modern standards. But I’m actually okay with that. It is unlikely that I would feel a huge performance difference between DDR3 and DDR4 for daily use, especially since I don’t need this laptop to do heavy jobs. I simply want a laptop that is fancy enough and can make me happy. As long as the keyboard feels right, the display is good, and the internet is good, I can work with it.
This Dell XPS 13 is actually the first laptop I have ever had that cost more than $500. (I do have a Lenovo W540, but I don’t think it can really be called a laptop. It’s basically a brick and not something I can put on my lap…) So I don’t really know how good it is compared to other laptops in the same class. I’m not a professional laptop reviewer or YouTuber, and I’m not able to come up with beautiful words to describe it.
The only word I can think of is AMAZING.
The keyboard is amazing. I don’t understand keyboard jargon such as actuation force or travel distance. But I am very used to the Adesso MKB-135B mechanical keyboard, and I rarely find a keyboard that can provide a similar typing experience, not even close. The reason I loved my previous $180 Chromebook so much is that the keyboard was not bad. And the keyboard on this XPS is even better. My fingers feel like they are flying when I type on XPS keyboards. The keys do not feel like cheap plastic.
The second thing I love about the laptop is the display. It’s not a 4K display, not an OLED display, and not a touch screen. But I think it does have excellent color and brightness. The thing I hated most about my previous 180 Chromebook and all the decent $200 monitors I have used, the XPS seems to give me a more vivid image. I don’t know the reason behind it, but I do believe it is because of the color capability.
The last thing I love about the XPS is its look and dimensions. It’s only about 0.3 to 0.4 inch thick and has a skinny bezel. The small footprint of the XPS is famous, so there is no need to talk much about it. As for hardware performance, I don’t really have strong feelings about it. I do all my heavy computations on remote machines. And I don’t play games on the XPS either.
This laptop has only USB-C ports, which is somewhat annoying, since many gadgets still use USB-A. And I also need a USB-C-to-HDMI converter when I use this laptop for presentations. But on the other hand, the XPS has a microSD card reader. I kind of like that. I have many microSD cards from old cameras and phones. I can put them into my XPS, though I don’t know when I am really going to need them.
However, I can still say one bad thing about the XPS: the cooling system. Even though I don’t do heavy computations on the XPS, I sometimes compile code with it. And that’s when I immediately feel the heat at the bottom of the laptop. I think one day I’ll probably reapply the thermal paste, using a better paste, or even upgrade to a better heat pipe if there is one.
Another issue is the Intel GPU. X11 did not perform that well with the UHD GPU. So I had to migrate my graphical environment to a Wayland-based system. I chose Sway WM, which is i3-compatible. I’ve been using i3 WM for a long time, so I thought it wouldn’t be a problem if Sway was truly i3-compatible. But it turned out there were a lot of things I had to change. That is another story. Maybe I’ll write about it next time.
But what I can say is that Wayland is also amazing when running on this XPS. I really love this XPS 13. Now, even when I am at home, I still spend a lot of time using this laptop.