Dell updates popular XPS 13 laptop with 16:10 screen, IR camera

I love the 16:10 ratio screen but a bit disappointed that the page-up and page-down keys are still squashed above the left and right arrow keys. I have used the XPS 13 for about 6 months and just cannot avoid hitting the pg-up or pg-down keys when reaching for the arrow keys which is a nightmare for coding. I would much rather have those as function keys as they were on the previous model of the XPS 13.<p>When I looked into this issue, I found an old thread on a Dell forum where an XPS 13 user (of a previous model) was complaining that there were no dedicated page-up and down keys. As someone that uses those keys a lot I get that it seems Dell&#x27;s solution to this has caused them to sabotage the functionality of the arrow keys and is definitely worse than having no dedicated keys for pg-up and down. I was hoping they would hear feedback from developers or anyone who uses arrow keys a lot and revert back to the old layout.

I have a 13&quot; XPS and a 15&quot; Macbook Pro. I wanted to like the XPS but the Mac is just much better hardware. First, there is no comparison between the quality of the touchpads. The MacBook one works great but the XPS is terrible (imprecise movement, accidental movement&#x2F;clicks from palm). The XPS wifi card is unreliable, it frequently disconnects. I understand a lot of people replace it with a better one. The screen is not great. There is no way to disable the automatic brightness magic going on (terrible for doing photograph processing). There is no way to turn of the eye blinding charge light on the front, under the touchpad. For a laptop that is premium priced, I&#x27;m disappointed with the hardware quality. I prefer my Lenovo X230 over the XPS 13.

That&#x27;s awesome. 16:9 monitors only make sense for watching video, and are an abomination for pretty much any kind of work involving text.<p>I will be very happy when 4k 16:10 or 3:2 desktop monitors become widely available at an affordable price.

The ars technica writeup does not mention the most significant upgrade of all in my opinion: 32GB RAM in February. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bartongeorge.io&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;01&#x2F;introducing-the-2020-xps-13-developer-edition-this-one-goes-to-32&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bartongeorge.io&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;01&#x2F;introducing-the-2020-xps-...</a>

Does any Dell employee lurking have info about why I should consider waiting for the developers edition rather than just load up my favorite distro on the consumer hardware?

Looks nice, I&#x27;m torn about what my next laptop should be, but at this point whoever can offer me the most for 1k and I want 16GB of RAM minimum, if that&#x27;s not possible, I&#x27;m holding back. I&#x27;m sick of paying ridiculous money for basically the same maximum RAM we&#x27;ve been able to buy for a decade (A 2010 MBP could hold 16GB of RAM, sure it&#x27;s not DDR4 or better, but it&#x27;s still useful and runs just fine).

&quot;Dell estimates that this model will get up to 19 hours of battery life when configured with an FHD+ display.&quot;<p>I like this trend.

Maybe one day, the chipset gods at Intel will see fit to bless us with a 13&quot; ultrabook that has 32GB of RAM.<p>I can&#x27;t tell if it&#x27;s Intel restricting it, but it&#x27;s suspicious to me that every manufacturer simultaneously agreed to not ship larger RAM configurations in this form factor.

I&#x27;m hoping Thinkpad follows this lead and also moves to something not 16:9

Kind of annoying that you can&#x27;t get it without the windows logo on the meta key when buying it with Linux.

I don&#x27;t think there is anything particularly different about my development environment than others, but I really struggle with only 16gb of ram. As much as I like being mobile, my MBP is &quot;light duty&quot; at best (real work relegated to my iMac). Thus, disappointing to see the 16gb limit on these new Dell models.

Are keyboards going to get so flat that at some point they are concave...

What a disappointing review. Core count? RAM clock rates? I guess it&#x27;s really an &quot;enterprise&quot; laptop for people who don&#x27;t care much about things like that.

Why would someone want an IR camera?<p>I can&#x27;t find any information online about why that would be useful.

This may seem like a minor issue, but the downward firing speakers are a ridiculous choice for 2020. There are laptops that don&#x27;t have compromises like these. Yes we can use headphones or pair an external bluetooth speaker, but sometimes it is nice to just have your laptop fill your hotel room with sound and you may not have these other accessories on hand.