I was a big fan of the Dell XPS 13 in its Broadwell iteration, and the Skylake version of the machine was even better. It was a slim, attractive, comfortable-to-use laptop, and it included two of our favorite features: Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and a Precision Touchpad.

In bumping the XPS 13 up to Kaby Lake, Dell hasn't changed a whole lot. The processor has been swapped out and so, too, has the Wi-Fi card; instead of the Dell-branded part, it's now a Qualcomm-branded Killer part. The battery is slightly bigger (60Whr, up from 56Whr), too.

This means that the latest version has all the good points of its predecessors. I love the soft-touch interior that Dell uses. It's actually better than the bare metal used by Apple, HP, and others; the edges of the machine are soft and don't dig into your wrists, with the only downside being a tendency to attract fingerprints. The keyboard feels good, the Precision Touchpad is precise and handles gestures adeptly, and the narrow screen bezel continues to look elegant and allows the machine to have a smaller size than is typical for a 13-inch device.

In previous years, this made the XPS 13 one of our top laptop picks. It's a very solid system, it's pleasurable to use, and it's reasonably future-proofed.

But this is the third year that Dell is using this same basic design, and Dell's competitors haven't been standing still. This reuse means two things: Dell hasn't done anything to fix the flaws with the XPS 13's design, and the competition is now stronger than it was.

Same old, same old

On the first point, the big problem is the webcam placement. The thin top bezel means that there's no room for the camera at the traditional top of the screen position. Instead, the webcam is below the screen and looking up, and as I discovered with the initial Broadwell version, this angle is so unflattering as to be almost useless.

I use webcams semi-regularly, and this odd placement alone means that, for me, the XPS 13 could never be my laptop of choice. I know this doesn't apply to everyone, and some people never use the webcam, but if you care about this feature, the XPS 13 continues to be deeply flawed.

Dell's decision about the webcam struck me as lazy design for Broadwell, and it still strikes me as lazy design, as if the company's engineers designed the system with its nice thin bezel and completely forgot about the need for a webcam until it was too late to do anything about it. And it's frustrating, because this flaw doesn't seem unfixable: make the bezel at the top of the screen a bit larger and put the camera there. It wouldn't even mean that the laptop had to be any bigger, as surely the bottom bezel could be made smaller to compensate.

Laptops like Apple's latest MacBook Pros and HP's refreshed Spectre x360 do exactly this; although their left and right bezels are very narrow, the one at the top is a little bigger. HP puts not just a webcam here, but a Windows Hello biometric, authentication-capable infra-red webcam.

This complaint neatly segues into the other way the XPS 13 is showing its age: it doesn't have any biometric authentication option. We're big fans of Windows Hello, and the camera-based system used in Microsoft's Surface systems and the Spectre x360 is a joy to use. The XPS 13's webcam difficulties preclude that style of authentication, but a fingerprint reader below the keyboard would have been a reasonable alternative. Unfortunately, Dell hasn't added one.

This leaves the XPS 13 feeling some way short of premium. Heading into 2017, we want to see biometric authentication become standard; the way it works in Windows Hello is very elegant, and it makes it much less painful and annoying to use long, secure passwords.