Before delving into the specs, let's have a look at the design. From the outside, the XPS 15 9570 is not radically different from the previous generation XPS 15 9560. You get a CNC machined aluminum chassis, which is now available in platinum silver. Dell chose not to bring the goodness of the glass fiber palm rest and rose gold color options that made the XPS 13 9370 look chick but instead, chose to retain the black carbon fiber composite palm rest from the previous XPS 15 iteration. Unlike the XPS 13 9370 and the XPS 15 2-in-1 9575, Dell has been fairly benevolent with respect to port selection.

On the left, you find DC power in, USB 3 Type-A, HDMI 2.0, Thunderbolt 3, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The XPS 15 9560 was infamous for having just a 2-lane Thunderbolt 3 port, which was a bottleneck in getting the most out of eGPU setups. While 2 lanes are fine to get by if you are hooking the eGPU to an external display, you'll start feeling the bandwidth crunch when you direct the eGPU output to the main laptop display. Luckily, Dell tells us that the Thunderbolt 3 port in the XPS 15 9570 has full 4-lane PCIe connectivity (40 Gbps) so that's one less thing to worry about. Moving on to the right, we get to see a full-sized SD card reader — a reprieve for professionals considering that both the XPS 13 and the XPS 15 2-in-1 have made do with a microSD slot. There's one more USB 3 Type A port, a battery level indicator, and a Noble lock slot. The power button now houses the optional Windows Hello-compliant fingerprint reader.