Dell's XPS line has been part of the 13-inch ultrabook world since its introduction at CES 2012. In the six years that have passed since then, the line has seen a steady series of upgrades, largely just to keep up with the march of technology. However, the latest revision is arguably the biggest one the XPS has seen since its introduction.

That said, Dell hasn't exactly redrawn the blueprints. The machine is still designed with portability at top of mind. If you're the type of person who tries futilely to work on a flight, only to be completely stymied when the person in the seat in front of you reclines an inch, a laptop like this makes sense. At 2.7 pounds and 19mm of thickness, it isn't the thinnest nor the lightest machine on the market, but it's svelte enough to slip into any carry-on, and compact enough to fit on a tray table alongside your complimentary ginger ale with no problems at all.

Dell

Cosmetically, numerous changes have been made to the XPS 13. Some of these are subtle, like thinner bezels around the display, a brighter screen, and revamped thermal engineering. Others are more readily noticeable, like the speakers now located on the sides of the chassis, adjacent to the space bar, and the "woven glass fiber" palm rest that comes with the rose gold/white version of the machine. (A more traditional black chassis with a carbon fiber palm rest is also available.) I don't find the textured glass fiber very attractive, and can only imagine how those ridges will fill up with meat-paw grime after months of daily use. Your mileage may vary, along with your cleanliness.

Under the hood, it's a tough little machine. Benchmarks are solid but on par with the field, and its 6-hour, 20-minute battery life score (on a video playback test) is above average. My tester was configured with an eighth-generation Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. The 13.3-inch touchscreen dazzles at 3840 x 2160 pixels, and though Dell has jettisoned all of the unit's traditional USB ports, they have at least been replaced by three USB-C connectors, one of which is used for power. A microSD card slot provides the only other physical connectivity option here aside from a headphone jack.

Dell

What's not to like? I did encounter an above-average number of stability problems during testing, the most notable of which was Windows Media Player invariably crashing at the end of video playback. The machine is also inexplicably slow to boot—a solid 30 seconds when most other laptops boot in half that time.

Furthermore, while I love the trackpad's size, the physical buttons are incredibly loud when clicked. They're so noisy—like clipping your nails—that you won't be able to use this machine in bed next to a snoozing spouse without ruining your marriage. And while the keyboard action is as good as it gets for a machine this size, the keyboard backlighting is incredibly unhelpful on the white version of the XPS. White light shining through a transparent cutout on a white keyboard makes the keys illegible, particularly ones with hard-to-read features like those in the Fn row.

And then there's the webcam. Dell has been openly ridiculed for years for placing its webcam below the LCD, such that it looks up at the user from below at a harsh and unflattering angle. Put more plainly, the "Dell nosecam" is a thing, and it has been for a while. For 2018, when Dell went back to the drawing board and revamped the XPS 13 from top to bottom, it finally had the chance to correct this design flaw. And what did it do?

The nosecam remains exactly where it was before.

While the XPS 13 starts at a mere $1,000, the price quickly ramps up once you start upgrading the innards. My test machine, at $2,100, is a tough sell against a machine like the HP Spectre 13, which runs $1,720 with the same configuration. Even with specials—the Dell is $200 off as I write this—you're still paying a significant premium mainly so your clients can see that your schnoz hairs need a trim.