Dell XPS 13 Plus review: thin, light, a great OLED screen, and a powerful P-series chip, but expensive, gets very hot, a poor battery life, and very few ports
The XPS 13 has a new design and a whole bunch of new problems — Dell collectively shocked everyone who follows the laptop market when it announced the XPS 13 Plus.
Context & Ripple Effects
The XPS 13 Plus is Dell's most aggressive redesign of a line it has iterated on for years: the 2020 XPS 13 was already dinged for limited ports, and the 2020 2-in-1 for inadequate cooling — so the Plus doubling down on thinness while cutting ports further is a deliberate escalation of known tradeoffs, not an accident.
What changed with the Plus is the price-performance bargain. The 2015 models were reviewed as value plays — $799 with class-leading battery life — while the Plus asks premium money for an OLED screen and P-series chip, then loses points on exactly the things the old line won on: heat, battery, and connectivity.
First-order effects
- Buyers shopping this tier get a machine whose strengths (OLED display, P-series performance, thinness) come bundled with weaknesses (heat, poor battery life, very few ports) at a premium price — no configuration escapes the tradeoff.
Second-order effects
- Dell's own follow-up confirms the market verdict: the 2023 XPS 13 restores improved battery life, though it keeps only two ports and slips on relative performance — evidence the Plus's compromises didn't hold as a template.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, premium ultrabook design keeps trading ports and thermals for thinness and screens, pushing buyers toward dongles and dock ecosystems — and making battery life the metric each yearly revision must claw back.
The trend: Premium consumer laptops are converging on a thin-screen-few-ports formula where each generation trades thermal headroom and battery life against industrial design, forcing annual walk-backs.