In an unexpected turn, Dell has announced the release (and sale) of new XPS 13 and XPS 13 2-in-1 now available for sale in Singapore.

This comes as quite a surprise as manufacturers generally try to stick to their yearly schedule when it comes to refreshing their line-ups but this year proved to be the exception. The upgraded XPS 13 series laptops arrived just around 6 short months after the previous release.

Dell was quick on their hands when it came to the launch of TigerLake mobile CPUs from Intel just last month, sticking the new processors in the same “Early 2020” chassis without any significant changes at all; suggesting similar TDP and heat performance when it came to the new CPUs.

Dell XPS 13 9000 Series (Model 9300) non-touch notebook computer, codename Modena.

Features

As in incremental update, not much has changed compared to the early 2020 release so don’t feel too bad about it!

The new features can be summed up below:

XPS 13 2-in-1:

  • 11th Gen Intel® Core™ processors and Xe graphics
  • Thunderbolt 4
  • Memory update to 4267MHz LPDDR4x (From 3733MHz)
  • IR camera with Windows Hello capability
  • Updated design ID – machined aluminum in platinum silver with black carbon fiber (previously available in platinum silver and arctic white)
  • Starting price: S$2,299.

XPS 13:

The most significant change was to the memory that is now 2/3 of a cycle quicker, owing to the update to LPDDR4x from LPDDR4. Users will find opening large excel files or spreadsheets just that much quicker in the new XPS but other than that, other improvements are minor. Other aspects such as the screen seem to be staying the same as the Early 2020 revision without any upgrades to new panels or models.

Other than that, the usual splattering of up to i7-1185G7 (available post launch), 32Gb of memory and 2Tb NVME SSD options (and everything in between) is available for your choosing.

Soon?

With the release of these laptops, one thing’s for sure: Dell isn’t shy to push products first-to-market when it’s able. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come for an AMD equivalent?

This guess isn’t unprecedented either as Dell had already got their feet wet with the launch of the G5 SE a couple months back that did feature a Ryzen processor. Aside from a couple of laptops from ASUS, the AMD mobile market is barren for the taking. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get more announcements towards the start of next year if my intuition is correct.

Given the aspect of a bit better thermal headroom and the possibility of having 6 cores within the same TDP with the Ryzen 4xxx series in something as small as the XPS 13 is definitely worth considering for Dell.

 We’ll see if my intuition is correct next year!

Chia is the horse-author from the far flung year of 2153. While not grazing on grass pastures or reviewing old time-y games and technology from the early 21st century pretending to not know what comes next (as to not disturb the space-time continuum), he can be seen exchanging vast quantities of Earth currency for parts needed to fix his damaged space ship.