By Kane Fulton
With the rumoured launch of Intel’s Broadwell-U CPUs at CES 2015, it was highly likely that laptops featuring slim and portable designs would emerge — but the systems that strode the red carpet under the Las Vegas sky surpassed my already high expectations.
I’m a sucker for a stylish ultraportable, and while the gains in battery life brought by Intel’s fourth-generation Haswell processor made a huge difference to on-the-go productivity, for me, the slim and light designs made possible by Broadwell make the next generation of systems far more exciting.
Take Dell’s new XPS 13, for example. The previous incarnation of the company’s Ultrabook was hardly a monster, but its successor looks cut from an altogether different, silkier cloth. The 11-inch notebook’s aluminium bezel is so thin that it’s virtually invisible, and Dell has managed to cram a 13.3-inch display into a frame the size of what you would typically find on a 11-inch laptop.
As Juan Martinez notes in our hands on review, the XPS 13 2015 has an 11% larger display than the one on the 13-inch MacBook Air, despite the laptop being 23% smaller than Apple’s …read more