Dell launched the latest and greatest XPS 15 for 2019. This is now the fourth iteration of this product and it’s good, it’s really good, but it’s not as good as what it could have been. When it first launched, four years ago, I think it was one of the best-looking devices available on the market at the time.
A lot of people felt the same way, it was just a really nice looking 15-inch powerful laptop, thin and light. However, three years later, it’s not as unique of a product as it once was, and because it’s on its fourth iteration I’m not going to go through the details of every single components.
Most of it has not changed, even compared to the first iteration, it still has the same kind of design on the outside, still has the carbon fiber keyboard. A great looking device a great performing device for what it.
Now, one of the main features they’ve added this year, is the option for an OLED panel on the display. Mostly gaming devices, but they all use the same panel. These all use the Samsung OLED 4k.
Really nice image and it’s particularly noticeable in media consumption: if you’re watching something that supports HDR or just stuff that has a lot of color, like a sports game and just can show off the vibrancy and the benefits of an OLED screen. This does looks awesome, but we have to say, in comparison to the previous 4k panel that they had available and they still have that option, just the 4k regular IPS panel, it’s not that much better.
It’s not to say that the OLED panel doesn’t look amazing, it’s just that the original 4k panel that you could have gone with the XPS 15 last year was such a nice-looking panel to begin with.
About the performance: this is a device that’s running the ninth gen-i9, so it’s an eight core CPU as well as the GTX 1650, a reasonably powerful GPU from NVIDIA. When this device launched four years ago, it had thermal limitations because they were trying to put some powerful tech into a relatively thin and light device.
Four years later, it still has very similar thermal characteristics to the original model from 2016. Some people look at this device as a kind of business laptop or kind of workstation laptop that is powerful and looks relatively good in a thin and light package, but there also a lot of people, myself included a few years ago, that look at this device like a nice-looking gaming laptop that you should be able to play games easily on it because it is so powerful.
Running an NVIDIA video card does not mean it is a gaming laptop and this is something a lot of people just have to drill into the minds. When it comes to the XPS branded device, it is not a gaming laptop as much as we want it to be. The device runs hot, it doesn’t throttle as aggressively as last year’s model, but it still has very distinct thermal limitations.
The battery is also unchanged, it’s still a very large battery, but with the OLED you’ll be getting over 8 hours of battery life. So, still a solid battery life but not as good as the regular IPS panel. The webcam moved up to the top, a big thing for a lot of people. It used to be down, on the bottom, the so-called nose cam, and many complained about it for years.
Right now, if you’re on the market for an XPS 15, chances are you’re looking for a device that’s relatively portable but also relatively powerful. The other device that may have popped up on your radar is the Razor Blade 15. If you play games and you actually want to get a device with the intent of playing games regularly, do not get the XPS 15, you will be disappointed about the amount of money that you spend on it.
One of the main aspects that we like the most about the Dell device is the keyboard. The keyboard deck, full carbon fiber, we love how it feels, how it ages, it doesn’t get gross and bad over time, it just stays really clean over the years as long as you wipe it down once in a while.
