Dell XPS 13 (9345) review: Is this Copilot+ variant a winner?

Dell XPS 13 (9345)

MSRP $1,300.00

Score Details

“The Snapdragon X chip inside makes the Dell XPS 13 even better.”

Pros

• Excellent build quality
• Thin and light
• Fast productivity performance
• Very good battery life
• Quality IPS display

Cons

• Some controversial design elements
• More expensive than Intel model
• No headphone jack

The newest Windows on Arm platform based around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipset is off and running. Most of the major laptop manufacturers have introduced Microsoft Copilot+ PCs, with notable machines like the HP OmniBook X and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 offering strong performance and very good battery life.

Dell has also joined in the fray, with the XPS 13 9345 using the Snapdragon X Elite and sporting pretty much exactly the same design as the Intel version. I found it to have the same strengths and weaknesses, with some extra speed and longevity thrown into the mix.

Specs and configurations

The XPS 13 9345 starts at $1,300 for a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 13.4-inch FHD+ IPS display. The laptop can be configured with up to 64GB of RAM, with a jump to 32GB being an additional $200 and a bump up to 64GB costing $600. It’s $100 to upgrade to a 1TB SSD, and $300 to upgrade to 2TB of storage. A QHD+ IPS panel costs $300, while upgrading to a 3K OLED display costs $500. The most expensive XPS 13 will run you $2,500.

That makes the XPS 13 a very expensive Windows on Arm laptop, with the HP OmniBook X and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x both costing around $1,100, albeit with less RAM and storage and with the Lenovo including an OLED display. The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 is as expensive as the XPS 13, while the Apple MacBook Air M3 starts off at $1,099 and maxes out at $2,299 with 24GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD.

It should be noted that the current Intel version of the XPS 13 (9340) is $150 cheaper when similarly configured and is even offered at a cheaper starting configuration that costs $1,099.

Design

I could copy a good portion of the text from our last two XPS 13 reviews into this one and save myself a bunch of time. I won’t do that, but the fact is this: Nothing has changed in the XPS 13’s design since the XPS 13 Plus introduced Dell’s new ultramodern XPS design paradigm. Dell doesn’t really change the underlying XPS design much from generation to generation until major overhauls, and in the case of the XPS 13, the company has doubled down on that approach.

I just finished reviewing the 2024 Intel version of the XPS 13, and it was sitting next to this one as I was running through my benchmarks. I also had an XPS 13 Plus on hand (which I just shipped back), and it’s a good thing I received the black version of the Snapdragon model because I might have gotten confused and put the wrong one in the box. I mean, it’s impossible to tell the two silver machines apart without using a magnifying glass on the label or firing them up and looking for the chipset in Settings.

The all-aluminum chassis has the same sleek, angular aesthetic that aims for a minimalist look, and when you open up the lid, you’ll find the same zero-lattice keyboard, LED touch function keys, and all-glass palm rest with hidden haptic touchpad. It’s strange to think these features have been around for a couple of years, because they still seem incredibly new and fresh. At least, visibly. The incredibly thin bezels complete the modern appearance. The XPS 13 looks a lot more contemporary than any other 13-inch laptop, including the MacBook Air M3 and the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7.

And the XPS 13 is just as rigid as always. Of all these laptops, Dell managed to make the one that just feels the most solid. Even the MacBook Air M3, while as dense and luxurious as usual thanks to Apple’s fastidious manufacturing, has a slightly flexible lid. The XPS 13 does not. Nothing bends or twists. Well done, Dell.

Keyboard and touchpad

However, while the XPS 13’s design is certainly forward-looking, does it actually succeed in being better? In my opinion, it does not. Let’s start with the worst culprit, the row of LED touch function keys. On the 13-inch model (and not so much the 14- and 16-inch models that share the same virtual keys), Dell has the excuse that a physical row of function keys would have taken up too much space. I guess that makes some sense. But, almost nobody is going to actually like the choice, because there’s no haptic feedback to let you know that you’ve actually activated a key. And you have to physically look at the keyboard when you need to choose a function. It’s not a good solution.

The zero-lattice keyboard has large keycaps, but absolutely no key spacing. The switches are light and crisp, with just enough travel, but I still found myself checking my finger placement because I couldn’t run my fingers over any edges to orient myself. I’d say the keyboard is a bit of a wash overall, and I much prefer Apple’s Magic Keyboard and even Lenovo’s slightly refreshed keyboard on the Yoga Slim 7x.

The haptic touchpad works great, as far as haptic touchpads go. It’s quick and responsive, and it does a good job of providing feedback that’s quiet and precise. There’s just one problem: you can’t see the edges, and you’ll probably find yourself trying to swipe and press on the palm rest at one point or another. I’ve used the XPS 13 for some time now and I still get tripped up. Dell needed to include some LED outlines or something, because while the XPS 14 and XPS 16 have touchpads that are large enough that this problem doesn’t often present itself, it still happens to me on the XPS 13.

These are really modern features. The problem is, they just don’t work all that well in practice.

Connectivity and webcam

The XPS 13 has just two ports. On the Intel model, they’re two USB-C with Thunderbolt 4. On the Snapdragon model, they’re both USB4. Ultimately, USB4 provides most of the same performance and functionality of Thunderbolt 4, but they’re compatible with Thunderbolt 3. That’s a difference to keep in mind.

Of course, two ports aren’t a lot of connectivity, even for a 13-inch laptop. While the MacBook Air M3 also has just two (Thunderbolt 4) ports, it also has the MagSafe 3 connection for power. Plug in the XPS 13 power adapter and you’re left with just one port free. And there’s no 3.5mm audio jack, something that really makes little sense. Keep some dongles and hubs handy. At least wireless connectivity is fully up to date, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

The webcam is a 1080p version, and it’s fine. The infrared camera works well with Windows 11 Hello’s facial recognition. And the Snapdragon X Elite’s Neural Processing Unit (NPU) runs at more than the 40 tera operations per second (TOPS) required by Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC specification. Right now, the AI features are limited to enhanced Microsoft Studio Effects, Live Captions, and Cocreator. The primary Copilot+ feature, Recall, is on hold.

Performance

The XPS 13 (9345) uses Qualcomm’s third-fastest Snapdragon X Elite chipset, the X1E-80-100, with 12 cores (eight performance and four efficient) running at 3.4GHz and a dual-core boost to 4.0GHz. Those specifications are lower than those of the Snapdragon X1E-84-100 in the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16, which runs at 3.8GHz and has a 4.2GHz dual-core boost.

At this point, we’re limited in the benchmarks we can run given limited Windows on Arm compatibility. In the benchmarks we can run natively, the XPS 13 9345 was surprisingly quick. It’s a lot faster than the Surface Laptop 7 with the same chipset, and even faster than the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 in Cinebench 2024. It was a lot faster than the Intel model — 26% faster in Cinebench 2024 in single-core and 44% faster in multi-core. It was also faster than the MacBook Air M3 in multi-core (57%), but slower in single-core (17%), with the MacBook held back in sustained performance by its lack of active cooling and very thin chassis.

The XPS 13 9345’s Adreno GPU performance was in line with the chipset, and the M3 GPU cores in the MacBook Air M3 were the fastest in the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark among our comparison group. None of these laptops are bona fide gaming machines. Note that the Apple M3 chipset has CPU optimizations for various creativity processes like video encoding and decoding, which along with the faster GPU makes the MacBook Air M3 a considerably faster laptop for creators.

But for demanding productivity users, the XPS 13 9345 is a very fast laptop — to be fair, that’s true for all the laptops in this comparison group. Given the Qualcomm chipset’s extra efficiency, the XPS 13 9345 should run cooler than the Intel model, which can get quite hot even with lighter workloads. That’s an added bonus.

Battery life

Since the introduction of the Snapdragon X Elite, Microsoft and its partners have published some impressive battery life promises for the new chipset. Interestingly, the results I’ve seen in marketing materials have all been based on looping video, which is the least demanding of common battery tests. It’s also the test likely most impacted by the display’s power draw relative to other components.

We also run a web-browsing test, which is slightly more demanding and more indicative of typical real-world usage. The tests we usually run that best duplicate productivity workloads, such as the PCMark 10 Complete battery benchmark, don’t run yet on Windows on Arm. In order to test each laptop’s efficiency when running demanding workflows, we use the Cinebench 2024 multi-core benchmark. Each of the laptops in our comparison group runs at roughly 100% performance in this benchmark when unplugged.

Unsurprisingly, the XPS 13 9345 and other Snapdragon X Elite laptops had impressive battery life when looping our test video, even better than the very efficient MacBook Air M3. All of the comparison machines were running IPS panels except for the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16, and Asus Zenbook 14 Q425 that had OLED displays — and they showed less battery life in this test. The Zenbook and XPS 13 displays were Full HD+ while the others were all higher-res, another important factor. What was surprising was that the XPS 13 9340 Intel model also got very good battery life in this test, as did the Zenbook. All of these results are much better than most other Intel Meteor Lake laptops, which come in at 14 hours or less.

However, in the web-browsing test, the Snapdragon laptops fell off considerably. They’re better than the eight hours or so of most Intel laptops, but well behind the MacBook Air M3’s 19.5 hours. And again, the XPS 13 9345 wasn’t significantly longer-lasting than the XPS 13 (9340) and Zenbook 14 Q425. In the Cinebench 2024 test, the Snapdragon machines weren’t significantly more efficient than Intel laptops. The MacBook Air M3, meanwhile, lasted considerably longer.

The bottom line is that the Snapdragon X Elite chipset doesn’t seem to be as much of a battery life standout as we might have hoped, at least in these laptops. We’ll need to do more testing, and the XPS 13 9345 still had very good battery life. But the MacBook Air M3, the XPS 13’s most important competitor, remains way ahead — at least, when it’s doing real work.

Display and audio

I reviewed the XPS 13 9345 with a 13.4-inch 16:10 Full HD+ (1920 x 1200) IPS display. There are also QHD+ (2560 x 1600) IPS and 3K (2880 x 1800) OLED options. I found the display to be good enough for productivity work, with more than enough brightness and colors, but with less text sharpness than I like. The advantage of the display is better battery life, at least within the constraints discussed above.

My colorimeter liked this display quite a bit. Brightness was excellent at 536 nits and contrast was among the best I’ve seen for a laptop IPS display at 1,940:1. Our baselines for good displays have been 300 nits and 1,000:1, and we need to adjust both because most IPS displays today exceed those measurements. Colors were closer to the IPS average, though, at 99% of sRGB, 77% of AdobeRGB, and 77% of DCI-P3, while accuracy was very good at a DeltaE of 1.08 (less than 1.0 is considered excellent).

Certainly, this is a great display for productivity workflows. Creators and media consumers won’t be too impressed with the colors, though.

Dell built a nice little sound system into the XPS 13 9345, with four speakers, including two tweeters and two woofers. Things get plenty loud and there’s only a little distortion at maximum volume. Turn things down to around 85% and you’ll enjoy clear mids and highs. It’s hard to get a small laptop like this to produce a lot of bass, so you’ll want some headphones for music and action movies.

There’s a lot to like here, but not as much as you might expect

The switch to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite was supposed to provide a serious uptick in performance and efficiency over Intel’s Meteor Lake chipset. Surprisingly, while the performance is certainly there, battery life remained closer than I would have imagined. It’s fair to say that you won’t get better battery life than the Intel version of the XPS 13, and the MacBook Air M3 remains pretty far ahead.

At the same time, the XPS 13 9345 ran a lot cooler, which is a major benefit. That alone is enough to warrant serious consideration. Then again, there will always be some degree of some uncertainty over compatibility with Windows on Arm, and it does cost an extra $150. I think that’s worth the upgrade, but it may not be a straightforward choice.

Either way, I can say that if you want a small, light, and fast laptop, the XPS 13 (9345) is a solid choice.