 When Apple dropped the MacBook Pro 16 inch, there was just nothing really in the PC world that compared to it. Like sure, we had stuff that was way more powerful or lighter or with longer battery life, but there was no laptop in existence that compared as an all rounder that I could point at and be like, there, PC peeps, just go buy that one. Until today. Right out of the gate, the XPS 15 and 17 mean business. Look at them, the tall screen, the aluminum wrapping around the edges. If the long-term experience holds up to the first couple of glances at these things, then they might just be the best laptops on the market. Just like I deliver the best sponsor segues on the market. Today's video is brought to you by GlassWire. Instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with GlassWire. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off at the link below. For a laptop to be truly excellent, it has to nail all of the parts that you interact with, the keyboard, the track pad, the screen, and of course the chassis. If any one of these parts sucks, it doesn't matter how light or powerful or long lasting it is, you will eventually grow to hate using it. And the XPS 15 and 17 are a masterclass in nailing these features. Starting with the chassis, it's not like the old XPS 15 is bad, it's just that it and every other Windows laptop now feels distinctly last gen compared to the XPS 2020 lineup. Their screens are shockingly rigid, considering their size and thinness, the reassuring resistance of the hinge feels quality and without sacrificing a smooth one finger lift, and the carbon fiber top deck gives the keyboard an incredibly rigid surface to rest on. And it makes such a big difference on something like the MacBook Pro or the XPS 13 with their short snappy keys. I can absolutely blast out a quick instant message, but sometimes I struggle getting into that flow like I can on say a ThinkPad that I prefer for long form writing, like a video script. These XPS's somehow managed to be perfectly tuned for both and they're an absolute joy to use. With 1.3 millimeters of key travel, it's a bit more than the XPS 13, but it maintains the excellent snap at the top of the stroke and it's just, mwah, but here's the thing, even if this is the best keyboard on the market, the likes of Microsoft, HP and Lenovo have been putting out A plus keyboards for some time now. So having a good keyboard isn't nearly as much of a differentiator as what lies below it. The absolutely gargantuan trackpad. Thank you Dell. I now finally have something concrete to point at while I'm yelling at all the other Windows laptop makers to improve their trackpads. It still isn't quite as big as the MacBook Pro 16 inch, but in fairness to Dell, they didn't have the extra space created by Apple's larger bezels to work with. And to my hands, the tracking is every bit as accurate and easy to use. And compared to Windows alternatives, this trackpad just, well, it just blows them all out of the water with the only one in the same league being the Razer Blade 15. But even that is a B plus plus or an A minus compared to the A plus that we're looking at right here. One note by the way, some of the XPS 15s in the very first batch have a slight wobble on the bottom. So if this happens to you, call up Dell for a replacement. That is a defect and that problem has since been fixed. Up top though really is the shining star. And I mean shining because this display hits 500 nits. The way that it reaches all the way from the top down to the bottom of the device, really, I mean, I've talked about this before, but I found it changes the way I use it, making me treat the XPS 15 and then especially the 17, much more like a small desktop compared to a big laptop. Out of the box, the colors are over the top vibrant with 107% coverage of the Adobe RGB color space and Delta E values of over 20, yuck. But by simply opening up the Dell color checker and selecting Adobe RGB for the color space, those values dropped to an average Delta E of four and a maximum of six. That's color accurate enough for basically anyone other than a professional photo or video editor. And if you're one of those, you probably already have your own calibration tool anyway. My one complaint about the display is the options. Come on Dell, please give us a 1200 P touch option. Right now, the 4K touch option is a $300 adder and like, yeah, sick display, but that is really steep for something that I've felt for a long time is not really necessary at these screen sizes. At the top of the display, we find Windows Hello facial recognition, still my favorite way to unlock a laptop. But what's cool is if you're more into fingerprint sensors, Dell included a snappy one of those on the power button as well. And that's been super useful, what with wearing masks being all the rage these days. By the way, if you're wondering how the heck they got a webcam into that tiny bezel up top, the answer is by just making it really bad. Like to be clear, it's a lot better than having it, you know, down under the screen. So it's looking up my nose all the time or whatever, but come on, how am I supposed to shout out lttstore.com on my video calls like this? They can't properly appreciate the merch. What I can properly appreciate though, are the speakers. Both models are excellent in this regard with a surprising depth of base and clarity of travel for a laptop. I think it's pretty safe to say these are among, if not the best speakers on a Windows laptop, even if they don't quite match up, let's be fair to the incredible sound that Apple was able to get out of the MacBook Pro. So as a laptop that you interact with then, Dell has crushed it. And if this was a thin and light, we'd basically be able to call it here. But with the XPS 15 coming in at four and a half pounds and the 17, a full pound heavier, we need some real horsepower in order to justify the heft. So why don't we crack them open and take a look at what's inside. To open up either of the XPS's, all you need to do is remove the eight Torx T5 screws, do a little bit of spudging and off comes the bottom panel. Now, normally I wouldn't look twice at a bottom panel, but these, oh, these are pieces of art. They're CNC milled from a single piece of aluminum and between the curves that are sculpted with a ball end mill and the surface finish that they got on the outside, I think it is pretty safe to say that this is not a cheap part. Both units have massive batteries relative to their size, which I consider to be a mandatory upgrade by the way, from the 56 watt hour base model battery, with the 15 getting up to 86 watt hours and the 17 getting close to the maximum allowed on a plane in the US with 97 watt hours. This netted us about nine hours on the XPS 15 and closer to 10 hours on the 17. Although with the brightness of the display and the power of these components, how you're using these laptops is going to greatly impact your real world battery life. I mean, there were times with the screen brightness up with SolidWorks open that the battery would die after just four hours. But then also there was this one time that our battery test glitched out after a couple of hours on the 17 and it kept idling along for over 17 more hours. Above the battery, there we go, both of them have easy access to dual M.2 SSD slots and dual SODIMM slots to make storage and RAM upgrades easy, but that's where the similarities stop. Now, inside the XPS 15, we find pretty much what we'd expect in a laptop of this class. We got two heat pipes and two fans that make for a total of around 50 Watts of cooling capacity. In optimized mode, this solution kept our CPU around 90 degrees with solid performance, but Dell also provides an ultra performance toggle that pushed our eight core Core i7-10875H to deliver more performance than a top tier desktop from two years ago, at the expense of thermals and possibly longevity, but hey, we did say it was a MacBook Pro competitor, didn't we? The GTX 1650 will allow for a pretty decent gaming experience if you're willing to drop the settings and set your resolution to 1080p, but this isn't a gaming laptop and I imagine it's gonna get more use speeding up renders in Premiere and it also managed SOLIDWORKS quite well. Moving over back to the XPS 17 though, Dell has really stepped up their game and this is honestly a different class of machine. Look at this cooling system. Attached to these two huge fans is a massive vapor chamber that is straight from the wet dream of a thermodynamics professor. Even with 100 Watts of cooling though, the Core i7-10875H still gets toasty in ultra performance mode, so we wouldn't recommend using it all the time, but with this cooling, it managed a Cinebench R20 score of nearly 4,000, making this thing 20% faster than a MacBook Pro 16 inch. Not to mention that it's RTX 2060 Max-Q shreds the AMD GPUs that Apple stubbornly continues to use, at least for now, while also delivering good performance in games. I mean, that's the thing. Of course, a dedicated gaming laptop of the same price is gonna destroy either the XPS 17 or 15, both in terms of graphics performance and responsiveness with high refresh rate displays being pretty much standard on anything over $1,000. But I think that almost anyone besides a full-time gamer or video editor or 3D modeler is going to be more than happy with the performance that's on tap here, which doesn't mean that we don't have any complaints. Notebook Check discovered that the XPS 17 actually dips into its battery when it's under full load, because the included 130-watt power adapter can't quite keep up. So if you're hitting the CPU and GPU hard at the same time, you can actually lose battery charge even though the laptop is plugged into the wall. Now we've confirmed this behavior, both with our unit and with our Dell rep, who said that it was a decision to keep the size of the AC adapter down. And like, okay, fair enough. But I do wish that in the configurator, there was an option for a heavier and more powerful adapter so the customer can decide which trade-off they wanna make. Bringing us to the other big trade-off, the Intel CPU. This right here, ah, there it is, is the Zephyrus G14. I feel like we pull this out a lot lately. It houses a Ryzen 9 4900HS, an eight-core processor that puts Intel's current mobile chips to shame. With a less sophisticated cooling solution, we're seeing higher multi-core performance, higher single-core performance, and longer battery life from a physically smaller battery. Now, I'm gonna give Dell a pass on this generation for only including Intel in their XPS lineup. I don't think anybody saw AMD's Mobile 4000 series being as good as it is. But next time around, I'm not gonna be so forgiving. I expect to see an AMD version of the XPS 15 and 17 for those of us who want the maximum performance from our devices next time. Also, in fairness to Dell, if they had gone with AMD, they would have missed out on all these juicy Thunderbolt 3 ports, of which the 15 has two and the 17 has four. And in turn, they would have missed out on one of the coolest use cases of the XPSs. Now, I personally would have liked to see at least one USB Type-A, but still, this is pretty cool. So this is the Dell WD-19TB, a Thunderbolt dock that over a single cable lets you turn your XPS into a full-fledged desktop experience. We're talking dual 4K displays, gigabit ethernet, mouse and keyboard, along with a dongle or two. Technology Connections recently created a 27-minute love letter to this approach. And for many people, it's an awesome way to nearly seamlessly transition from a great portable experience to a great less portable experience, whether it's for work or for gaming. Now, as you've probably guessed by now, these computers don't come cheap. Like, we're talking full-blownsies Apple pricing here. I mean, they start at $1,300 and $1,400, but the thing is, if you're shopping in that price range, in my personal opinion, there are better value options. So by the time we get to a config that I would actually recommend, you can expect to pay at least two grand for the XPS 15 and getting closer to three for the 17. But I also can't really complain, because sure, they're expensive as all heck, but you're also getting what I think is the best Windows laptop that money can buy. And if Dell can figure out how to get AMD and Thunderbolt into the next one, I might even be ready to call it perfect. If it also had an HDR OLED display, maybe high refresh rate, 5G mobile connectivity would be nice, better webcam, caching functionality on the fingerprint sensor, so you don't have to touch it again once you get to the login screen. I think a better GPU on the 15 inch would be pretty nice. And how about like an illuminated Dell logo on the back? Like when did that become not cool anymore? Then it would be perfect. Just like my segues to our sponsors, like Squarespace. You may have heard about Squarespace. It's the easy way to make a website in minutes. Squarespace is a leader in website design, and they're all in one platform, means you can do everything, even buy domains through them. You can even create email campaigns. Your website can be anything from a personal portfolio to a resume to a fan fiction site, or you can even sell stuff. They've got website analytics tools to help you track how your website's doing and find all the weak areas to help make sure you get a steady stream of traffic. And they've got customer support that's ready to help you out 24 seven, if you get stuck. Even we use Squarespace, both LinusMediaGroup.com and LTXExpo.com were built quickly using Squarespace. So don't wait, go to Squarespace.com slash LTT for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, you can get 10% off at our link down below. So thanks for watching. To see more about why Dell should consider switching to AMD, watch our review of the HP NvX360. For the price, that thing is a really incredible little laptop, courtesy of our friends at AMD.