 On paper, the Dell XPS 13 2018 has the best screen, the highest performance, and the best built chassis out of all the thin and light laptops on the market. But... Just because, you know, someone has the right ingredients, doesn't necessarily mean that they'll put them together correctly. So then, is the XPS 13 a delicious cake? Well, there's only one way to find out. That's not bad! Oh, oh! Oh, there's some egg shell! This video is brought to you by Spectrum Glasses. Spectrum Glasses are an affordable, long-term solution that helps your eyes manage high-energy blue light emitted from computer screens. Use offer code LINUS through the link below and save 10% today. Now, the Dell XPS 13 9370 2018 straddles the line between playful and professional. It has just a touch of flash, especially our subjectively flipping awesome rose gold version, but manages it without looking or feeling tacky at all. The white keyboard area, accented by carbon fiber, is one of, if not the stiffest to ever come through our labs, and apparently, it is extremely resistant to stains. With Dell going as far as to say that if you draw on it in permanent marker, it'll just wipe right off. Now, this was a dry erase, but, you know, hopefully we'll do a B-roll shot or something to show it with a permanent marker. Now, for thin and light, the XPS 13 is a little bit on the thick side, but that hasn't stopped Dell from giving up on USB Type-A ports for some reason. To their credit, though, they have included three USB Type-Cs, two of which are Thunderbolt 3, external GPU lovers rejoice, and also a headphone port and a micro SD card reader. So, for the next year or two, you might be regularly reaching for the included A to C dongle, but native Type-C devices are becoming more and more common all the time. Now let's address the video title. Intel allows partners to configure the TDP, a measure of power consumption of their 8th Gen Core i7 mobile processors, and Dell has gone full throttle on this one, allowing it to draw up to 27 watts and reach up to 4 GHz turbo speeds, which makes this device feel really snappy over short bursts. But, when we see manufacturers push performance to the limit in compact systems, we often encounter thermal throttling. So, how about the XPS 13? Well, turns out they've actually done a great job here. Under full load, it can't quite keep cool at first, briefly throttling in an attempt to stay quiet during short sprints. But then, when the system realizes that big things are happening, like a long video export, for example, the fans kick in to bring everything under control, and the real world results are impressive. Our XPS 13, with a CPU that costs over $100 less, matched or beat the competing Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and absolutely ran circles around any notebook with a 7th Gen U series processor. But, a powerful engine is only as good as the rubber that meets the road, or the photons that hit the eyeballs in this case. And our model actually looks really good here, too. It sports a 4K 13.3-inch touch display with HDR support, it's exceptionally bright, the colors are amazing, and you can basically have your nose, even if yours is smaller than mine, touching the screen and still not see an individual pixel. There's just one small problem. It's a $400 optional upgrade. Adding insult to injury, there are only two screen options, and the 1080 one isn't available with touch. I mean, we get that bigger numbers sell better, but realistically, you don't actually need 4K on a screen this small, so we want to see a 1080 touch option for a more modest increase in price. That might make us feel better about the slightly undersized trackpad. This thing is just okay. The surface coating feels good, but I found myself wishing that it was a little bit taller, just like my wife, and having trouble with accuracy, even after playing around with pointer acceleration settings. Maybe one solution would be to break the mold and experiment with a slightly taller aspect ratio on the screen, like Microsoft has been doing. That would also give them an easy fix for the improved, but, if we're being honest, still pretty horrible webcam placement. I mean, I know that not everyone uses the webcam on their laptop a lot, but I do, and I'm pretty sure that the people I call don't want to look up my gargantuan snout the whole time that they are talking to me. It even interferes sometimes with Windows Hello facial recognition, which made the inclusion of a fingerprint sensor and the power button actually that much more awesome. This is sick. Which means I guess we're back to good stuff. Let's talk about the keyboard. It is really good. Alex prefers the longer travel of the X1 Carbon, but for me, the soft, quiet keystrokes managed somehow to not feel mushy, and the short travel allowed me to get up to nearly my full desktop mechanical keyboard speed in a matter of minutes. And the speakers are great too, especially for a laptop this size, with a nice clean sound that makes them well suited for something like tossing on some tunes while you're playing cards with your friends. And you can even have a pretty long game too, since this seven-hour result in our battery life test is based on a continuous load. You should get through a workday pretty comfortably without the charger. Now, let's be clear here. There were some negatives in this video, but none of them are anywhere near deal-breakers, and with the first reasonable config starting at $1,200, the XPS 13's price is pretty good with some caveats. A similarly specced LG Gram includes a touchscreen, has better battery life, and is much lighter, but it falls behind on performance, build quality, and Thunderbolt 3 for the 13-inch version. So if you're into easy docking or future expansion for your notebook, that's a big deal. So overall, we're giving two recommendations here. One for potential buyers. If you're willing to pay to play, the XPS 13 is a well-built, high-performance, and compact machine. And then we also have one for Dell. Fix the screen options. There needs to be a cheaper touchscreen for you guys to be competitive on the low end. And then, while you're at it, deal with that webcam placement eggshell in this otherwise truly delicious electronic cake. It's actually a really good cake. You know what else is really good? The Thermaltake P90. It's an open-frame tempered glass mid-tower case that's split up into three compartments for your graphics card, power supply, and other cooling components. It's got 5mm thick tempered glass side panels that let you put your system on display. It's got three different layouts that make it wall-mountable, horizontal lying or vertical standing, and it features seven drive bays. Check it out today at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you liked this video, you can... or just liked it, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out... buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. And while you're down there, you can check out our merch store, which has cool shirts like... This one! And we've got a link to our community forum down there as well. You should totally join it.