Dell XPS 13 9350 review: Too little, too late

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It's an aphorism that, in retrospect, Dell's XPS team would have done well to frame and put on the wall. Since its inception in 2012, several generations of the XPS 13 have come and gone. Some were fantastic, some flawed – but at its heights, few ultraportables did it better.

For those in any doubt: this will be the last XPS 13. Dell announced in CES 2025 that it was finally retiring its current naming structures – XPS, Inspiron, Precision – in favor of something simpler. Something more Pro, more Max, more Premium. Something arguably more Apple.

In many ways, that comes as little surprise. The XPS range was always intended to tempt you away from that MacBook. Here, the XPS 13's CNC-machined aluminum body, elegant lines, and 1.18kg weight are all eager to do exactly that. If you have around £1,399 going spare, then it seems – on paper, at least – to be a worthy substitute.

Dell XPS 13 9350: Specification

Last year's model, the XPS 13 9340 – which employed Intel's underwhelming Meteor Lake chips – has since been retired, but the chassis remains the same. You now have two choices: the Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered XPS 13 9345, or the XPS 13 9350 we have here, which houses Intel's latest Lunar Lake generation of mobile chips.

Pricing flits into the realms of the reassuringly expensive. The entry-level model begins at £1,399, pairing an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V, 16GB of on-package LPDDDR5X RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD, and a non-touch 13.4in, 1,920 x 1,200 IPS screen.

All the usual upgrades are on offer. You can double the RAM, but as the Lunar Lake architecture physically locates the system memory on the CPU itself, doubling the RAM forces you to upgrade to an Intel Core Ultra 5 258V, which pushes the base price to £1,599.

Processors reach all the way up to the Core Ultra 9 288V, but the small increases in clock speed and L3 cache size mean that the performance jumps are modest. At the time of writing, it was only £50 to upgrade to the top-end Core Ultra 9 288V, but £150 for the slower 268V.

Upgrading the storage is relatively affordable – it's only £50 to double the 512GB to 1TB, and a slightly less sensible £150 to double that to 2TB. Tick that 3K OLED touchscreen and your wallet will be £200 lighter; a more power-efficient QHD+ IPS touchscreen is £250.

Looks-wise, you can decide between graphite grey or platinum silver. We definitely prefer the moody graphite option, not least as it's just a tad less eager to retain fingerprints and smudges. The dark interior and Gorilla Glass touchpad look more stylish in the darker hue, too, in our opinion.

Dell XPS 13 9350: Keyboard and touchpad

This is where it falls apart for this generation of the XPS 13, and the blame lies squarely on the decision to adopt the 'unique' keyboard from the 2023 XPS 13 Plus. Our reviewer at the time was smitten, but many other reviewers – this one included – have found themselves feeling far less romantically inclined.

While the keyboard's zero-lattice design both looks and sounds like a good idea, offering the largest possible keys in the smallest possible space, it's unpleasant to type on. The very absence of a lattice separating the keys makes typos far more commonplace, as it's impossible to find your way around purely by feel. Other little design choices only serve to pile on the irritation. The combined power button and fingerprint reader sit just alongside the backspace key. This looks neat, but delete some text a little too eagerly, and an errant prod turns off your laptop.

If you've ever wondered how you could further hobble a keyboard in 2025, then one idea would be to replace the top row of function keys with a row of backlit capacitive buttons that offer no haptic feedback whatsoever. This means that some of our favorite buttons – we're big fans of Escape and Delete keys here at ITPro – are now relegated to imprecise touch buttons which are impossible to find by feel alone.

Yes, the touchbar does make it marginally easier to change the volume or brightness, but this isn't an unsolved design problem: Apple, for one, has managed to cater to the two types of users – those that prefer function keys; those that prefer volume controls – for as long as we can remember, simply by allowing users to customize the default behavior of the function row. This, on the other hand, is a solution in search of a problem.

The touchpad is unique in a far more inoffensive manner: it's hidden behind a panel of Gorilla Glass which stretches across the width of the laptop. The touchpad is normal-sized – it spans from the left hand edge of the space bar to just left of the Copilot key and there's about a centimeter of dead space above and below. The fact you can't see it isn't a big issue, thankfully, as you get used to knowing where it is.

The touchpad works fine. The glass finish still feels wonderfully smooth under the finger, and both single – and multi-fingered gestures work reasonably reliably. So far, we haven't experienced the occasional and infuriating stuck button issues that we experienced on the 9340 and 9345 models – we'll report back if that changes.

In fact, side-by-side testing suggests that Dell has either replaced the touchpad found on the 9340 and 9345 models or that it just uses a variety of interchangeable parts. Whichever is the case, the haptics in our review unit produced a noticeably more crisp, high-frequency click than the touchpad on the XPS 13 9340. Go back to the old model and clicks feel muffled and dull by comparison, even with the touchpad feedback cranked up in Windows.

Dell XPS 13 9350: Connectivity

Consider this section of the review as art imitating life. There are two Thunderbolt 4-compliant USB-C ports, one on either edge. There is no 3.5mm audio out. There is Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

When even Apple's MacBook Air manages to squeeze in two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a MagSafe charging port, and a headphone socket, the XPS 13's connectivity veers towards the ludicrously restrictive.

Dell XPS 13 9350: Display

The XPS 13 lays claim to a world first: tandem OLED technology makes its laptop debut in the guise of a pin-sharp 2,880 x 1,800 touchscreen. And you guessed right: the tandem designation means that two OLED panels are literally overlaid on top of one another. The benefits are that each panel can operate at a lower brightness, thus simultaneously boosting overall brightness and reducing the chances of burn-in on either panel.

Hit the power switch and OLED makes its presence known, the XPS boot logo floating in the middle of a perfectly black background. It's a quiet showcase for OLED's infinite contrast ratio and perfect black levels.

As the desktop fades into view, OLED's other talent-rich, saturated colors – leaps to the fore. Whether it's video, games, or photos – or even just our desktop background – the sheer intensity and richness of the colors is impressive. In our tests, the panel covered 100% of sRGB, 100% of DCI-P3, and 98% of Adobe RGB, which explains the intensely vivid colors on the Windows desktop. Peak brightness is less remarkable, but the panel reaches an ample 448cd/m2, which is just bright enough to help the screen remain legible outside despite the semi-gloss finish.

One thing the OLED display isn't, however, is strictly accurate. Tested against the Display P3 gamut, which seems to most closely match its default calibration, it provided an average Delta E of 1.77 and a maximum of 4.24. Colour temperature was a whisker away from perfect at 6,480k and gamma tracked at around 2.2. These figures are respectable, but as many of the colors on our test chart were above a Delta E of 2, there's a general sense that a lot of the colors are dialed a bit too far toward vibrant rather than accurate. Swapping between the various sRGB, DCI-P3, and Adobe RGB color profiles in Windows did nothing to improve accuracy, either.

Sadly, the HDR implementation here has its quirks, and that's putting it mildly. All of the YouTube HDR videos we tried looked awful, with completely blown-out highlights. We initially wondered whether HLG HDR video support was broken. Unfortunately, although Dolby Vision support is on the cards – which is theoretically a welcome bonus – all of the video content we watched on Netflix suffered a similar fate. The moment HDR is enabled, the Dolby Vision logo pings into view, and bright blue skies and fluffy clouds are squashed into a uniform white.

It seems that the issue is dependent on screen brightness. The moment that the screen brightness is set to around 60% or below, the blown-out areas suddenly regain detail. Something is clearly very broken here. We did try the HDR Calibration Tool to see if that resolved the issue, but the blown-out highlights cause issues here, too, making it impossible to tweak the black level and white level response due to it crashing the test images. It's hugely disappointing, but hopefully resolvable via software and driver updates.

If you want to save £200, then don't be afraid to downgrade to the standard 1,920 x 1,200 IPS display. We tested it in our review of the Dell XPS 13 9340, and it's fair to say that it's pretty good. Color accuracy is respectable, contrast impressive by IPS standards, and the adaptive 30-120Hz refresh rate does its bit for battery life. For most people, it's more than good enough – and going by other reviews, you may regain a couple of hours of battery life, which may be more valuable to you than broken HDR playback and oversaturated colors.

Dell XPS 13 9350: Performance

Intel had one job with its Lunar Lake generation, and that was to make amends for the Meteor Lake generation, which found itself comprehensively outgunned for performance and battery life by both Apple and Qualcomm. Broadly speaking, it's a success.

CPU performance is broadly similar to before, albeit slower in multi-core tests; battery life is improved (albeit with caveats), and GPU performance is given perhaps the biggest boost. Casual gaming on a 1.18kg sliver is now entirely feasible, so hats off to Intel's GPU teams there.

One word to the wise: if you're expecting huge performance deltas between the various Core Ultra 5, Ultra 7, and Ultra 9 chips, then dash those expectations. All the Lunar Lake processors have 4 Performance cores and 4 Efficiency cores with no Hyper-threading, and Turbo Boost clocks are in a tight 4.5GHz to 5.1GHz range. The top three processors have a little more L3 cache at their disposal – 12MB instead of 8MB – and the AI-accelerating NPU is boosted from 40 tops to 48 tops, but dramatic performance increases are off the table.

Comparing the three XPS 13 models across the Cinebench 2024 and Geekbench 6 benchmarks is informative – especially since all three chips have to do their best within the thermal limitations of the XPS 13 chassis. For single-core performance, Qualcomm's Snapdragon retains the pole position, with the Intel chips jostling for second and third place around 15% behind. In the Multi-core tests, however, Lunar Lake's reduced core count sees it fall around 30% behind Qualcomm and 20% behind Meteor Lake.

Move to GPU performance, and the tables turn. It's here that the new Intel Xe2 graphics architecture comes to the fore, and the Core Ultra 7 258V in our review unit shows it in its best light as it sports the slightly more powerful ARC Graphics 140V GPU. In a range of tests including Geekbench 6's GPU compute and 3DMark's Time Spy and Steel Nomad benchmarks, the 140V pulled anything from 30% to 130% ahead of Qualcomm's Snapdragon, and around 30% ahead of the Meteor Lake chip in the XPS 13 9340. Stick to modest resolution and detail settings, and current games will often be genuinely playable.

Battery life has made a big leap forward with this generation, too, but the figures don't look as impressive as they could: going by other reviews across the internet, the OLED display is noticeably more power-hungry than the less-exciting IPS variants. That said, there's nothing to complain about here. Where the previous Meteor Lake XPS 13 lasted 12 hours and 15 minutes in our battery rundown test, the Lunar Lake model lasted for a creditable 14 hours and 1 minute. That's still substantially behind the 17 hours and 25 minutes of the Qualcomm Snapdragon model, but it's a useful step forward.

Dell XPS 13 9350: Is it worth it?

Despite some improvements, the answer remains an emphatic no. For anyone who needs to type regularly, the keyboard is a drag; the connectivity is awkwardly restrictive, and not one facet of the pretty design makes it more pleasurable to use than any of the competition.

Don't get us wrong, it's great to see Intel finally delivering on its side of the bargain, with a welcome boost to efficiency going hand in hand with genuinely useful gains in GPU performance. But it's not enough to offset the worst aspects of this design: one that deserves to be learned from – and ultimately consigned to the history books.

Perhaps though, this is a fitting end for the XPS 13 after all. The flawed, original model in 2012 had thrilling potential. And the insanely expensive Dell Adamo which preceded it, and arguably inspired it, was bold, gorgeous, and awful – albeit more the latter than the former. With this final offkey Swan song, maybe we've finally traveled full circle. Rest in peace, XPS.

Dell XPS 13 9350 specifications