One of our favorite laptops of the past few years is Dell's XPS 13. It packs a slick metal and carbon fiber chassis, a beautiful near-bezel-free display, and more than enough battery life for everyday usage. Today, Dell has updated the XPS 13 for 2016 with all the latest hardware.
The biggest upgrade to the new XPS 13 is, as you might expect, Intel's Kaby Lake processors. The XPS 13 will come in three variants, packing either the Core i3-7100U, Core i5-7200U, or Core i7-7500U depending on the price point. All of these CPUs are 15W low-power parts with respectable performance and efficiency gains over Skylake.
With the upgrade to Kaby Lake and a slightly larger 60 Wh battery, the 2016 XPS 13 boasts up to 22 hours of battery life if you opt for the 1080p panel. As with previous models, the QHD+ variant comes with a significant battery penalty: Dell only claims 13 hours of life for the high-resolution model.
The only other notable change is the switch from Intel and Dell wireless controllers to a solution from Killer. This is possibly due to issues that Dell experienced with the wireless cards in previous models of the XPS 13, as the feature set of the Killer solution - Wi-Fi ac with 2x2 MIMO and Bluetooth 4.1 - is identical to past models.
Other key specs have remained the same on the XPS 13, including a single Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C port, up to 1 TB PCIe solid state drives, and up to 16 GB of memory. The new laptops will be available on October 4th starting at $799, in silver, gold, and a new rose gold color.