Speaker 1: Dell’s XBS 13 has always been one of my favorite laptop lines. It evolves a little bit year after year, but this year it’s CES. It’s really the biggest visual jump I’ve seen in the design. And this version right here is the new Dell. XBS 13 plus.
Speaker 1: Now why do they call it the plus? Well, you can see it’s got a lot of physical changes to it. It actually also supports, uh, higher wattage [00:00:30] CPUs, and it’s got some new stuff going on with the webcam new stuff going on with the touch pad, all this ANF to a more premium product. And that’s, I guess why they call it the plus the first thing that jumped out to me was not the super thin bezel they’ve had that before on these systems. Uh, but the keyboard, which has these really cool looking edge to edge cues, they’ve really eaten up every little bit of available space on the keyboard deck here. And you know, it starts over here, goes all the way over here. And then you say, wait, wait a minute. What happened to the function keys? Well, they’re right up here and this is a [00:01:00] capacitive touch row here.
Speaker 1: That is the media controlled keys. And if I hold down this function button, it’s also got the function keys. It’s a more subtle take on the idea of having touch controls on a laptop compared to the, uh, apple touch bar, which has gotten a lot of grief. And we’re gonna leave it alone from now on. Interesting though, if you want to keep the function keys up all the time, you hold down the function key and you hit escape and then it’s locked into the function keys. Or if you just want to go back to the media keys, you do the same thing here, and you got your volume, you got your brightness up and down like this. [00:01:30] And that’s mostly what I use. These media keys for volume and brightness. Then if I look down at the bottom, the touch pad is gone. It’s this one gigantic strip right here.
Speaker 1: This is all gorilla glass down here. Now the whole thing is not a touch pad. The touch pad part is very wide. It covers the entire space bar and it goes past the alt key, just to the edge of the alt key on this side and to the edge of the alt key on this side. And that’s about where the touch pad is. I think you are gonna have to develop a little bit of muscle memory over time to figure out exactly where it begins and ends. And I can kind [00:02:00] of see the cursor move around. And when I get to the edge, it stops moving. Once I pass the alt key there now, because everyone is working from home and using their laptops as their everything machines, their zoom machines, their video conference machines, there’s been a big move over the last year or so to move into higher end web cameras on these.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are moving to 10 80 cameras, full HD cameras. Now this system has not moved into a 10 80 camera yet, still 70, 20 camera, but they did break out the sensors, the IR sensor that you use for facial recognition login and the regular sensor [00:02:30] for actual, you know, video stuff. And they broken that out. So they claim you’re gonna get better performance from both. I it’s probably not gonna be as good as having a 10 80 camera in there. Like the new MacBook bros recently switched to, uh, but I like any improvement there. And the X PS 13 line that has been famous for a long time for fitting in, uh, these pretty decent, we cans into very tiny spaces. You see how small a space the top of the bed has to fit into. And Dell spent several years refining that and getting the cameras smaller and smaller.
Speaker 1: If you go back to some of the earlier generations, they [00:03:00] actually had a webcam that was below the screen, uh, that gave you that weird up the nose shot. And they said, no, no. We gotta figure out how to put it above the screen. And that’s where we are right now. You may not notice this looking at it, but the, the screen actually does not have that final, uh, glass top layer that a lot of displays have that actually lets it be a little thinner. Let’s more light come through Dell, not gonna impact the durability or the ruggedness of the, of the display. But that’s just an interesting note. Now there’s something else missing from this system that I didn’t notice at first. And then I looked at and I said, wait a minute, [00:03:30] am I missing something here? And, and I went all around.
Speaker 1: So I picked it up and I looked on this side and I looked on this side and you know what, there’s no headphones Jack on this. I, this is one of the first laptops I’ve ever seen that just completely eliminates the headphones Jack and said, it’s got two USBC Thunderbolt ports. So if you want to use wired headphones with this or a wired microphone, which you may want to do, uh, you’ll need some sort of, um, you know, audio to USBC adapter. And if you wanna read more about the XBS 13 plus and everything we know about it so far, or check out [00:04:00] the link in the description below for our story. So this is gonna sit alongside the current X vs 13, and there’s an X vs 13 two, and one and a few other products, but this is definitely a new branch in that family tree. It’s gonna carry a little bit more of a premium price. We don’t know exactly what yet, uh, but it should be out sometime in the early part of 2022. So keep an eye out for it is the Dell Xs 13 plus.
