41.13 Olive Dell XPS13 9380

20190310

The Dell XPS13 9380 (2019) was reviewed as the best 13 inch laptop at the time. Common pros are the keyboard, screen, fully USB-C with 3 USB-C, 2 with Thunderbolt and 1 Powershare to charge other devices, and a WebCam back at the top (compared to the previous model that received criticism for having nose-cam). It also has a 3.5mm audio jack and stereo speakers. The Cons are no HDMI nor USB-A and the powerful 4K display is a battery drain. The battery life is said to be 8 hours of typical use. It is a well built machine and gets a 5-star rating from PCMag as “the best ultra portable laptop you can buy.”

It’s 13.3 inch 4K display (336mm as I measure it) comes in a compact form factor (reputably an 11" form factor). This was a concern on first sight as being too small compared to a 14 inch laptop but quickly adapted to. It is a compact size without compromising performance and the keyboard is just fine.

The system was purchased for SGD $2300. Extras included official Dell sleeve, USB-C to VGA adaptor, a wireless mouse with USB-A, and a box of accessories including USB-C to USB-A, travel adaptor, earpods/microphone, USB card reader, keyboard protector, cable pouch, etc.

The laptop is used as a development machine for writing, compiling C and C++ programs, and interactively developing R and Python scripts for data science. It is also ultra portable and so when travelling and flying is used for programming.

Specifications

Spec Details
Machine Dell XPS 13 9380
CPU 8 x Intel Core i7-8565U 1.80GHz
BogoMIPS 4224
Memory 16GiB LPDDR3 Synchronous 2133MHz (0.5 ns)
Network QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (ath10k)
Disk PM981 NVMe Samsung 512GB
Video Intel HD Graphics (i915)
Webcam (uvcvideo)
Audio (snd_hda_intel)
Touchpad SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad ()
Boot Grub2
Kernel 4.15.0-46-generic


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