I liked the Dell XPS 13 an awful lot when I reviewed its initial Broadwell-based iteration last year. The keyboard and touchpad felt good, the high-resolution screen looked great, and the whole package was stylish, with its super-thin bezel and soft-touch interior. The only major flaw was the webcam placement driven by that thin bezel. Some other publications also felt that battery life wasn't what it should be, but in our testing it seemed decent even if it fell short of Dell's own estimates.

Almost everything in that review holds true of the new device, and that's a good place to start. The XPS 13 got all the important basics right. Once again our review model has the beautiful 3200×1800 IPS touchscreen and the same extremely narrow bezel.

This is as eye-catching as it ever was, and I'm a little surprised that other manufacturers haven't leapt on the same hardware. The XPS 13 is quite a bit smaller than systems with comparable screen sizes, or if you prefer, its screen is quite a bit bigger than that of systems with the same footprint. To quantify that: the XPS 13 is 11.98 inches wide. The 11-inch MacBook Air is 11.8 inches wide, and the 13-inch MacBook Air is 12.8 inches wide. Similarly, the XPS 13 is 7.88 inches deep; the Apple systems are 7.56 and 8.94 inches deep. This Dell with its 13.3 inch screen is much closer in size to the Mac with an 11.6 inch screen than the one with a 13.3 inch one.