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Laptops · Dell XPS 13

Dell XPS 13 9300

6owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
1/0positive/negative since 2024
21 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and battery; criticized for build quality and durability.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 21 yearsStill going
N=2. My Inspiron 9300 Dell laptop from 2005 still works fine, although 32bit Windows 7 with 2GB of ram without an SSD makes it painfully slow by today's standards. In addition, I got a Lenovo Z710 from 2014 (replace my 9300) that still performs great, recently put Linux Mint on it and it feels like a new laptop. I say that to say this isn't exclusive to Apple and I think your sentiment is mostly good marketing by them. No Apple hate here, enjoying my company-supplied MBP too.
Likes it
I don't know if I won the lottery, but I have sensitive hearing and I've never heard a coil whine from my XPS 13 (9300). The charging brick did develop a whine which I replaced. It also had the perfect keyboard with no wiggling key caps. Later production 9300 models and recent XPS laptops do have key caps that wiggle (once you notice, it's super annoying, I think I've been spoiled).
Likes it
Funny, my Dell Inspiron 9300 had wuxga (1920x1200) in 2005. The best mac laptop at the time was 1680x1050 and almost double the price. Like everything Apple, they don't invent it or be the first, but they know how to market it to the average muppet to suddenly want it.
Doesn’t like it
I had an xps 13 9300 and struggled with battery life on any Linux distro ( tried fedora, Ubuntu, pop, elementary, solus, Arch, void ) and I'm not a beginner or anything. Even with combinations of tlp, powertop, gnome power profiles, kernel shit to make it run lower speed. Framework is really nice from a hardware perspective, but the display res is wonky with scaling, 100% is small and 200% is big, which puts you in the no no zone on most display servers which employ fractional scaling. MacOS is the only I've ever used that doesn't completely butcher oddball scales. Battery life I've observed to be around 4 hours of light usage on stock fedora. (11th gen main board) I personally run a new MacBook Pro M1 running any Linux I want in Lima or parallels, depending on GUI needs. Damn thing is god tier on battery, outlasts any other laptop I've ever owned by a factor of 3 at least.
Doesn’t like it
I've had 2 Dell XPS's running Ubuntu, a 9300 and 9370. I very recently switched to an Air M2. The build quality between the XPS and the air is night and day. The 9300 flexed so much that when I picked it up with a single hand, the trackpad would click from the flex. After a couple years, the keyboard stopped working, the shell started to physically split and I had to tighten the case screws every week or so (there was a ~2-3mm gap in the case, to a point where the USBc wouldn't line up). My camera started to turn off at the slightest vibration/breeze. I find OSX painful. But between a mildly frustrating OS and crap hardware...for me, the air is an obvious better buy.