Dell 1P6KD - Battery 84Whr 6 Cell - Warranty: 6M

Product Information

Just like most of Dell's performance laptops, the Inspiron 16 Plus starts with an Intel Core i7-13700H with six P-cores, eight E-cores, and a 5.0 GHz boost speed, strapped with a 45-Watt TDP. It's fed by 16 GB of DDR5-4800 memory in a dual-channel configuration, by way of a pair of upgradeable SO-DIMMs, with an official maximum capacity of 32 GB. There's also a 1 TB NVMe PCI Express SSD in the standard M.2 2280 form factor on board.

For its current range, Dell has split things up a bit and now offers two variants of the XPS 13. There’s the base XPS 13, which offers a balance between performance and efficiency - which means a longer battery life - and a newer Plus model which favours power over efficiency. Aside from that, both of the 13” models come with the same gorgeous, sleek design, with a lightness that rivals even the current super-skinny MacBook Air models. The Power section of MyDell shows battery health statistics, and also provides access to different charging strategies designed to maximize the usable lifetime of the battery. There's also four thermal management profiles here, labeled Optimized, Cool, Quiet, and Ultra Performance. Optimized is the default operating mode, Cool will keep the surface temperatures low at the cost of performance and noise, Quiet will keep fan noise to a minimum, and Ultra Performance will ungate the fan speeds under load to ensure best performance.The MacBook Pro 14 also has better connectivity, with both more Thunderbolt 4 ports and an HDMI connection. Both laptops have full-size SD card readers, which is welcome. The XPS 15’s wireless connectivity is a generation behind, giving the MacBook Pro 14 another win. WCCFTech made the point that the OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro would likely require tweaks to the macOS interface to accommodate for the precision needed when using touch on a display. Notably, the iPad Pro already has the assistance of the Apple Pencil, but there's no telling how accessories will fit into the equation. All are premium laptops of various sizes that, like the XPS 15, are aimed at professional digital content creators and enthusiast-level users. Among them, you'll find a decent array of recent AMD, Intel, and Nvidia components. Productivity Tests Dell XPS laptops are the perfect Windows alternative to popular Apple MacBook products like the 13-inch MacBook Air (2022) and 15-inch MacBook Air (2023), often offering better specs at a cheaper price. Where the current version of the XPS 13 has drawn controversy is in the removal of some of its connectivity options. While Apple users will, by now, be familiar with (and occasionally frustrated by) the smaller number of USB-C ports, it does mean users of the newest XPS models will have to be dongle or hub-ready. What makes the XPS range great for musicians?

As you can see in the benchmark charts below, this year's XPS 13 Plus finished behind the previous model on most of our tests. It topped last year's model on only PCMark 10. Its performance generally fell between the Acer Swift Go 14 that features a high-powered Core i7-13700H CPU and the Asus ZenBook S 13 that uses a more efficient Core i7-1355U chip. Meanwhile, a pair of HP Pavilions based on AMD Ryzen U-series chips generally outperformed the XPS 13 Plus, which isn't a great look for Dell's ultraportable. Hard drive retention: Hard drive retention is not available on models with a soldered hard drive, including XPS 9315 2in1, Chromebooks or Venue tablets, except the Venue 11 Pro. Not surprisingly, the new XPS 15's OLED panel delivered wide color coverage bested only by the Samsung, and a more than ample max brightness of 422 nits (OLED screens' sky-high contrast makes anything over 300 or 350 nits a boon, whereas we usually look for at least 400 nits from IPS panels). The SpyderX Elite numbers confirmed our eyeball tests, which showed bright and brilliant colors.Desktop replacements spend much of their time plugged in, but long battery life is always a plus when business takes you out of the office. The XPS 15 passed with flying colors and more than 14 hours of stamina. You'll see shorter runtimes if crunching through content creation rather than playing video, but should still have plenty of headroom to work away from a wall outlet. We didn’t test the MacBook Pro 14 in the same version of the PugetBench Premiere Pro benchmark, and so we can’t directly compare numbers. However, in this benchmark that runs in a live version of Adobe’s Premiere Pro and uses the GPU to speed up certain tasks, the MacBook Pro 14 with the M3 Max achieved the second-highest score we’ve seen in a laptop. Only the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 with an AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D and an RTX 4090 was faster. The XPS 15, even in its most powerful configuration, won’t come close to matching the MacBook Pro 14. Non- gaming laptops with integrated graphics tend to plod through these tests, but the discrete GPUs in this group showed their graphics and 3D chops with impressive results. For super-heavy-duty animation or modeling workflows, you'll want something from the workstation aisle, but video editors and mainstream content creators will be more than satisfied. We tested the MacBook Pro 14 with the fastest CPU available, the M3 Max with 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores. That’s a monster chip that has achieved some of the fastest benchmark results we’ve seen. As you’ll see here, the XPS 15 configured with the Core i7-13700H can’t keep up in CPU-intensive benchmarks. It was only competitive in the Cinebench R23 benchmark in single-core mode. When all cores are engaged, the MacBook Pro 14 is much faster.

Neither laptop has received any design changes in several generations. That’s a good thing, because both are among the best designed and built laptops available today. Technology enthusiasts love premium PCs. Flashy machines made from ultra-premium materials, with the thinnest profiles or the fastest components, speak to us on a primal level that cause us to make caveman noises like Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor on Home Improvement. The problem with those PCs, of course, is that premium features usually come at a premium price. But if you don't want to part with the big money, the subject of this article -- the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7630) -- is an excellent alternative. The MacBook Pro 14’s Mini-LED display is much brighter, both in its default standard dynamic range (SDR) setting and when running high dynamic range ( HDR) content. Add in its incredibly deep contrast and a maximum brightness of 1,600 nits and the MacBook Pro is the best laptop for HDR streaming. Where the XPS 15’s OLED display is better is in its coverage of the AdobeRGB gamut. But Apple’s display is slightly more accurate. Against most other laptops, the XPS 15 might come out on top. But it’s simply outclassed by the MacBook Pro 14 in performance, battery life, keyboard and touchpad, and overall display quality. The 720p webcam was outdated on last year's model and is now severely behind the times on this year's version. All but the most budget laptops these days feature crisper 1080p cameras and some higher-end models now offer 1440p cams. The XPS 13 Plus's webcam produces a grainy image with reddish skin tones. It could be a deal breaker by itself if Zoom calls are a regular part of your day.

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (7630): Affordable, Attractive And High-Performance Mobile Computing

The XPS 15 has the best audio quality in a Windows laptop, with quad speakers pumping out plenty of volume with clear mids and highs. But the MacBook Pro 14 has six speakers, including force-canceling woofers, and it puts out incredibly full sound with tons of bass. Again, the MacBook Pro 14 is better than the XPS 15. Portability Digital Trends The Inspiron 16 Plus came to us running Windows 11 Home with a relatively light software payload. Aside from the typical drivers and control panels, Dell only included a McAfee LiveSafe 30-day trial and the standard Dell applications, including Digital Delivery and MyDell. As you'd expect, the most important of these is the MyDell application because that's where the Color & Display and Power control features live. After the introduction of the OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro, Apple is expected to push both features to MacBook Air models in 13.6-inch and 15.3-inch variants. This could happen starting in 2026 and beyond, depending on the tentative timeline of the MacBook Pro launch.

Alongside the two 13” models are the equivalent 15” and 17” versions, as per normal, with the larger screens and enhanced specs making for highly capable music production machines.Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).