If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC Is Typical Of The Genre, Other PCs Are Toast

Desktop Tourism Across the 30 years I've used laptop PCs, they've always made me anxious about battery life. Dell's XPS 13 9345 Copilot+ PC powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite X is the first Windows PC to relieve me of that worry and let me confidently leave my desk for a full working day without carrying any charging apparatus whatsoever – but it still has unwelcome baggage.

I was confident taking the PC out to play because in my tests it streamed YouTube nonstop over Wi-Fi for over 27 hours before its battery depleted. An hour of writing and web surfing while listening to tunes during a day of working for The Register drained it by just six percent. Gaming in Zwift, the cycling metaverse I use for at-home workouts, consumed 14 percent of the battery in an hour during which the machine was in constant contact with five Bluetooth devices.

The machine is seriously fast. The 12-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite X1E-80-100 processor delivered a multicore Cinebench score of 8595 – not far behind an Intel Core i9. My customary speed test – downscaling a five-minute, 4K video to HD – finished in 92 seconds, which is a new record for me. The PC always felt pleasingly snappy.

The Snapdragon is an Arm processor, and the cut of Windows Microsoft has prepared for the chip is said to convert any software coded for x86 so it just runs. That was my experience: whatever x86 apps I threw at it just ran. Swiftly. Even a Windows update zipped along without giving me enough time to get frustrated – or make coffee.

Dell, however, has made some poor design decisions. The keyboard feels cramped because only the slimmest cracks separate the square keys. Rounded keys would feel more natural. A little space between the keys and the side of the machine would be more comfortable.

The entire row of function keys is virtual – it's just a black matte expanse that lights up when touched. Curiously, the lights for the F1-F12 labels are a little offset to the ALT-Functions, meaning you'll need to move your fingers to a slightly different place to access different shortcuts. This is an off-putting arrangement.

So is the touchpad – another matte expanse without visual or tactile clues about its extent. It often made me think I'd right-clicked when I should have left-clicked, when sometimes I'd just missed the trackpad entirely and was left wondering if the PC was glitching.

Dell XPS 13 9345 Copilot Plus PC keyboard – Click to enlarge

The machine's screen embraces darkness rather than making a nice distinction between bright and murkier tones. And sound is poor – tamborines and snare drums are tortured.

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The one time I used the laptop while wearing shorts will remain the one time I use the laptop while wearing shorts, because the hot little jets of air it quietly emits are too warm for comfort on bare skin.

But Dell got its ports right: one USB-C slot on each side of the machine is the best option, as placing all ports on one side reduces options for cable and dongle placement.

Software to take advantage of the 45 TOPS NPU is yet to proliferate. Features like the generative AI additions to Microsoft Paint are laughably crude and just not useful. I'll stick to the web-based text-to-image tools I currently use. Text-to-text is verboten to Reg writers and therefore not of use to me on-device or online. I noted no discernible Copilot performance improvement on the Dell compared to the modest mini-PC I use most of the time.

Copilot searches do produce pleasingly detailed search results, but decades of typing search queries into browsers' omnibars is a hard habit to break – especially given I have learned to assess the value of search engine results.

I came away from my time with the XPS uncertain if acquiring the habit of hitting its Copilot key to summon AI-infused search would bring a productivity reward.

But the machine will undoubtedly improve your mobility with its battery life alone.

At the top of this article, I mentioned the XPS is the first PC to relieve my battery anxiety. But so did the 15-inch MacBook Air that I tried last year – and found myself using even when the XPS was at hand. The Mac's extra size makes it more comfortable to use – and at 1.5kg compared to the XPS's 1.19kg, isn't notably heavier.

Both machines are enormously liberating. My messenger bag and its array of pockets for tucking away cables and chargers is gathering dust, and thoughts of a day out threatening the delicate equilibrium of my middle-aged back and neck are gone.

I came away from my time with the XPS thinking that if all Copilot+ PCs are as speedy and long-lived as this, lesser Windows machines are already redundant and a foolish purchase. But I also felt that another vendor will likely do a better job of making Copilot+ PCs delightfully usable than Dell has managed with this $1,299 effort. ®