In these uncertain times it's tougher than usual to justify spending as much as a fully-loaded Dell XPS 15 costs, but boy, the screen is gorgeous and the power under it will crunch through whatever you throw at it—video encoding, software compiling, or gaming.

It is, in short, a powerhouse machine. It's the Window's world equivalent of the 15-inch MacBook Pro, and as such, if you prefer to skip the future drama surrounding Apple's chip migration, and just want a big, powerful laptop today, the Dell XPS 15 delivers.

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Like its smaller sibling, the 2020 Dell XPS 13 ([9/10 WIRED Recommends](https://www.wired.com/review/dell-xps-13-2020/)), the 2020 refresh for the 15-inch XPS shrinks the screen bezels to give you even more real estate (the screen becomes 16:10 instead of 16:9 in previous models). The result, as least for the tk x tk 4K screen in my test machine is, as noted above, gorgeous. Colors are excellent, and brightness is, if anything, too much, I rarely pushed it beyond 80 percent, and never had any trouble seeing the screen even in bright sunlight.

As I mentioned in the review of the 13-inch XPS, on paper the larger screen sounds negligible, but in everyday use it's really nice to have, especially when editing photos, videos, or playing games.

Under the hood Dell has a variety of configurations available. There's the base model, which gets you a 10th Gen Core i5, 8-gigabytes of RAM, and integrated graphics. This model is $1300, but it lacks the 4K display and has a relatively paltry 256-gigabyte hard drive.

If you bump the processor to an i7, add a discrete video card (Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti), the 3840 x 2400 4K touch display, and 16-gigabytes of RAM, you'll be looking at $2200. That's on par, both on specs and price, with Apple's 16-inch Macbook. 

The model I tested had 16-gigabytes of RAM and 512-gigabytes hard drive and goes for $2350.

Like the MacBook Pro, there's also an option to go with an Intel i9 processor, which puts the price up to $2800, but includes a larger 1-terabyte hard drive and the 32-gigabytes of RAM.

If you're a developer compiling software, or looking for a mobile video editing station, you'll want to stick with the mid to higher end configurations.

This latest model features a new trackpad, which is, frankly, giant. But it comes in handy for moving quickly around the huge screen. 

Battery life on the XPS 15 is a very mixed bag. Overall it's not as good as the XPS 13. In everyday use I usually managed to get around 9 hours out of it, but when I looped an HD video it barely managed to hit the 8 hour mark, 8:03 to be exact. That's certainly enough to edit video at the coffee shop for a few hours, but if you're doing anything processor intensive with this thing you're going to want the power cord handy. It's also probably worth noting that the power cord is larger and heavier than what you get with the XPS 13.

Like the smaller model there are three USB-C ports, any of which can deliver power. The two USB ports on the left side have Thunderbolt 3 support. There's also an SD card reader and (thankfully) a headphone jack. Dell helpfully includes small dongle for your older, USB-A devices, and a USB-C to HDMI cable as well. 

Dell packs all of this into a slim aluminum chassis with carbon-fiber palm rests, and a Gorilla Glass screen. The result is surprisingly small for a 15-inch laptop (it's just 13.5 inches by 9 inches) thanks to those incredibly thin bezels. It's small, but it is on the heavy side.

### What's Not to Like

As much as I like the 15-inch screen and optional discrete graphics, there are some trade offs witht he XPS 15 compared to the XPS 13. The biggest issue in my view is the added weight: the XPS 15 feels heavy (it weighs 4-4.5 pounds, depending on the configuration). Where the 13-inch model feels trim and light in a bag, the XPS 15 feels like a lead brick on my shoulders. It's not unbearable by any means, but if you prize portability, go with the XPS 13.

My other problem with the XPS 15 is that it can be loud, or at least what passes for loud in laptops these days. All that power has thermal discharge after all, and you have to get that heat out somehow, which means the XPS 15 spins up its fan fairly regularly and when it does it's not especially quiet. The good news is that this was mainly an issue when I exported large 4K video clips.

### Developer-Friendly

If you're a developer, you want your $3000 laptop to do everything. So even if Apple has moved to ARM, your software probably still need to run on X86 chips as well. Apple's plan to emulating the full X86 stack on ARM... well, I wish them luck with that, but I wouldn't want to be the guinea pig spending $3000 to see if it actually works. Especially when the XPS 15 is already here and won't be jump chip ships any time soon.