Dell XPS 13 review: Snapdragon laptop leaves us wanting more

The Intel-powered Dell XPS 13 was already a letdown next to the competition, and this Snapdragon-powered XPS 13 winds up downgrading most of the package without a meaningful reduction in price. It just makes a disappointing experience worse. The Dell XPS 13 (9345) takes most of what we already saw in the Dell XPS 13 (9340) -- a thin, light, and stylish system that focused a little too much on style and not enough on substance next to its competition -- and loads it with new brains in the form of a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip. While the Intel-powered XPS 13 was already on shaky ground, the shift to Snapdragon only gives this new version even less stable footing to compete with the many great laptops out there. Snapdragon might promise advanced AI capabilities over the current field, but with so many AI capabilities in wait-and-see limbo, it's probably worth waiting and seeing if the impending AMD and Intel mobile chips don't just catch up on the NPU front and then continue to score easy wins in the CPU and GPU department. As it stands, the 1,299 Dell XPS 13 (9345) has a rocky path ahead of it.