IT Blog

I am sitting in a conference room with a bevy of laptops in front of me—so many that they’re blocking my view of the monitor where I’m about to videoconference with some of the people who created them. With a variety of case stylings, colors, materials, and approaches to fundamental design decisions, they are not exactly a matched set. But they’re all iterations of a specific computer: Dell’s XPS 13.

The disparate models represent a decade’s worth of evolution and lead up to the new XPS 13 Plus, which Dell is unveiling today and plans to ship this spring, with pricing still to be announced. Like its predecessors, it squeezes a 13″ display into a surprisingly compact case by shrinking the bezel around the display. But beyond that, what’s new is really new—not just for the XPS 13 line, but also for laptops in general.

For one thing, its keyboard flouts the industry’s recent design conventions by giving you oversized keys without any space between them. It also does…