XPS 13 Developer Edition: Specsheet and a short overview

ByBarton George

On Monday, we announced the new 1080p display for the XPS 13 developer edition and its upcoming availability in Europe and beyond.   To support that launch, here is the official spec sheet as well as a brief presentation on the project and resulting product.

Stay tuned for more news.

Pau for now…

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  7. Hi Barton,

    thank you for all your efforts on this matter, I’ve been (and I think a lot of people around the world too) waiting for a linux ultrabook for a while and Dell’s one is really a nice machine.

    I’m from Europe and I’m having a lot of difficulties on finding the Sputnik on Dell sites (I’ve looked for it on the France one, Spanish and Italian…)… is there an easy way to find it or it is still not avalaible?

    Thanks a lot,

    mik

    Reply

    1. Hi Mik,

      Sorry for the confusion, the XPS 13 developer edition will be available online in Europe later this week. (Right now its available thru reps).

      Thanks!
      Barton

      Reply

      1. Thank you a lot… I’ll keep looking for it… I’m really hoping to finally buy a pre-installed linux laptop (and a cool one as this one… great!!)

        mik

  8. How would you describe the keyboard? (That and lack of wired nic – to let it act as pxeboot server – are the primary cons right now as I consider this for my next laptop)

    Reply

    1. A USB3 dongle can be configured for a wired Gig-E network interface. I am surprised Dell didn’t provision one for the “developer” model. Details on how to do this:

      http://debian.netside.net/xps13_linux.html

      The setup is on an XPS13 running Debian Wheezy 7.0 and CentOS 6.3, but I am sure it can be reproduced on Ubuntu. Obviously, you need to have an OS already installed to compile and load the Asix kernel module, so it will not work on bare metal.

      –Mitch

      Reply

  9. The specsheet PDF lists Bluetooth 4.0, while the regular Win8 XPS 13 on the DELL website lists Bluetooth 3.0.

    I’d really love to have Bluetooth 4.0 due to the way better powersaving features, but I fear it’s only a typo.

    Care to enlighten us? 🙂

    Reply

      1. My comment wasn’t aimed at whether BlueZ supports BT 3.0 or 4.0, but at the inconsistencies in your technical specs.
        The tech specs of the XPS 13 in the DELL shops list BT 3.0 everywhere, while the PDF provided in your blogpost lists BT 4.0 which seems to be correct when comparing it with the specs at Intel.

  11. Pingback: Sputnik 2 is here: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition goes 1080p and lands in Europe | Christine's Blog

  12. Barton: first, congrats to Dell for being to first company to seriously support linux in a top end laptop for developers. This is a long overdue machine.

    My fave IT news site, El Reg, just gave your box a preliminary review:
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/11/dell_sputnik_review/

    Looks like you are off to a promising start, but definitely have more work to do to make it really polished. Please do not leave this project half baked.

    Some features that really matter to me are:

    1) ECC RAM. There is no excuse: every serious box shoudl have it, not just servers.

    2) wired ethernet port. Wireless is insufficient.

    3) very fast yet reliable SSD (the 256 GB that you ship with is fine as far as capacity goes). And have it plug directly in (e.g. on a desktop, be a PCIe drive, not go thru the crap SATA interface).

    Reply

      1. And also a (mini) hdmi port. Mini display port it’s a very strange, unused and unsopported output port for use with an external monitor.
        Quite all others ultrabook competitors have at least one between (mini) hdmi and (mini) vga.
        Keep up the good Linux work!

      2. I’m actually happy that it comes with a sane (mini)DP connector instead of the crap HDMI is… and I think most technical people (as the target group of the device is) might agree here.

      3. Barton: how has Sputnik been received so far? And what are future plans? Is Dell gonna keep it, or dump it? I am going to buy a laptop in the next 2 months, and I really need to know.

        In particular, in my April 11th posting above, I cited the Register review which indicated that your laptop had great promise, but the Linux support for these hardware features was failing:

        1) “Shutdown can be problematic; sometimes it shuts down, sometimes it only logs out.”

        2) “Hibernation fails with a “device failed to thaw” error message.”

        3) “I had no success with Bluetooth; neither a keyboard nor an audio streamer would connect.”

        4) “Perhaps the biggest annoyance was when I connected a Canon camera and got the error message “unable to lock camera” and no access to my pictures.”

        1), 2) and 4) are required features for me. I will not buy a machine that does not work with these.

        Have you guys made any progress fixing these issues?

        Also, if you are gonna keep Sputnik, what are your next plans for hardware? Haswell chips coming soon?

        I would love to beta test any new machine that you have coming out. Now normally, I would charge for my services, but for you, my friend Barton, I will do it for free.

  13. Pingback: XPS 13 Developer Edition: Specsheet and a short overview | Christine's Blog

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