One of the most disappointing things about the ultrabooks released to date has been the cost. Apart from Acer’s S3, which keeps pricing low thanks to a mechanical hard drive, 13in ultrabooks tend to sit closer in price to $2000 than the magical $999 which was thrown around when the first devices came on the market.
Dell has turned that on its head. It's finally released Australian pricing for its very sexy XPS 13 Ultrabook which hits shelves tomorrow. The base model, which features a Core i5-2467M CPU, 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM, comes in at $1199 when buying direct from Dell. JB Hi-Fi offers the same with a Core i7-2637M CPU for $1499. For the top end model with both Core i7-2637M and a 256GB SSD you’ll need to fork out $1699 to Dell.
The pricing in comparison to the competition is very reasonable, and the ultrabook also boasts what we think is a great design. Not only do we love the two-tone stylings of Carbon fibre chassis and Gorilla Glass screen but the thin bezel that enables Dell to fit a 13in screen into a small footprint makes other ultrabooks look bloated.
The Core i5 is zippy enough for most people’s needs, and as long as you have some sort of overflow storage (be it cloud, NAS or external hard drive based) then the 128GB SSD is going to be enough for day to day use.
Hopefully Dell’s aggressive pricing on the XPS 13 will pressure other manufacturers to drive down their prices. Either way, the XPS 13 marries excellent design and reasonable specs with the pricing that we have been hankering for since ultrabooks first appeared.
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