Dell has announced XPS15z, a competitor to the Apple MacBook Pro. Dell has nearly copied the entire laptop from Apple, constructing the laptop from Aluminium. They’ve also put most of the ports on side of the laptop, just the way Apple likes to do it.
The build is pretty good. Unlike the other XPS laptops, the “z” moniker actually adds a significant amount of portability, with the thickness just being slightly more than the MacBook Pro. It has a brilliant high-res 1920×1080 screen, that makes it a pleasure to see movies on. The back-lit keyboard makes it easy to type round the clock. Dell has added an ambient light sensor to control the brightness and as well as the back-lit nature of the keyboard. The laptop has a quick, responsive and accurate touch pad.
Unlike the MacBook Pro, you have an option to upgrade the DVD Drive to a Blu-Ray option. It gets a decent hard drive in the form of a 750GB, 7200RPM HDD. The placement of the speakers have been copied from Apple too.
XPS15z is a pretty powerful laptop which can handle whatever you throw at it with its Intel Core i7-2620M(2.7GHz) [2nd Gen Sandy Bridge]. You can configure upto 8GB of DDR3 RAM. It also has nVidia’a Optimus Technology that allows it to switch from the discrete [2GB GeForce GT 525M] graphics card to the on-board Graphics card to save battery and power. For eg: you don’t really need the GPU when surfing the internet, but once you power-up a Game or a video-editing software, the dedicated GPU comes on.
All in all, the XPS 15z is a good laptop for one looking for Apple like build without the Apple Price Tag.
