The article's arguments against the Macbook Air are "they don’t look great" and "the design is outright archaic."
The XPS13+'s capacitive touch strip seems to be a badly designed copy of the infamous Macbook Pro touch bar, which at least had some additional functionality compared to regular function keys. The XPS13+ only replaces physical keys by capacitive sensors which are hard to use and find and don't add any useful functionality.
The borderless touchpad looks nice, but it probably makes it harder to figure out where the touch sensitive area starts.
If you also remember the well-known overheating problems with previous XPS13 models (see e.g. https://www.techadvisor.com/review/dell-xps-13-9300-2020-378...) you start to wonder what the point of the XPS13+ is, especially considering that the price will probably be in the range of similar Macbook Pro configuration.
Even Apple has learned (again) that form over function doesn't always provide benefits for the user...
Great job, Dell, for cloning the feature that people hated perhaps most about the recent MacBooks (capacitive buttons) and which Apple itself retreated from.
The article's arguments against the Macbook Air are "they don’t look great" and "the design is outright archaic."
The XPS13+'s capacitive touch strip seems to be a badly designed copy of the infamous Macbook Pro touch bar, which at least had some additional functionality compared to regular function keys. The XPS13+ only replaces physical keys by capacitive sensors which are hard to use and find and don't add any useful functionality.
The borderless touchpad looks nice, but it probably makes it harder to figure out where the touch sensitive area starts.
If you also remember the well-known overheating problems with previous XPS13 models (see e.g. https://www.techadvisor.com/review/dell-xps-13-9300-2020-378...) you start to wonder what the point of the XPS13+ is, especially considering that the price will probably be in the range of similar Macbook Pro configuration.
Even Apple has learned (again) that form over function doesn't always provide benefits for the user...