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I've been reading lots and lots of reviews, specs comparisons, and general videos about the XPS13, and it seems like a pretty sweet "ultrabook". Granted, it's impossible to think that meeting the desires of everyone on here and still keeping the price reasonable, or to keep the XPS13 from turning into a much heavier ~6lb laptop, my number one request for the XPS13 before launch is simply more RAM. If I could buy it with 8GB right now, you'd already have my money and I wouldn't even be writing this.

While the very goal of Project Sputnik is to allow us to code against micro-"cloud" instances locally, our production servers only run Ubuntu 10.04, so I'll be forced into a VM option whether I like it or not. Our current webdev VM has need of >2GB of RAM; and while you could argue that our VM needs tweaking, the simple case is that being limited to only 4GB on the XPS13 is a big limiting factor for several of us. Having an 8GB option makes a lot of sense. Less swapping will save the SSD's lifespan as well.

The other question, of course, is whether Dell is even considering a hardware refresh or not. If they have no intention of updating the hardware before their Fall timeframe, then we're just wasting time with these hardware-related posts. Either way, please let us know whether we can expect other hardware options. And some semblance of ETA other than "fall" would be awesome. Will it be end of Q3, early Q4? late Q4? etc

The other stuff I'm about to list would just be icing on the cake, but I hesitate to purchase an XPS13 today not knowing if there's going to be an 8GB model later.


** Leave the display resolution alone.
To those asking for more than 1366x768 resolution, holy crap, how good is your eyesight?? You *do* realize this is only a 13.3" display, right? I really don't need a "retina display" to use vim all day.

** Ditch the USB 2.0.
2000 called, they want their technology back. USB 3.0 only, please.

** Upgrade Bluetooth to BT 4.0.
BT4 has some nice power-saving options as well as plenty of extra features to keep us geeks happy.

** Please let us opt for a matte screen.
I already own a mirror, thanks. Seriously, we all know that a matte screen doesn't have the vibrant color that a glossy screen does, but we're programmers -- we deal with text and web browsers, not print-quality Pantone color tuning.

** A power brick that weighs less than the laptop itself.
I own one of the early XPS15 models, and the power brick was nearly perfect: nice and compact. Still, the power 'brick' that ships with the newer MacBook Air is pretty tiny and only two-prong, so I'm sure this could get done.


Here's hoping that a hardware refresh is really on the books, and that the fully-loaded XPS13 price tag won't make me consider looking elsewhere for a super-portable webdev system.

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