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A few weeks ago I took a long lunch to grab a beer and watch a soccer game. My club, Liverpool, were playing Leicester City in the English Premier League — a big match — but our starting center defenseman was out injured, so Lucas Leiva, a diminutive midfielder, was forced to play out of position. An hour and a half later Leicester City had torched Leiva several times, scoring three goals. Liverpool was left weeping and I went back to work, depressed.
Then, less than a week later, Liverpool comprehensively beat venerable Arsenal with the same squad, except Leiva was replaced by a proper defenseman, the big and brutish Ragnar Klavan. The simple moral: play the best players in their best positions and the team will actually play well. That’s the way I felt when I switched from testing a Samsung Chromebook Pro to testing the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 ($1,300).
The Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, on the other hand, takes a pop at both the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro.
The Samsung Chromebook Pro played its part. It was affordable, and I could do most everything on it that I normally do on a laptop — namely, working on Chrome. But the keyboard and trackpad felt cheap, so long spells on the computer led to dissatisfaction. Plus, the Chromebook Pro had virtually no internal storage and little offline functionality. Bottom line: it wasn’t fun to use for more than an hour at a time (unless I was watching Netflix). If Samsung was trying to compete with the iPad Pro, the Chromebook Pro wasn’t the answer. The Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, on the other hand, takes a pop at both the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro.
Specs: Dell XPS 13 2-in-1
