Someone needs to give Dell a lesson in marketing, because it hid the most impressive part of the new XPS 13. The upcoming laptop is the first to feature a Tandem OLED display, as Dell confirmed to The Verge.
Tandem OLED is all the rage right now, with Apple introducing the display tech first with the iPad Pro M4. The concept behind Tandem OLED is simple. In order to increase the historically low brightness of OLED, you stack multiple OLED panels on top of each other. We haven’t heard of any other shipping device using this display tech, outside of the upcoming XPS 13.
Dell didn’t confirm specs behind the display, though we’ve already seen bold claims about what Tandem OLED is capable of. Last week, TCL demoed a slideable Tandem OLED display that it claims can reach up to 2,500 nits of brightness. For context, even the best OLED laptops only get up to about 700 nits right now.
In addition to being the first Tandem OLED laptop, the XPS 13 is the first time Dell has included a Snapdragon chip in its XPS line. The laptop features the Snapdragon X Elite CPU, and it’s one of the few new Copilot+ laptops that’s releasing on June 18. The XPS 13 with the Tandem OLED touch display, 512GB of storage, and 16GB of RAM is for $1,500.
Although Tandem OLED is an exciting step in display tech, it’s not free of issues. Users have already noted a grainy effect on the iPad Pro, for example. In addition, iMore discovered that a bug with HDR content on the iPad Pro would blow out highlights, particularly for shades of blue. As with any cutting-edge tech, we expect some growing pains with Tandem OLED as companies like Dell and Apple work through display bugs.
Still, the Dell XPS 13 is the first laptop to sport the tech, and it might be the only one for quite some time. We’ve seen an influx of OLED laptops over the past few years like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, but we haven’t seen any Tandem OLED models yet. It’s possible we could see more in a few weeks at Computex.
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