Enlarge (credit: Scharon Harding)

I was treated to a welcome surprise when I first laid eyes on the latest Dell XPS 13 (9315). The color options—a youthful sky blue or a unique purplish brown—are visual candy in a PC world dominated by shimmery silvers, grown-up grays, and boring blacks. Dell's 2022 XPS 13 doesn't compromise by offering a more traditional colorway for cheaper, as prior XPS 13 laptops did, either.

After I moved past appearances, I found there was more to enjoy under the hood. While this machine isn't as wild of a redesign as the one given to the costlier Dell XPS 13 Plus , the company did some tinkering to make the XPS 13 lighter and thinner than ever, all while accommodating quality-of-life upgrades like better speakers and a bigger battery. Unfortunately, it has a dreadfully limited and dongle-dependent port selection.

There are flashier alternatives for a thin-and-light laptop, but the 2022 XPS 13 is an admirable clamshell with more to offer than a couple of unique hues.

Enlarge / Intel's new "Raptor Canyon" NUC Extreme (rear) is a lot larger but also a lot more capable than previous NUC Extreme boxes (front). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel's NUC (Next Unit of Computing) desktops rose to prominence about a decade ago by being small; they were essentially laptops without screens or batteries, crammed inside a tiny box.

But in the years since, Intel has flirted with larger NUCs. They have always been relatively small, but as they graduated from dedicated laptop GPUs to regular dedicated GPUs to even-larger dedicated GPUs, the NUC Extreme PCs have steadily grown to the point that they're now encroaching on do-it-yourself desktops built around mini ITX motherboards, small SFX power supplies, and other size-conscious components.

Enter " Raptor Canyon ," the latest and largest in Intel's line of desktop PCs. It replaces the " Dragon Canyon " NUC design and improves upon it by making room for longer triple-slot GPUs—up to 12 inches (or just over 300 mm) long. That's not enough space for one of Nvidia's massive RTX 4090 and 4080 cards, but it can fit just about anything else.

Enlarge / Dell's UltraSharp U3223QZ 4K monitor. (credit: Scharon Harding)

I get it; not everyone finds monitors as exciting as I do. For most people, a little extra color or a larger range of tones don't really differentiate one screen from another. So I don't blame Dell for stuffing the UltraSharp U3223QZ 4K monitor with fluff like motion-activated controls, monstrous speakers, and a webcam with presence detection. But after weeks with the monitor, I found none of those extra features as exciting as the monitor's IPS Black panel.

The U3223QZ has a lot to prove. For one, it debuted at the same MSRP as the 5K Apple Studio Display (starts at $1,600 ). Since then, Dell has made the price more competitive ( $1,280 as of writing), but it's still expensive for a 31.5-inch monitor. Dell's U3223QZ is also one of the few monitors to use IPS Black technology, which is supposed to yield about twice the contrast as the typical IPS monitor. I confirmed this with a colorimeter and, more enjoyably, with my eyes.

The bonus features on the U3223QZ have their pluses. The speakers are louder than average and the webcam can automatically log you in and out. But for many people, it makes sense to save money and buy the version of this monitor without the webcam ... and without a dedicated Microsoft Teams button.

Enlarge / Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023 is meant to get the Arm version of Windows into the hands of more developers. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft has released two new systems based on Qualcomm's Arm processors lately. The first, a 5G version of the Surface Pro 9 , has mostly been panned by reviewers, with software compatibility being a major pain point even after two generations of the Arm-powered Surface Pro X. The second is the $600 Windows Dev Kit 2023 , formerly known by the much cooler name "Project Volterra," and it's supposed to help solve that software problem.

Microsoft has tried doing Arm Windows developer boxes before—namely, the $219 ECS LIVA QC710 it began selling about a year ago (it's no longer for sale, at least not through Microsoft's store). But with its 4GB of memory, 64GB of pokey storage, and underpowered Snapdragon 7c processor, using it was like revisiting the bad netbook days. Maybe you could get some basic browsing done on it. But actual work, even for someone like me who primarily works with text and medium-resolution photos all day? Nope.

The Dev Kit 2023 is nearly three times as expensive, but the hardware is powerful enough that it mostly just feels like a typical midrange mini-desktop in day-to-day use. Freed from the limitations of cruddy hardware, the machine makes it much easier to evaluate Windows-on-Arm's remaining software limitations. For this review, we won't be using it as a developer box, but it does give us a good chance to evaluate where the Windows-on-Arm project is right now, both in hardware and software—especially relative to the Mac, the other hardware and software ecosystem that is making a much cleaner, wider-ranging, and more graceful transition from x86 software to Arm.

• 

  A black box and a silver remote on a table

The new Apple TV 4K is pretty much just like the last one for most people, and that means it’s still the best streaming box you can buy if money is no object—doubly so if you already live in Apple’s ecosystem.

More importantly, a substantial price cut helps make it more appealing. That cut’s still not big enough to make it the best deal in town, though.

When it was first introduced in 2017, the Apple TV 4K was positioned as a rethinking of how we approach TV. As I wrote then , it fell far short of those ambitions as Apple ran up against the entrenched and disparate interests of the various players in the television business. Nonetheless, the Apple TV 4K has a killer interface, outstanding picture quality, a strong stack of features, and impeccable app support.

• 

  The front of the 2022 iPad. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

There was a time when Apple’s focus was on simplicity in its product lineups—on making a one-size-fits-all design for just about every consumer. In other words, it wasn’t too long ago that there was only one iPad.

Today, nothing could be further from reality. The iPad lineup includes six different models, not counting different finish colors or storage configurations, of course. Apple’s new tablet brings some welcome changes to the aging base iPad design, but it doesn’t quite carve out a strong position for itself in a robust iPad lineup.

Nonetheless, it modernizes an aging design and doesn’t shed anything that was great about its predecessor in the process—well, except for one thing, but we’ll get to that.

Enlarge

Shortly after our review of the Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 9 7950X were published late last month, AMD sent us a box containing the other two members of the Ryzen 7000 launch family: the $400 Ryzen 7 7700X , and the $550 Ryzen 9 7900X .

Absent a six-core member of the family in the $200 range, AMD's eight-core, 16-thread processors usually represent a sweet spot in the lineup—great gaming performance without being overkill and enough cores to handle fairly heavy professional workloads like photo and video editing and rendering without feeling slow.

That's still true of the 7700X, which handily outspeeds the six-core 7600X and costs $50 less than the first 8-core member of the Ryzen 5000 family did a couple of years ago. Right now, it has two problems. The first is that, like the other Zen 4 CPUs, it requires a substantial investment beyond the $400 that you'll spend on the CPU itself in the form of a pricey new motherboard and DDR5 RAM that's still quite a bit more expensive than DDR4. The second is that its out-of-the-box power settings aren't ideal—with a little tuning, the processor can run a little cooler and consume less power while delivering similar results. Here's what we found.

Enlarge / Dell's MS700 Bluetooth Travel Mouse. (credit: Scharon Harding)

There's something to be said about a portable PC peripheral. With many people working in various locations and pairing PC accessories with various devices, portability has become a necessity for many. The Dell MS700 Bluetooth Travel Mouse released today prioritizes portability with Bluetooth connectivity and, more interestingly, the ability to twist into a flatter shape.

The twisted mouse is similar to mice like Microsoft's bendable Surface Arc but stands out with its ability to easily toggle across multiple paired devices, plus a cozy texture. But these are about the only enjoyable things about using the MS700.

Dell's MS700 felt scratchy when I moved it around or made extended swipes, and the touch-scroll strip is an inadequate replacement for a scroll wheel. And there are very few customization options with this $65 (MSRP) mouse.

Enlarge / The new $100 Kindle is Amazon's best entry-level model ever, though it still has to live in the Paperwhite's shadow. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is the e-reader lineup’s exciting new high-end device, the one that's pushing the Kindle experience forward. But it’s just as important for Amazon to keep pushing the baseline forward for the people who want to hop into the ecosystem but don’t want to spend too much.

So we come to the new $100 Kindle (or $120, with no ads). Also called the “2022 release” or “Kindle (11th generation)” on Amazon’s product pages, this model costs $10 more than the one it replaces (inflation comes for us all), but it has new perks to help justify the price bump. For the first time, the basic Kindle has the same 300 PPI screen density as the rest of the lineup, and Amazon has streamlined the top and side bezels around the 6-inch screen to make the device smaller and lighter. USB-C, Bluetooth support for audiobooks, and a boosted 16GB of storage round out the spec sheet.

We’ve had the new Kindle for a few days, not long enough to read more than a few hundred pages or put a dent in the battery but long enough to develop some impressions about the device's strengths and weaknesses. The main question to answer: Who should buy this Kindle, and who should spend $40 more on the waterproofing and larger, nicer screen of the current Kindle Paperwhite ?