Dell XPS 13 9345 Review: Snapdragon Battery Life Meets a Genuinely Portable Laptop

The Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X Elite, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 3K OLED touchscreen) is built around a bet: that most people would trade a little app compatibility for a laptop that genuinely lasts all day and then some. For a lot of buyers, that bet pays off.

The Snapdragon X Elite chip is an Arm processor, the same basic architecture Apple uses in MacBooks, rather than the x86 chips from Intel or AMD found in most Windows laptops. That shift is why the battery life numbers here are unusual. Independent battery tests have recorded results in the high teens to high twenties of hours depending on the workload, with lighter web-browsing tests running longest. In practice, that means most people can leave the charger at home for a full day of classes or a workday of meetings and writing.

The 13.4-inch 3K OLED touchscreen is sharp and rich, and 16GB of RAM plus a 1TB SSD is a comfortable amount of headroom for office work, web browsing, and light photo editing. The chassis is thin and light at just over 2.6 pounds, and the quad-speaker setup punches above its size.

The catch is software compatibility. Because the Snapdragon chip uses Arm architecture, some older Windows programs need to run through an emulation layer instead of natively. Mainstream software like Microsoft Office, Chrome, Zoom, and Photoshop runs fine, but niche professional tools, especially specialized engineering or scientific software, are the ones most likely to hit friction. If your daily software list is mostly browser tabs, Office, and communication apps, you're unlikely to notice. If you depend on a specific legacy Windows program for work, it's worth checking Qualcomm's or the software vendor's compatibility list before buying.

At $1,249, this isn't a budget laptop, but it lands in a reasonable spot for what you get: a genuinely thin, quiet, cool-running machine that doesn't need to live next to an outlet.

Price: $1,249.00 at Walmart (checked 28 Aug 2026)

“Most people can leave the charger at home for a full day of classes or a workday of meetings and writing.”