Anyway, you will also note they did not actually send the i7 versions off for testing as the battery life would tank. IMO, there are three basic classes of laptop ultra-portable trade power for awesome battery life and light weight, desktop replacements which are meant to be used on a desk, and gaming machines. You can dump a large SSD into an ultra-portable without issue but dells approach of bumping RAM, CPU, HDD, etc. in lockstep just means their ultra-portables are stuck with tiny disks for little reason.
You might want to read that whole review if you haven't already. They found that the XPs 13 had excellent battery life, to the point that they tested it and it was exactly what was advertised. That is, for the low-end screen (1080p) they got over 15 hours of light usage. Dell provides battery life estimates for different configurations (visible in the review[1]), so it's not inconceivable that i7 light usage might get over 11 hours as Dell claims.
http://www.howtogeek.com/196582/why-you-probably-dont-want-t...
And an i7 would drop down to around 4.5 brand new under heavy usage. And around 2 before you start looking for a charger once the battery ages a little.
PS: The only reason I bring this up is their base numbers are rather low and they don't seem to have a way to configure the systems before checkout. Overall the i5 version seems like a real mackbook competitor, but their low end model seems to be designed more for halo effect (battery life, and price) vs an actual reasonable choice.
I'm not sure why you think it's fishy. As long as Anandtech has kept their benchmark tests consistent across different units tested, it should be fine. I'm not sure how you got HD video viewing as a light benchmark test, I've never heard of that before. Generally, decoding a highly compressed chunk of data and using it to constantly update the display seems close to a worst case scenario to me, unless you are doing serious data crunching (e.g. encoding) which while more common than it used to be, I wouldn't consider common enough to include as a regular benchmark in a general purpose review.
According to Anandtech's article, the 13-inch Macbook Air has a 54 Wh battery and the Dell has a 52 Wh battery, so the XPS battery is slightly smaller. The hardware drawing power from the battery is different through (Broadwell-U @ 14 nm vs Haswell @ 22nm), so extrapolating numbers in that way is not likely to yield very accurate results.
Anandtech then just displayed numbers for useage levels vs hours:minutes.
Anandtech then just displayed numbers for useage levels vs hms.
Yeah, the "Choose Options" menu under the "Hard Drive" section. Currently, the $999.99 and $1299.99 models can upgrade from a 128GB to a 256GB SSD for +$100, and the high end $1599.99 model can upgrade from a 256GB SSD to a 512GB SSD for +$300. Available options may vary at times.
Though I'd rather just replace the SSD myself, especially for the 512GB upgrade. Looks very easy to do do, based on YouTube videos.
PS: You can get a 512GB desktop SSD drive for under 180$ so cost wise it's a non issue. And 30$ micro SD cards are at 64GB so 512GB would not be a space issue.