Dell Inspiron 7000 2-in-1 and XPS 13 9380 win Slickdeals Editor's Choice awards

Based on reader interest, deal-tracking site Slickdeals is predicting that the new Inspiron 7000 convertible and XPS 13 will become highly sought-after laptops once they launch in just a few short months. The Inspiron series alone has had over 200 deals in all of 2018 or nearly three times more than the XPS series.

by Allen Ngo, 2019/01/15

It's common for tech sites to give "Editor's Choice" awards to gadgets they specialize on and cover. When a website gives awards to gadgets that they don't have much expertise on, however, it leaves us a little baffled. Slickdeals.net - where users go to find the best online deals - recently gave "Editor's Choice" awards to two Dell laptops at CES 2019 based solely on how popular their predecessors were. In other words, the website is expecting these two models to be hot sellers when they eventually become available. The XPS family as a whole, for example, appeared on the front page of Slickdeals over 80 times in the past year.

While we don't have a problem with recognizing top sellers, we're not fans of handing out "Editor's Choice" awards to unreleased laptops just because of their expected popularity with consumers. An award for being popular comes at the expense of lesser-known models that could be just as promising or potentially better such as the upcoming Lenovo Yoga S940 or Asus ZenBook 14 UX431.

The new XPS 13 9380 launches next month with the Inspiron 7000 2-in-1 coming later in the year. With Slickdeals already praising these two laptops, however, we wouldn't be surprised to see it pushing the Inspiron and XPS to readers more heavily than competing alternatives.