Dell ceases to pick its nosecam: New XPS 15 model will move the webcam back to the top bezel

In an interview with The Verge, Dell executive Frank Azor stated that the upcoming XPS 15 series will feature a webcam in the top bezel of the frame. That might not seem like as big a deal as the adoption of a new generation of CPUs or the inclusion of a GeForce GTX 16-series GPU, but for Dell owners who have had to tolerate their video-call partners getting a glorious view of their nasal cavities it has been a long time coming.

The Dell XPS 13 9380 model already has the webcam back where most users feel it should be, in the center of the top bezel. It only makes sense that a refreshed Dell XPS 9580 laptop lineup will follow suit. It’s likely many XPS fans are looking forward to the chance of owning the 15-inch version of the XPS family that features an OLED panel or the above-mentioned Coffee Lake-H Refresh CPU or Turing-based GPU. But you can almost say for certain there would be plenty of potential purchasers who would have been put off by a “nosecam”.

As evidenced by design features such as the notch or camera bump on modern smartphones, it can be the smallest thing that turns a customer off a product. Dell must have thought it was such an insignificant change to make by shifting the webcam from the top to the bottom bezel, so that users could enjoy owning an XPS 15 laptop with the slimmest of frames. But just as the XPS 13 9380 has now moved to solve the “nosecam” problem, the XPS 15 9580 will soon eradicate it completely.