After two generations of no major design changes between the Latitude E5550 and E5570, the Latitude 5580 comes in with rearranged ports and a marginally lighter chassis than its predecessors. Internals have been revised to support both Kaby Lake 15 W U-class and 45 W HQ-class CPU options, which is uncommon on consumer designs
Beyond some internal changes, the outward appearance of the 5580 remains faithful to its predecessors. Users can expect the same matte black chassis tested against MIL STD 810G standards for resistance to certain levels of shock, dust, and temperature ranges.
Ports are evenly distributed around the three edges of the notebook with one USB 3.0 port on each side. VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort over USB Type-C all come standard for a wide variety of display output options.
Dell has equipped the system with a very fast SD reader capable of transfer rates of around 250 MB/s from our UHS-II test card. In comparison, most Ultrabooks are limited to transfer rates of under 100 MB/s. Nonetheless, transferring 1 GB worth of data from our SD card to desktop will still take about 12 seconds since the mechanical drive is a bottleneck to write speeds.
An inserted SD card sits flush against the notebook edge to allow safe carrying without damaging or bending the card.
Compatibility with 802.11ac networks is standard across all SKUs. Our test unit comes equipped with the Intel 8265 capable of theoretical transfer rates of up to 867 Mbps.