Enlarge (credit: Dell )

Dell's Australia arm has been slapped with a $10 million AUD (about $6.49 million) fine for "making false and misleading representations on its website about discount prices for add-on computer monitors," the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced today. The Australian regulator said the company sold 5,300 monitors this way.

As Ars Technica previously reported, the ACCC launched litigation against Dell Australia in November. In June, the Australian Federal Court declared that Dell Australia made shoppers believe monitors would be cheaper if bought as an add-on item.

Here's how the "misleading representations" worked. Shoppers of Dell Australia's website who were buying a computer would see an offer for a Dell display with a lower price next to a higher price with a strikethrough line. That suggested to shoppers that the price they'd pay for the monitor if they added it to their cart now would be lower than the monitor's usual cost. But it turns out the strikethrough prices weren't the typical costs. Sometimes, the lower price was actually higher than what Dell Australia typically charged.

Enlarge / Dell's 2023 XPS desktop. (credit: Dell)

Dell has begun refreshing its popular XPS lineup of desktops and laptops with the latest mobile processors and GPUs. These updates mostly focus on chip upgrades, suggesting only mild improvements to the series that shouldn't make owners of last year's models very envious.

Dell's XPS 17 and 15 laptops will be available on March 2, a Dell rep confirmed to Ars Technica. Dell will offer each with up to an Intel Core i9-13900H but also support i5 and i7 options.

Intel's 13th Gen H-series mobile chips don't bring massive upgrades over their 12th Gen counterparts. The i9-13900H has six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads, and 24MB of cache. It supports clock speeds of 1.9-5.4 GHz. The i9-12900H we tested in last year's Dell XPS 15 has similar specs but clock speeds of 1.8-5 GHz.

Enlarge / Ubuntu will be available and supported even for XPS 13s, which weren't bought as "Developer Edition" this time around. (credit: Dell)

The latest update to Dell's XPS 13 product line will be available beginning Wednesday, September 30, and will feature 11th-generation Intel CPUs, aka Tiger Lake. We know a lot of AMD fans are going to be disappointed at no Team Red option—honestly, we're a little disappointed, too; we've been extremely impressed with this year's AMD Renoir laptop CPUs.

However disappointed AMD fans might be, Tiger Lake represents a pretty massive upgrade from last year's Ice Lake and Comet Lake lineup, as we saw directly when we had the chance to test a prototype Tiger Lake laptop earlier this month. The four core/eight thread i7-1185G7 we expect in the highest-end XPS 13 models might not be a match for an eight core/sixteen thread Ryzen 7 4800U—but it hangs pretty even with an eight core/eight thread Ryzen 7 4700U, even on massively multithreaded workloads.

Meanwhile, not every workload is massively multi-threaded—and the Tiger Lake i7 we tested demonstrated extremely fast single-threaded performance. More importantly, its Xe integrated graphics were far and away the highest performing iGPU we've ever seen—they aren't ready to take the place of a gamer's Nvidia RTX series discrete GPU, but we suspect they sounded a death knell for Nvidia's cheaper MX series of discrete laptop GPUs.

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