Annoyingly, neither the price nor the spec have been updated recently. The non-developer XPSes are already on Skylake and come with more RAM and storage: http://www.dell.com/uk/p/xps-13-9350-laptop/pd
12.04 is still under LTS support by Ubuntu for another 4 years (LTS releases are supported for 7 years), so even if it's "old" it's also receiving active support. That being said, there's nothing stopping you from upgrading to 14.04 yourself.