Dell’s new XPS 14 is better in almost every way

The 2026 XPS 14 is the best premium laptop we’ve seen from Dell in a while, with amazing build quality in a thin machine and good performance thanks to Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” chips. Bonus: Dell killed its gimp “Premium Plus” naming system.. XPS is back!

I can’t believe how much this new paradigm has transformed XPS 13 I reviewed it last year, which at the time was destined to be the line’s disappointing swan song. The new XPS has improved in almost every respect, with an actual F-row, better speakers, and great battery life. Too bad it’s so expensive.

Dell sent us two XPS 14 laptops to test: a $1,999.99 entry-level model with an 8-core Intel Core Ultra 5 325 chip, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a 1920 x 1200 IPS display, and a $2,899.99 OLED touch version with a 16-core Core Ultra X7 358H processor and graphics power Much larger and double the speed of RAM and storage. Each has three Thunderbolt 4 ports and a 3.5mm audio jack.

The build quality is impressive. It’s a little thicker than the MacBook Air, but about a third of a pound heavier, and feels like a solid slab. The next thing that catches your eye, especially if you’re haunted by past XPS laptops, is that the smooth tactile trackpad has borderline lightly textured lines and the keyboard has a proper function row. No more completely invisible trackpad and capacitive touch buttons for the Escape and F keys. Praise God!

While these two changes are reason enough to rejoice, I still have my quibbles. Whether there are borderlines or not, this tactile trackpad is still fine. Sometimes I need to press harder to get a click to register, and sometimes I get an unintended double-click even when I press gently. I sometimes get a false click if my palm is too firmly planted on it while typing.

Speaking of typing, I still can’t stand behind the gapless keyboard. It has a measly 0.8mm travel distance, although it’s not quite as shallow as it sounds. This is due to the tactile bump on top of each keystroke, which gives it a surprisingly solid feel. Despite this touch, I don’t like writing on it. I feel slower, stilted, and more prone to typos. Having an actual function row is a huge improvement, but this keyboard still doesn’t work for me. At least now it’s more of a “YMMV” type of thing.

Elsewhere, the 8MP/4K webcam looks sharp in bright light but loses a bit of color and color quality in dim light or when backlit. The speakers are very good for this size of laptop, producing well-balanced sound that you can turn up without distortion – although they don’t have the strongest bass.

But clearly the standout display in the OLED model is the screen. The 2880 x 1800 tandem OLED touch display is always bright and rich with deep contrast and vivid colours. It’s amazing. The 1920 x 1200 IPS panel with the bottom configuration is almost monotonous in comparison. Up to 500 nits it’s a bit brighter and controls glare well, but it’s a bit dull next to the OLED. However, the IPS display has its own unique feature: a variable refresh rate that ranges from 120Hz all the way down to 1Hz when displaying static content. OLED matches 120Hz, but its lowest refresh rate is 20Hz.

These low refresh rates help give excellent battery life to both XPS 14 models. On the OLED, I can get more than 10 hours of semi-continuous mixed use (the usual load of Chrome tabs, the occasional music or video stream, and a video call or two). The same workload on the IPS model reached over 14 hours, likely due to the lower-resolution screen with a minimal 1Hz refresh rate, and you can probably stretch it longer if you’re careful. (I wasn’t.) The IPS configuration crushed our battery rundown test with 26 hours of continuous playback time, even beating all of the Arm-based laptops we tested. I hope we see these types of panels in more laptops. As with phones, lowering the refresh rate while staring at documents helps conserve battery.

The Intel Panther Lake chipsets in these laptops also help both XPS 14 models with power efficiency, but they’re no slowdown in the performance department. It has solid temperatures, with the fans remaining very quiet – even under load. During stress tests, the bottom case got quite warm but most of the keyboard remained cool. The OLED model with the I ran Battlefield 6 At 50fps at 1920 x 1200 on the Low preset with XeSS set to Ultra Performance. Not great, but not as good as a potato – and in a thin and light laptop.

However, much cheaper MacBooks outperform the new XPS models in raw performance. Without fan MacBook Air M5 15-inch It wipes the floor with the entry-level XPS 14, and it even beats the top-tier OLED model in most non-GPU-heavy benchmarks. Go up to MacBook Pro M5 14-inchand the scales are tipped a little further in Apple’s favor — plus you get an HDMI port and an SD card slot.

This brings us to the XPS 14’s biggest problem: price. When it was launched, the entry-level IPS model cost $1,600. Now it is $2000. The OLED model with the X7 chip started at $2,200, and now it costs less $2900. This is of course due to “ongoing market conditions”, also known as Ramageddon. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a lot of money for the performance you get. Dell recently announced a lower cost XPS 13 Priced at $700 ($600 for students as a temporary discount). It’s good to see upcoming attempts to compete with the MacBook Neo, but in the meantime the Dell OLED XPS 14 has risen in price compared to the cost of the entire XPS 13.

It’s heartbreaking to see these types of prices. $2,200 for the OLED XPS 14 was justification for a high-end PC with great build quality. But at $2,900? For $200 less, you can get… Asus ZenBook Duo with two The 14-inch OLED displays and Intel Panther Lake chip are better. And for less than Entry level XPS 14, ZenBook A16 It offers three times the RAM and a 16-inch OLED display in a lighter package. And when you compare Apple’s offerings with the XPS 14 in terms of price versus performance? It’s a massacre.

I commend Dell for righting the ship and revitalizing the XPS line after their rebranding blunder. But even if the new XPS laptops are better than ever, they’re now becoming a tough sell for new reasons.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge