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 incredible build quality in a thin machine and good performance thanks to Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” chips. A bonus: Dell killed its lame “Premium Plus” naming scheme. XPS is so back!

I can’t believe how much of a turnaround this new model is from the XPS 13 I reviewed last year, which at the time was set to be the line’s depressing swan song. The new XPS has improved in just about every way, with an actual physical F-row, better speakers, and remarkable battery life. Too bad it’s wildly 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 touchscreen OLED version with a 16-core Core Ultra X7 358H, much beefier graphics power, and double the RAM and storage. Each has three Thunderbolt 4 ports and a 3.5mm audio jack.

The build quality is impressive. They’re only a little thicker than a MacBook Air, but about a third of a pound heavier, feeling like a solid slab. The next thing that strikes you, especially if you’re haunted by XPS laptops past, is that the seamless haptic trackpad has lightly textured boundary lines and the keyboard has a proper function row. No more completely invisible trackpad and capacitive touch buttons for Escape and F-keys. Hallelujah!

While these two changes are reason enough to rejoice, I still have my quibbles. Boundary lines or not, this haptic trackpad is still only okay. I sometimes need to press extra hard for a click to register, and I occasionally get an accidental double-click even when pressing lightly. I also sometimes get a misclick if my palms rest too heavily on it while typing.

Speaking of typing, I still can’t get behind this gapless keyboard. It has a paltry 0.8mm key travel, though it doesn’t feel quite as shallow as it sounds. This is due to its tactile bump at the top of each key press, which gives it a surprisingly solid feel. Despite that tactility, I don’t like typing on it. I feel slower, stilted, and more prone to typos. It’s a major improvement to have a physical function row, but this keyboard is still not for me. At least now it’s more of a “YMMV” kind of thing.

Elsewhere, the 8-megapixel / 4K webcam looks sharp in bright light but loses a bit of its punch and color quality in dimmer lighting or when you’re backlit. The speakers are quite good for this size of laptop, producing a well-balanced sound that you can crank up without distortion — although they unsurprisingly don’t have the strongest bass.

But the showstopper on the OLED model is, obviously, the display. The 2880 x 1800 tandem OLED touchscreen gets bright and is always rich in deep contrast and lively colors. It’s a stunner. The 1920 x 1200 IPS panel on the lower-end configuration is almost humdrum by comparison. It reaches a slightly brighter 500 nits and it controls glare pretty well, but next to the OLED it’s a little dull. However, the IPS screen has a unique feature of its own: a variable refresh rate that goes from 120Hz all the way down to 1Hz when you’re viewing static content. The OLED matches that 120Hz, but its lowest refresh rate is 20Hz.

These low-dipping refresh rates help give both XPS 14s excellent battery life. On the OLED, I could get over 10 hours of near-continuous mixed usage (the usual boatload of Chrome tabs, occasional music or video streaming, and a video call or two). The same workload on the IPS model reached over 14 hours, likely thanks to that lower-res screen with 1Hz minimum refresh, and you can possibly stretch it longer if you’re being cautious. (I was not.) The IPS config even smashed our battery rundown test with 26 hours of continuous runtime, even beating all the Arm-based laptops we’ve tested. I hope we see these kinds of panels in more laptops. Like phones, dialing the refresh rate way down when you’re staring at documents helps preserve battery.

The Intel Panther Lake chips in these laptops also help both XPS 14s with power efficiency, but they’re no slouches in the performance department. They’ve got solid thermals, with the fans staying pretty quiet — even under load. And during stress tests the bottom case got pretty warm but most of the keyboard remained cool. The OLED model with the X7 chip and its integrated 12-core GPU is pretty formidable for graphics-heavy tasks like 3D rendering in Blender, and it can even squeak by in playing some AAA games. I ran Battlefield 6 at a fair 50fps at 1920 x 1200 resolution on the Low preset with XeSS set to Ultra Performance. Not amazing, but not potato quality — and in a thin-and-light productivity laptop.

Still, much cheaper MacBooks beat the new XPS models in raw performance. A fanless 15-inch M5 MacBook Air wipes the floor with the entry-level XPS 14, and it even beats the higher-end OLED model in most non-GPU-heavy benchmarks. Step up to the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro, and the scales tip even a little further in Apple’s favor — plus you get an HDMI port and SD card slot.

This brings us to the XPS 14’s biggest issue: price. When it launched, the entry-level IPS model cost $1,600. Now it’s $2,000. The OLED model with the X7 chip started at $2,200, and it now costs $2,900. This is of course all due to “ongoing market conditions,” also known as RAMageddon. But it doesn’t change the fact that this is a crap-ton of money for the performance you’re getting. Dell recently announced a lower-cost XPS 13 priced at $700 ($600 for students as a temporary discount). It’s nice to see upcoming attempts at competing with the MacBook Neo, but in the meantime Dell’s OLED XPS 14 went up in price by the cost of that whole XPS 13.

It’s heartbreaking to see these kinds of prices. $2,200 for the OLED XPS 14 felt justifiable for a high-end computer with fantastic build quality. But at $2,900? For $200 less you can get an Asus Zenbook Duo with two 14-inch OLEDs and an even better Intel Panther Lake chip. And for less than the entry-level XPS 14, the Zenbook A16 offers three times the RAM and a 16-inch OLED in a lighter package. And when you compare Apple’s offerings to the XPS 14 for price to performance? It’s a massacre.

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

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge