First, the verdict: the new XPS 14 is a laptop I recommend, and highly. I have a complicated history with the XPS name, though, and so does Dell.
I have been using the XPS brand laptops since 2012, when the first XPS 13 arrived as one of Intel's Ultrabooks, a $999 Windows answer to the MacBook Air. I was not always an easy sell on where Dell took the line next. When 2-in-1s were the fashion, I stood at an Intel offsite and argued for two hours, with Techaisle data behind me, that the category would struggle. I had tried the contraptions, including Dell's original XPS Ferris-Wheel, and none of them convinced me to give up a clamshell. Then a few years later Dell sent me an XPS 13 2-in-1; I put it through a road test, and it made a convert of me. That is the thing about this line. It has a habit of winning arguments I walked in ready to lose.
By 2020, I was calling the XPS 13 perfection personified. I opened the 9300, set it on my desk, and let it sit for three days before I could bring myself to use it. For years, this was the one Windows laptop I could hand to someone without a caveat.
Then Dell decided the name had to go. In 2025, XPS became Dell Premium, the top rung of a new consumer ladder of Dell, Dell Plus, and Dell Premium, while the Pro and Pro Max labels went off to the commercial and workstation machines. It all looked tidy on an org chart and meant nothing to the person actually shopping for a laptop. I sat through more than one briefing where I watched a room full of smart people explain a naming system that answered a question nobody had asked. The machines stayed good throughout.
They just lost the one word that told you so at a glance.
This year Dell admitted it made a mistake and brought XPS back. New design, new silicon, same three letters. I have spent the last few months with the new XPS 14, and I have enjoyed nearly all of it.
The good part, which is most of it
The 2024 machines were beautiful and occasionally maddening. There was a touch-sensitive function row that lit up and vanished, and an invisible touchpad you had to hunt for, all of it design that wanted to be admired more than used. The new XPS 14 quietly walks a lot of that back. The function keys are physical again, and you can feel them under your fingers. The touchpad now has a faint line marking its edges, so you are no longer patting a blank sheet of aluminum hoping something registers. None of that will sell a laptop on a spec sheet, but it is the difference between a machine you tolerate and one you stop noticing, and the noticing is where the last generation of XPS lost me.
The chassis is the best I have felt from Dell. It is CNC-machined aluminum, and it opens with the kind of weighted resistance you get from a well-made car door rather than a laptop lid. It is around 3 pounds and thinner than the MacBook Pro it has been chasing since 2012. It has spent the last few weeks moving between my desk, the couch, and a shoulder bag by the door, and I keep forgetting it is in the bag at all. Weight is the first thing you stop noticing about a laptop you actually want to travel with, and I stopped noticing this one fast.
Then there is the display, and this is where the XPS pedigree still earns the name. It is a tandem OLED at 2880 x 1800, and it is the reason to buy the more expensive configuration. Blacks are genuinely black, text sits crisp, and photos have the depth I usually only get from a desktop monitor. It runs at 120Hz when you want smoothness and drops way down when you do not, and unlike almost every other Windows laptop that promises this trick, this one actually pulls it off without me digging through three settings menus to enable it. After a week, I found myself reluctant to go back to any of my other screens.
Battery life surprised me, and I do not say that about Windows laptops. OLED panels have a reputation for drinking power and leaving you tethered to an outlet, so I went in expecting to babysit the percentage. I did not have to. On a normal working day, with mail and documents and a dozen browser tabs and a couple of video calls, it simply lasted. I stopped reaching for the charger, which for an Intel machine is close to a miracle. The charger, for what it is worth, is a bit of a brick, and I wish Dell had shipped something smaller. But I reached for it far less than I expected to.
Performance is quietly one of its strengths, and the chip deserves a paragraph of its own. My review unit runs Intel's Core Ultra X7 358H, part of the new Panther Lake generation built on Intel's 18A process, and across weeks of real work it has never once left me waiting. The more interesting number is the graphics. The integrated Arc B390 lands close to a discrete GeForce RTX 4050, and that single fact is why this machine exists in the shape it does. Dell no longer needs to find room for a separate graphics chip, so the chassis got smaller and cooler without giving up much of anything. A redesigned dual-fan system handles the rest, with larger and noticeably quieter fans that keep the laptop cool on the lap until you really lean on it. It is not going to win a benchmark war against Apple, and if you are editing 8K video for a living, you already know you are shopping elsewhere. For everyone else, it just gets out of the way, which is the most I ask of a processor. There is an NPU on board too, for the on-device AI that Windows keeps adding, though I will be honest that I notice it far less than the marketing wants me to.
Thinness has a price, and you pay it at the ports. There are three Thunderbolt 4 connections and little else. No USB-A, no HDMI, nothing full-size. If you still carry an old projector cable or a camera's memory card, you carry a dongle too, and most of us made that peace years ago. My one honest grumble is that Dell stayed on Thunderbolt 4 rather than moving to Thunderbolt 5. On a laptop that costs what this one does, in 2026, I expected the newer standard. The storage is Gen4, quick enough for everything I do, with a Gen5 option waiting if your work actually needs the extra speed.
A few smaller things earned my affection along the way. The speakers are a real surprise, a four-way system with no visible grille that fills a room far better than a laptop this thin should manage. The webcam is finally sharper than 1080p, and Windows Hello signs me in the instant the lid opens, no button and no wait. Neither of these will sell you the machine on its own. Together they are the kind of detail that separates a laptop worth its premium from one that merely charges it.
The one thing that isn't for me
And then I started typing.
Here is what makes this hard to write. In 2020, when I called the XPS 13 perfection, the keyboard was part of the reason. It ran edge to edge across the deck, the keycaps were large, the travel was normal, and I praised how comfortable it was for both one-finger and ten-finger typists. For the better part of a decade, an XPS keyboard was a friend.
Then Dell went to the zero-gap lattice, and that is where we parted ways. The keys now sit edge to edge with no space between them at all. Powered off, it looks clean, modern, and expensive. In use, my fingers cannot find home position without me looking down, because there is nothing between the keys to feel my way across. I keep catching the edge of the next key over. I keep landing half on one letter and half on the one beside it. I am a fast typist, and this keyboard makes me a slower and more error-prone one, and no amount of getting used to it has fixed that for me.
I want to be fair about this. Plenty of people type on this layout. My complaint is with the geometry, not the depth of the press. I want the small physical borders between keys that let my hands know where they are without my eyes checking. Give me the older XPS keyboard, or any chiclet layout with visible spacing, and I am a happy man. This lattice, however handsome, fights the way I actually work.
It bothers me more here than it would on a cheaper machine, precisely because everything else is so good. When a $2,000 laptop has a mediocre keyboard, you shrug. When a laptop this considered, this well built, this close to being the one I recommend without an asterisk, still ships the one thing I cannot make peace with, it stings. The keyboard is the gap between a machine I would hand to anyone and a machine I hand over saying “you will love it, but go type on one first.”
I will admit one bias before I wrap up. This was an XPS 14, and it was my first. Every XPS I have owned since 2012 has been a 13, a size I have defended through every redesign and every rebrand. So I read the latest news out of Dell with more interest than I expected. There is a newly announced XPS 13 for 2026, the thinnest and lightest the company has ever built, and it starts well below the price of any XPS 13 I have bought. I want to get my hands on it more than I have wanted a laptop in a long time. If the 14 is this good, the 13 owes me a reunion.
Where I land
Fourteen years after my first XPS, Dell has built one that feels like the line at its best. The design has grown up, the display is the best I have used on a Windows laptop, and the battery finally behaves the way a machine this portable should. The touch-panel quirks of the last generation are gone, the function keys are real again, and the touchpad no longer plays hide and seek. For most people this is one of the best Windows laptops you can buy right now, and I would say so without hesitating.
The keyboard is my one holdout, and it is a personal one. Try the layout before you commit, because if those edge-to-edge keys suit your hands, there is very little between you and a laptop you will keep reaching for. Dell got the hard parts right this time. This line has talked me out of my objections before. Give me a little space between the keys, and I suspect it will do it again.