Dell 16 Plus Real User Verdict: Great Screen, Shaky Build

It's an Inspiron; my expectations are that it turns on more than half the time and doesn't have more than half an inch of keyboard flex.

After reading that full review, it seems like a pretty good laptop that's well priced. Having said that, this writer seems to have an emotional connection to technology that I will never be able to relate to.

Demanding your laptop has 'soul' or 'personality' is precisely how you end up with form over function monstrosities, which is exactly what people have been panning the XPS line for.

Computers gotta have soul

that copilot key... yuck

Buy an Inspiron, a consumer-grade laptop, mostly made of plastic, and then drop it. Now, let's all blame Dell. Why did you make me do this? What a clown. Plastic doesn't just magically crack like that.

I have a Latitude 7450 with Ultra 7 165H and a string of XPS products before that. Every single one of them had wifi issues so bad that I had to revert back to dock or external wifi dongle. My current Latitude has been BSODing at least once a week due to weird driver issues even after they replaced it.

Dell 16 Plus is a rebranded Dell Inspiron 16. That sub brand is notorious for low quality and fragile builds. They draw you in with nice specs and low prices, but slack off on quality build to keep prices low.

Calling 840M graphics 'pro' is a tragedy. I have an HP junk book of the same general specs from last gen and it can barely run Minecraft at 1200p.

Dell 16 Plus is also all aluminum. Only thing is soldered ram but SSD is upgradable. It's up to you which one to choose but I would go with the 16 plus maxed at 32GB ram, might be overkill but you have longevity with it.

I have one of these for work. Absolutely not. Technically my second one as the first one had a failure due to lack of quality control. It really feels like its just a disposable electronic.

Repair man here at big company: This damage is caused by a very tight hinge, hinge stiffness does this kind of damage.

I really thought Dell was going to be serious about their product quality in 2025 with all the new rebranding and everything. I really hope they try better next year... but doubtful as they would be trying to cut corners to get it cheaper due to all the ram and storage prices.

Compared to AMD, that Intel offers better single-core, better graphics, and better efficiency under low load. It was never intended for sustained throughput. You buy a LunarLake if you want to basically do nothing for a long time on battery.

Pro Max systems have better thermal management and cooling allowing the units to tolerate higher peak performance vs Pro Plus. The trade off is a slightly heavier unit. For AMD based procs you can have the exact same proc on Pro Max vs Pro Plus, the performance delta is up to +20% in Procyon Office productivity benchmarks.

I think that does look good. I sometimes use the Nano Review site re cpu testing. The Ryzen 7 AI 350 had some nice benchmarks.

That's a lot of money for little hardware. The appropriate price should be around 400-500$.

Honestly, if it gets the job done, that's what matters to me. Solid performance, good screen, decent battery, that's enough. It's just a tool.

Almost jumped on it however this has a crappy panel if you care about that, 45% NTSC so colors look washed out. The Dell 16 Plus has a better 2.5K screen and is also 100% srgb so much better colors, also it has an Ultra 7 258V.

Work gave me one, it will blue screen 3-4 times a day just sitting there doing nothing. Reloaded it, same thing.

Any dell consumer laptop is easily eclipsed in value by their off lease refurbished commercial devices. But if you gotta have the new stuff, that's a good price.

In my company I bought some of them, all cracked. It is a very cheap series.

EDIT: some people are saying it is probably impact damage. I don't remember dropping it and have been operating on the notion that this is the hinge deforming the plastic, but I probably shouldn't discount impact since I go to university and travel a lot with it on bumpy trains etc. Hinge does have a tiny bit of warping but maybe that's a separate issue?

1080p on 16 inch will be a bit rough. If you are not bothered by it, go for it, seems like a good deal.

I have the same cpu on an Asus expertbook p5, it's kinda slow. Maybe look for an H variant Intel, Ryzen 7/9 350 AI Pro Max ultra (whatever they call em).

If you're buying a laptop now, and you want it to last 3-5 years, I would be looking at getting one with 64GB RAM and 2 TB storage - as it's often hard (or impossible if soldered on) to upgrade later.

I did some research and came to conclusion that I am gonna buy the same laptop. It's a nice deal. I use laptop for STEM research not into heavy graphics and gaming so it's good for me.

After using a 7840U (in a Lenovo) for the last 2 years, I'm pretty disappointed. I knew it wouldn't have the same multicore performance but thought it would be more efficient. The Ultra 7 258V is just reaching 8k in Cinebench r23 at 17W whereas the CPU should normally hit around 10k. As of now I'm really regretting my purchase and that I didn't opt for a new Ryzen AI model at this point.

Just got the same laptop last week. I tried setting the power profile in the Dell Optimizer App to Ultra Performance and then it hits around 10k. So it seems to be fine. But regardless of that I'm very happy as this thing is a very nice Notebook.

Multithreaded build performance is going to be WAY higher on the Pro Max 16 (50% base difference in the processor, plus better thermals.) For Python, these are likely both overkill, and I'd take the Pro 16 Plus for the nicer chassis and better battery life.

The Pro Max will be faster but the Pro Plus will have much better battery life, and faster memory.

If you are working AI functions, Lunar Lake might be the better choice. It has memory on die, so memory access is faster and the system will likely run cooler.

As a Dell 16 Pro Max owner, I fully agree that the quad speakers with two woofers and two tweeters are tinny sounding and terrible for the price. The laptop fans run 24x7 with constant hiss even when you are reading a notepad file and nothing else. Battery life is 3-4 hours max.

I work in relatively high level IT support and coming from an Intel 10th gen 4c/8t it's like going from stock Honda Civic to Kona 2023 N-Line. Scripting, deployment tools, too many browser tabs, multiple browser windows — it never slows down.

Soldered on memory, however 32GB is difficult to complain about and it is fast memory.

If it wasn't for the god awful screen that'd be a great laptop all round.

I was looking at this laptop recently. The screen itself didn't look great. My XPS 15 7590 has started to experience hardware failure and I'm gonna have to replace it sadly. I really don't like the design of the new keyboards and glass panels on their new replacement for the XPS line.

Actually a really good price for a model with ALU chassis and 32gb memory. I'd skip it since I don't like AMD for business use, but it's still a great deal.

Core Ultra processors are fantastic. Amazing power to battery life ratio. Intel Arc graphics are a huge improvement over regular Intel HD/UHD but note that some games do not support them yet since those cards have only been around a couple years.

I just purchased the Dell 16 Plus - moved from a desktop (the one I had was about 6 years old) to a laptop. I don't game, just will use it for surfing, store pictures, I have office on it.

Performance of both is adequate, the Intel chip will probably have better battery life. The AMD chip will have better productivity performance with the greater RAM.

It's a stunning platform. The Ryzen AI cpu performs as well as LNL CPUs and allows even better battery performance. And you get 50 TOPS, you can run LLMs locally on that platform. If you push it to 64gb you'd have one of the laptops with the biggest NPU and the most RAM currently available in the market.