Dell XPS 14 Reddit Verdict: Beautiful Laptop, Baffling Choices

It was the display unit — tons of people touched/used it in that row of display laptops. It's been on 24/7 for months and in use by thousands of people.

The capacitive function row is so baffling. It has all the disadvantages of a touchbar macbook (no tactile feedback on the fn keys) with none of the advantages (dynamic touchscreen that can be used for various application-specific controls). It's as though the only design criteria was to pick whatever ideas would look coolest in the photo shoot for the promo materials. Decisions made by complete morons.

Really highlights that reading the list of components will not indicate the performance of a laptop. No way this will confuse the general consumer.

Pros: accurate OLED touchscreen with a 120-Hz refresh rate, attractive design, good system performance, high-quality and stable metal case, fast card reader, available with up to 64 GB RAM. Cons: display has raster effect and constant PWM flickering, RTX 4050 Laptop with only 30-watt TGP, soldered-on RAM, input devices take some getting used to, touch bar doesn't provide any added value, no Wi-Fi 7, bad price-to-performance ratio.

I would get a MBP 14" or a Zephyrus G14 2024 instead.

Dell be like: hmm, our consumer and business lineups are very similar and some of them even share bodies. How can we differentiate them? Let's make our consumer lineup literal trash! I got a great deal on latitude 7440 last month. 2 usb-A ports, 2 thunderbolts, HDMI, headphone jack, excellent keyboard, exceptional build quality, no flex whatsoever, with physical F buttons, normal touch pad instead of whatever they put in new XPS. And despite this, latitude is 300 grams lighter.

Dell is doing alright on Latitude series but the XPS lineup is a disaster… I won't even comment on the pricing they got going for XPS with the 8GB RAM base models.

Josh nailed it, especially if one considers the larger picture, i.e., what's available that's better and for less. Dell's definitely resting on its laurels, hoping 'form over function' blinds the consumer. In what world is Razer a more economically viable alternative?! That one stopped me in my tracks!

One — it's a display model, which means it's been handled by a large number of people. Two — Dell has discontinued the entire product line and there will be no upgrades for this device.

Main points: they start at a high price ($1,700 for XPS 14, $1,900 for XPS 16) but offer low display resolutions (1920x1200) leading to low pixel density and pixelated images. Higher resolution options are available but at additional costs, pushing the XPS 14 to $2,000. The laptops perform similarly to or worse than cheaper competitors in common benchmark tests.

I bought a 9320 a month ago for $1499 ... Same specs except higher screen resolution and no discrete graphics. I don't think the 4050 is worth almost $1000 more.

There is no perfect laptop, only tastes that fit the laptop. If the price seems high to you, I would have recommended going to the Dell outlet — literally the price is much lower, not to mention the price it should have.

Well the XPS 14 and 16 are prosumer laptops primarily built for engineers and video editors. Gaming is a side perk. The Alienware line is primarily for gaming that can be used for engineering & video editing as additional perks.

I had to return the 2023 model 4 times because of godawful quality control. Dell is basically Russian roulette and I decided to never put myself through that hell again.

The 14 would probably be better for engineering because you'd want better cooling and a better gpu for some of those engineering programs. I'd recommend getting the 14 with at least an Intel Arc.

I have the XPS Plus 13 (i7, 32gb, OLED). I love it. Just used it as my primary computer for a month while away from home and my beefy desktop. When paired with an eGPU, I hardly missed my desktop. The touchpad is actually really good. It's the best non-macbook touchpad I've used.

The thing that gets me is that this redesign was implemented supposedly to allow for better cooling. I mean, build it a couple of mm thicker, FFS. Whoever designed this has never used a laptop computer as a power user, which was the whole XPS point.

Dell recently rebranded a lot of their products and partners like Best Buy are expected not to be advertising the old stuff and need to make room for the new. Get the battery replaced under warranty — it is shot from being plugged in and running nonstop for its whole life. Other than that, congratulations on a hell of a deal. This laptop will likely still be fine for 95% of what you need for a very long time to come.

Do yourself a favour and buy something else for the money. It's totally underpowered and overpriced + soldered memory + touch button row + no miniled option.

If the trackpad matters, go with the 14. I had the 14 and then saw the 13 and fell in love with the size and switched. Was unaware that the 13 had a different trackpad (not Sensel). It clicks with VERY little pressure. I barely rest my finger on it and it will trigger. Killing me. Thinking about switching back because of it.

More RAM. Can't upgrade later. More RAM.

I got that laptop with touch and nvidia gpu. One of the best laptops I've owned. And I really like the latitude line.

I have a 2024 XPS14 9440 with the Nvidia graphics. Running it with Ubuntu 25.04. Nice machine, but quite heavy.

I don't know which XPS14 these negative comments own. I have a XPS 14 9440 Intel — it runs smoothly on heavy tasks for at least 2-3hrs. And 10-12hrs on normal tasks.

I get why people want these laptops — design wise these are some of the best looking laptops on the market. However, Dell's quality control leaves much to be desired. And the system will be underpowered if you are planning to game with it, as you're running with a CPU designed more for battery life and the laptop itself under-powering the GPU.

You should only ever consider an XPS 14 if you absolutely cannot get the G14 2024, Omen 14 2024, Zenbook Pro 14 2023, or Legion Slim 5 14 2023.

I have owned several Dell XPS 13s over the years and am very happy with their quality and performance. My XPS 13 was purchased in 12/21 and has performed flawlessly except two things: crashing and overheating — solved by uninstalling Support Assist completely. And normal overheating — solved by using a quality laptop cooler.

I had the 14 and switched to the 13. Both 2024s. The 14 is great and I really wanted to keep it, but I prioritize mobility and the 14 is a full pound heavier and very noticeable. I didn't check the weight when choosing and could not believe how much heavier it was.

The catch is that it's a Dell and it doesn't even have a function row. Also it's a floor model and if the battery controller doesn't have a preserve mode your battery is damaged. Oh and that keyboard is gonna make you wish you didn't have hands.

Anti-consumer bullshit. Look at the photo of the internals, tell me there wasn't room in that design for a RAM slot. One would have been fine, not ideal but at least then the user could match whatever is soldered and double their RAM to extend their devices usable life by years. Apple's entire arch is not designed around supporting upgradeable RAM, I have my feelings on that but there is an actual hardware limiting factor there. Not so for the PC and Dell have no excuse in a device of this size.

It's incredibly funny to me that Dell clearly tried to out-Apple Apple with these redesigns... but Apple themselves accepted the pre-apple silicon macbook pros were just too flawed and reverted back to a normal keyboard, good port selection, thicker designs etc. How long until Dell concedes?

I just got one and am loving it so far. The OLED screen is great and the dark grey color looks awesome.

No. Choose anything else. Lenovo ThinkPad/Legion or Framework would be good places to start looking. XPS isn't the XPS of the past. 2020-2024 models have had/have many, many, many issues.

Have a $1,800 dollar paperweight that still 'works' but it crashes every time I try to seriously use it.

Dell has lost their way a bit in recent years. They made great machines in the mid-2010s and I used my XPS 13 for many years. But after they began eliminating ports left and right, going so far as to remove the headphone jack, which I still regularly use, I just couldn't buy from them anymore. One thing I noticed is that the fans sped up and sounded like a jet engine just doing the simplest things, like opening a browser with one tab open.

Pleased overall — price wasn't an issue so not a con for me. Battery on OLED isn't as good as the LCD LED screen (~3x power consumption). Performance mode is noisy (45w CPU) so I leave in balanced (35w CPU) for gaming. If you're going to play recent AAA games you can, but I'd limit FPS to 30fps in most games, low/medium detail and enable DLSS balanced.

As someone who has used a few Dell XPS models for close to a decade and purchased the last one in 2020, I was looking forward to buying an XPS this year. However, when I first saw a few reviews in Jan 2024, I did not like what Dell did to the function keys. This review made me really sad — it seems Dell XPS hit a new low this year.

It's disgraceful what they did to the high-end XPS laptops. If you bought an XPS 17 with 64GB of RAM and an RTX 4080 for $5200, you got your money's worth. Meanwhile, Dell is charging the same for a 16" display and RTX 4070. Only notable thing about the XPS 14 is that it has the slowest Ada Lovelace GPU on the planet.

I've had various XPS 15s for years, and I love them. However, they're neither great portable laptops nor great gaming machines.

It would be my next PC but I HATE the flat keyboard. I have the XPS 13 9210. It has been my daily driver for over 2 years. I travel a LOT and it is the perfect PC. I was hoping the new gen would go back to a better keyboard. Since it didn't I am not sure what my next laptop will be.

I personally don't like the keyboard and touch FN buttons. The keyboard looks like the failed butterfly on the MacBook.

Own MacBook Pro M1 Pro and just bought XPS 14 (base model) last week. It's a nice machine but quite heavy and battery doesn't last that long even with light day-to-day tasks. Keyboard is weird but it's fine for me.

Dell's pricing for this 14" 155H chip laptop was insane on release. About $500-600 more than the competition with the same specs. So that $1,900 MSRP is a terrible point of reference, despite being true.