Dell XPS 14 Review: Beautiful, Compromised
One of the best-looking laptops on sale, undermined by input decisions that Dell has now had two generations to reverse.
Daniel Reyes
The touch bar and invisible trackpad
The capacitive function row gives no feedback and cannot be used without looking. The haptic trackpad has no visible boundaries. Both look wonderful in photographs and both cost us time every single day.
Display and performance
The OLED option is gorgeous and the machine is genuinely quick, though it runs warm and the fans are audible under any sustained load.
Battery
Nine hours in mixed use with the OLED panel — respectable for a Windows machine of this class, some way short of the Air.
Specifications
| Spec | Detail |
|---|---|
| Display | 14.5in OLED, 3200 x 2000, 120Hz |
| Chip | Intel Core Ultra 7 155H |
| Memory | 32GB LPDDR5X, 1TB SSD |
| Ports | 3x Thunderbolt 4, 3.5mm |
| Battery | 69.5Wh |
| Weight | 1.68kg |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two working weeks as a primary machine, on battery wherever possible. Display at 150 nits, keyboard backlight off, the manufacturer’s balanced power profile, and the same browser profile with thirty tabs restored on every machine.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Battery life | A looped workday script — document editing, video calls, browsing — run to shutdown, three times, averaged. |
| Sustained CPU | A thirty-minute all-core render, reporting the settled clock speed rather than the boost figure. |
| Fan noise | Measured at 50cm from the display hinge during that render, in a room with a 28dB floor. |
| Chassis heat | Palm rest and underside temperatures after the render, since that is where it is actually felt. |
| Display | Brightness and contrast from a colorimeter, at the panel’s native setting rather than a boosted HDR mode. |
We deliberately do not report single-core burst scores, which almost nothing outside a benchmark actually produces.
The honest caveat: Sustained figures depend on ambient temperature. A warm room costs most thin laptops several percent.
How it compares
The closest alternatives on price are ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 and HP Spectre x360 14. All three have been through the same tests, so the figures below are directly comparable rather than collected from different reviews.
| Model | Price | Our score | Standout | Weak point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dell XPS 14 (this review) | £1749 | 3 / 5 | Stunning OLED display | Capacitive function row is a real usability problem |
| ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 | £1649 | 4 / 5 | The best keyboard on any laptop | A merely adequate display |
| HP Spectre x360 14 | £1499 | 4 / 5 | A genuinely usable convertible hinge | Heavier than a comparable clamshell |
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 scores higher at £1649, so the Dell XPS 14 has to win on stunning OLED display rather than on the total.
Is it worth the money?
At £1749 the Dell XPS 14 asks £206 more than the category average of £1543, against an average score of 3.7 out of 5 across the laptops we have tested. Its own 3 works out at roughly £583 per point. Paying above average for a below-average score only makes sense if readers who want stunning OLED display describes you precisely.
If the budget is the binding constraint, the Acer Aspire 14 AI at £649 is the floor we would still recommend — below that the compromises stop being ones you can live with.
Living with it
Two weeks in, the figure that stopped mattering was display — 14.5in OLED, 3200 x 2000, 120Hz is more than adequate and you forget about it by the third day. What kept surfacing instead was that capacitive function row is a real usability problem, which is easy to shrug off in a spec comparison and harder to ignore at 6pm on a Friday. On the other side, stunning OLED display turns out to be the sort of detail you only appreciate after living with the alternative.
What we liked
- Stunning OLED display
- Genuinely premium build
- Strong CPU performance
What we did not
- Capacitive function row is a real usability problem
- Invisible trackpad edges
- No USB-A or HDMI
- Runs warm
Verdict
Buy it if the design speaks to you and you can live with the keyboard row. Most people should not.
Score: 3 / 5 · £1,749 as reviewed
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the laptops we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Dell XPS 14 Review: Good Idea, Uneven Execution and Dell XPS 14 vs ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED: Is the 2025 Model Worth the Change?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
