The New Dell XPS - It's Back and SO MUCH Better!

video made in partnership with Dell for CES. Last year, Dell did the unthinkable. They killed off their XPS brand. It was the weirdest thing. Like, this brand name XPS that's been associated with like their top tier, most premium hardware, they just nuked it because they were trying to simplify their naming of their systems and it just made no sense. But thankfully, someone at Dell realized that this was not the move. And so, for CES 2026, they are bringing back the XPS brand. So, we have the XPS 16, XPS 14. This has been fully upgraded this year. We have brand new chips from Intel with powerful GPUs. We have new keyboards, new screen tech, new battery tech. This first of its kind. It's all new. And even the chassis is new. So, these have a completely new design. This is a very thin system with the body being milled from a single block of aluminum. So, Dell has been very good with this kind of metal work. They've shown year after year that this is what they do with the XPS line. But this year, it feels a little bit different. This feels so sturdy and so rigid considering how thin this device is. It's kind of crazy. And here's the thing. When you look at a video like this, a lot of high-end premium laptops can look similar because it's just like metal stuff. But when you hold this thing in hand, it just there's just no flex to this thing. And it's a very clean design. There's almost no visible seams on this thing. You can see the screws, but unlike a typical laptop, there isn't a panel to lift away. To open it up, you unscrew those screws and then you remove the top keyboard deck. like it comes off and that's how you access the internals. It's not as easy to get in there now. There's a cable you have to watch out for, but it just maintains a very clean and seamless look. Now, the top logo is no longer that old school Dell logo they had from the previous generation. It's now this more modern XPS, and I think it looks a lot better. The colors of the devices that I have are this graphite gray color, but there is another colorway that's releasing later called Shimmer. It's like this warmer colored metal finish that I think looks really good. For ports, we have three Thunderbolt 4 ports and an audio jack, but there are no SD card slots on either of the devices this year. Now, the trackpad area on these devices. So, I'll show it to you on both the 16 and the 14. Uh, actually, you'll be able to see how the kind of two compare on the inside. So, if you'll notice, there's a few things that are different this year. So, the first thing, there are no visible cutouts or grills for the speaker on both the XPS 14 and 16. They're invisible. There's four speakers on each of them. They sound great, but you just can't see them. they're underneath the keyboard and they fire up. The second thing pertains to the uh the trackpad. So, this is a previous generation of XPS14. And if you'll notice this, so these both all of these things had uh haptic trackpads in the sense that they're like uh like a MacBook. They have a trackpad that doesn't have moving parts for the click mechanism. It's just like a haptic motor that sends a vibration to your finger when you click to indicate that you've clicked. Now, on this one, the previous generation, there was no visual indication as to where the active area started and ended. So, you could be kind of sliding around and once you get past a certain point, the trackpad stops working and now you don't know where it is. For some people, could have been frustrating. Now, they've added like a bit of etching to here. It's not super visible, but you can feel it as you're sliding your finger across. You just feel it and you're like, you know that you've reached the end of that active area. But the most important change in this keyboard area, I'm sure you've noticed by now. They've gotten rid of this row of capacitive function buttons and the escape key. This is something that I think a lot of people disliked out of the gate. I honestly don't even know why they went with it to begin with. And now the new versions of XPS products with the relaunch. They have physical keys for the function keys and most importantly, at least for me, the escape key. It's a very welcome change. The lattice keyboard does take some time to get used to. I've always thought this thing looks really nice, but you do have to spend some time with it, like a couple hours, but the type as fast as you normally would. At least I did. Now, the displays, both of these have an option for a tandem OLED panel, and these look so nice. So, it's two layers of OLED material stacked on top of each other, and it gives you better brightness, gives you better efficiency, better longevity of the panel because you don't have to drive them as hard. Everything just gets better when you have tandem OLED. It is more expensive than the LCD panel. It looks awesome, though. 120 Hz refresh rate and it just looks so good for games and content. And both the LCD and tandem OLED panels support variable refresh rate, so they're also more efficient than before. Now, under the hood, these are running Intel's new Core Ultra 300 series chips. Now, because this is so early on in the launch cycle, and these are both running very raw and early drivers. I'm not allowed to benchmark these things and show the numbers to you, but I will say just playing around with them, testing them, I think people will be very, very happy with the performance they get from CPU and GPU. These are just so good. Intel claims that these new integrated GPUs can deliver up to 50% better GPU performance compared to the Lunar Lake stuff. But yeah, for an integrated solution, very impressive. Now, because the GPU is as good as it is, these devices, XPS 16 and XPS 14 do not have an option for a discrete Nvidia GPU. Like for the past 10 years or even more, there's always been the ability to be like, hey, you know, if you want to, you could get a Nvidia GPU on the XPS devices, but now it's integrated GPUs only, at least for this product line. I don't know about future stuff that they're planning on putting out. Now, the battery or let's talk about energy efficiency first. This is a very energyefficient chip. The idea being this is as efficient as Lunar Lake, which was Intel's most efficient chip that they ever put out. It's supposed to be on that level. The 14-in pulls up to 25 watts. The 16-in pulls up to 35 watts because there's just more room in there. It's got a more powerful cooling solution. But in addition to having a very energyefficient chip, these also have very energy dense battery packs. This is the first laptop I have seen, in fact, I think it's the only one out there right now that have the new 900 ED cells that are significantly more energy dense than a typical laptop battery. Those are going to be like 6 maybe 700 watt hours per liter. These are 900. And it's because they're running a new silicon carbon tech, right? You just get a different anode material that allows it to be more dense versus the typical graphite anode. And it's just a better pack. Now, because of that super dense pack, the 14-in device gets a 70watt hour pack despite being super thin, which is great. The 16-in, however, also gets a 70watt hour pack. Uh, in terms of battery life, that's like their claims. This is around 25 27 hours. The 16-in is supposedly the same somehow. From my testing so far, I again can't give you like numbers, but they look very good. The thing is, why is the 16-in running the same size pack? It should be a bigger one. My only guess, and this is just like a guess in my head, because this battery tech is new, like really new. The manufacturers behind this, they can't do like multiple SKs for Dell. They just want one skew. You get a 70 watt hour pack, that's all you get for now. And maybe in the future, they'll have more options. That's the only thing I can think of as to why this is a I think most people, they would love the extra battery size and just be like, "Yeah, bring on the weight. I'll take it because a 99 or a 95watt hour battery in this thing would be like awesome." Okay, there you have it. the new Dell XPS and uh 14 and 16. Thank you for Dell for partnering with me to be able to show you guys things early.

My first Impressions of the New Dell XPS 14 and XPS 16 from CES 2026 Thanks again to Dell for sponsoring this video. Learn more about the XPS laptops here: https://dell.to/6000CTDWr #DellCollab @DellTechnologies If you'd like to support the channel, consider a Dave2D membership by clicking the “Join” button above! http://twitter.com/Dave2D http://www.instagram.com/Dave2D https://discord.gg/Dave2D