Are high-end Windows laptops worth buying in 2025? This Dell made the answer clear to me
on Google. Dell’s laptop rebrand may have resulted in some shuffling around of naming conventions, but the new Dell 14 Premium Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET The review unit I tested had a different CPU than the retail version: an Intel Core Ultra 7 265H, available for consumers as a special order, but not standard on the machine….
Dell’s laptop rebrand may have resulted in some shuffling around of naming conventions, but the new Dell 14 Premium
The review unit I tested had a different CPU than the retail version: an Intel Core Ultra 7 265H, available for consumers as a special order, but not standard on the machine. This resulted in a very slight performance boost compared to the retail version (a performance-core base clock speed of 2.2GHz vs the standard 2.0GHz).
The 14-inch OLED touchscreen is as gorgeous as you’d expect, with a 3.2K resolution, 400nit brightness, and a variable refresh rate up to 120Hz. The display’s thin bezels and seamless webcam module result in a clean and crisp design that gives the impression that the screen is bigger than it is.
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All in all, it’s a gorgeous laptop. The keyboard looks fantastic, but there are some usability trade-offs associated with its design. The first being that, while it has good key travel, it doesn’t feel as expressly ergonomic as some other laptops’ keyboards like the HP EliteBook X G1a or even the Acer Swift 16 AI. If you’re a fast typer, you may need some time to acclimate to the key layout here, as some might perceive it as a little cramped.
The LED function key row is also another thing that sacrifices usability for aesthetics. In previous reviews for the XPS, I’ve expressed my lukewarm reception for the feature, and it remains the same here. Personally, I find the always-on lighting a little distracting, but after a week with the laptop, I will say I’ve acclimated to it.
That being said, during everyday tasks, the laptop runs cool and quiet, and the 4050’s performance delivers for video editing, photo rendering, and even gaming, but demanding workloads quickly raise the temperature, which is particularly felt on the wrist rest and keyboard.
You’ll get less than that if you’re working on more power-hungry tasks and five hours or less if you stay in performance mode. For these reasons, I would say this is a laptop that requires some mindfulness of use, as opposed to a light and breezy device you can keep untethered from the charger and forget about.
Lastly, while we’re on the topic, even though this laptop is sleek and compact, it weighs 3.66 pounds for the LCD display and 3.79 pounds for the OLED. This is by no means the heaviest laptop on the block, but a testament to its design for weighing more than it looks.
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The Dell 14 Premium
