Dell 14S Review: Higher Price, Better Quality

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WIREDFast enough and gets fantastic battery life. OLED display has great colors and contrast. Lots of ports. Large, responsive touchpad.TIREDA very glossy, reflective display. Webcam quality is noisy. Only charges from one side.Laptop Pricing has never been so newsworthy. MacBooks just got a price hike, just months after the budget-friendly MacBook Neo made its grand debut. It's a rocky landscape to introduce a new laptop into, especially one that aims to be even slightly “budget-friendly.”

Enter the Dell 14S, a new mid-tier laptop that sits below the Dell XPS 14 in the lineup. It aims to walk the delicate balance between high-end features and build quality at a slightly lower cost. I wish the Dell 14S was more affordable, but in 2026, that's just not the reality.

The Dell 14S is the successor to the Dell 14 Plus, which itself came from the old Inspiron sub-brand. Historically, this has always been the company's midrange line, but the Dell 14S is certainly the most premium version to ever come out of it. It's made of aluminum, is fairly thin at 0.61 inches, and can even be configured with an OLED display. But the real indicator is the price. The Dell 14S starts at $1,270, which is hundreds more than its predecessor. Taken on its own, the Dell 14S feels very much like a premium laptop. In terms of size, it shares a lot in common with the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

There are a few minor hints that this model isn't quite top-end, though. The edges of the laptop seem to be made with shiny plastic. It only has a pair of 2-watt speakers, and they sound pretty mediocre. The same is true of the webcam. Even in a room with plenty of light, the feed adds lots of noise to the image. It especially feels like a downgrade compared to the 4K webcam in the Dell XPS 14. The keyboard feels fine, though the keys can be a little tiring to type on. I'm not sure if it's the actuation force or the travel length, but each key requires a bit more effort to press than I prefer.

Photograph: Luke LarsenPhotograph: Luke LarsenThe Dell 14S has more conventional ports than some of the more premium laptops out there too. There are two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, one on each side, as well as HDMI 2.1, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a headphone jack. Lots of people will appreciate this mix of ports, though I was missing an SD card slot. I also wish Dell had placed one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports on the right side, so that the laptop could charge from both sides.

Photograph: Luke LarsenThe higher-end configurations of the Dell 14S don't make a lot of sense, especially since this laptop bears so much in common with the Dell XPS 14. For $1,469, it comes with an eight-core Intel Core Ultra 7 355 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage. Notably, that's still $170 more than the 13-inch MacBook Air and $30 less than the 15-inch MacBook Air.

You can configure the Dell 14S with some of the most exciting silicon in 2026, the Core Ultra X7 or X9, but it'll cost you mightily. The Core Ultra 7 355 is more modest, though it'll certainly be plenty powerful for most users. The extra GPU performance in the X7 and X9 is really only needed for gamers or content creators. According to my tests, the Core Ultra 7 355 lands somewhere between the Apple M4 and M5 in multicore performance. It's fast enough for most people, but so was the previous-gen Core Ultra 7 258V, as found in the Dell 14 Plus. The company still sells that device at a starting price of $860, and that's the issue. The Dell 14S I tested was 14 percent faster in graphics performance, which isn't overly noticeable.

The battery life is incredible, though. That's thanks to the fact that this laptop uses Intel's latest, Core Series Ultra Series 3 chips, which are much more efficient than in previous years. In my local video playback test, it took 20 hours for the battery life to drop by 50 percent. It's standby battery still isn't quite as good as what’s in Qualcomm-powered laptops. It lost half its battery life when left unplugged with the lid closed for a few days.

Another concern is that the laptop came with a sustainability feature called Smart Charging turned on by default, capping the battery at 80 percent. The idea is to prolong the life of the battery, but as it turns out, this isn't so easily turned off. It's not an option within Windows 11 settings, nor is it in the preinstalled Dell Optimizer app. I had to go and download the MyDell app to change the charging mode. The other way to turn this off is by digging into the BIOS. That's just plain odd, and I can imagine the average person being extremely frustrated by this.

As impressive as the battery life is, it's not immediately clear that it's worth the extra money. The Dell 14S faces an uphill battle against cheaper laptops running the previous-gen Qualcomm Snapdragon X. The best example is the HP OmniBook 5. It sells for half as much (currently $630), despite coming with similar specs and an OLED display. It's considerably thinner too. The major advantage the Dell 14S has over cheaper laptops like the OmniBook 5 is the quality of the touchpad, which is something nearly all budget laptops struggle with. The Dell 14S has a responsive and large trackpad. That alone goes a long way toward making this laptop feel more premium.

Photograph: Luke LarsenThe OLED display is a great addition, as it improves not only contrast but also color. It covers the color gamut almost flawlessly. Although the accuracy wasn't there out of the box, you should be able to get more accurate colors if you calibrate. That said, this probably isn't the right choice for color grading or any kind of precise color work.

I'm not someone who minds a glossy display—in fact, I almost always prefer it. But in this case, the display really could have used some kind of an anti-reflective coating. Under standard overhead lighting, I found that I often had to run the screen at max brightness to comfortably use the display. That's because, unfortunately, the display only goes up to 300 nits. The standard IPS display that comes in the base model uses a matte finish. Despite the glare, I'd still probably opt for the OLED display, especially since it's only around a $50 upgrade.

The other problem is the screen resolution. Regardless of whether you choose IPS or OLED, the Dell 14S only comes with a 1920 x 1200 resolution. That's fine, but you can certainly pick out pixels in the 14-inch size. It's also disappointing because the previous version of this laptop, the Dell 14 Plus, offers a sharper 2560 x 1600 resolution for less money. It's not OLED, no, but all in all, it's the screen I'd prefer using due to its higher resolution. Fortunately, the Dell 16S does come with a sharper 2880 x 1800 resolution. A “QHD+” version of the Dell 14S is reportedly an option, though it's not currently available at Dell.com.

That's what makes my recommendation of the Dell 14S with with a caveat. It's a solid option, but it's stuck between two laptops that I like quite a bit: the Dell 14 Plus and Dell XPS 14. And because it's 2026, the Dell 14S is priced higher than it feels like it should be. Ultimately, the XPS 14's more extreme price, which is around $400 more than the 14S, does leave room for it in the lineup though. And against the Dell 14 Plus, it might feel unfair to compare this to laptops using older chips, but that's the reality on the ground for people buying laptops in 2026. The price difference has made it recommending 2026 models, especially when previous-gen versions are still being sold.