GoKawiilCNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.
8 / 10 Score Cnet Score CNET provides expert, unbiased reviews of products and services. When we assign a score, we use a scale of 1-10. Each product we score is evaluated by criteria specific to its category with most assessing pricing, quality, features and performance. Read more on: How we test Dell XPS 16 $2,350 at Dell Pros Stylish design with solid feel
Beautiful 16-inch 3.2K OLED display
Good balance between performance and battery life
Physical keys in Function row Cons RTX-level price without RTX GPU
Seams along the edges and below the keyboard are debris magnets
Few ports, no SD card slot
Can't upgrade RAM or SSD
With the XPS 16, Dell seemingly has two objectives: re-establishing the XPS brand, which it shuttered last year before bringing it back at CES in January, and positioning it between heavier, pricier, but more powerful content creation laptops such as the Asus ProArt P16, Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Aura Edition and Apple's 16-inch MacBook Pro and cheaper, thinner and lighter 16-inch models like the Asus Zenbook A16 and Acer Swift 16 AI.
I'd say Dell succeeded on the first mission: the XPS 16 is a fantastic laptop befitting of the premium XPS name. Like the smaller XPS 14 I reviewed, it has sleek looks and a solid feel at a reasonable weight, as well as an optional OLED display that's worth the upgrade. For the second undertaking, the move to Intel's Panther Lake processors allows it to offer strong overall performance in an enclosure that's fairly thin and light for its size. It doesn't have discrete graphics, so it just doesn't have the muscle for more demanding graphics tasks, but editing content and doing a little gaming are possible.
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