Every now and then companies make truly boneheaded decisions, which is exactly what happened when Dell killed off the name of its most iconic PC line and replaced it with something generic. It's like if Ford decided to rebrand Mustang and call it The Prime Sportscar instead. It doesn't make sense. But now that XPS has become Premium, it's time to see if Dell's latest flagship 14-inch ultraportable — the Dell 14 Premium (you see how dumb that sounds?) — still has the DNA that made its predecessors one of the best notebook families for more than a decade.
Design and display: How Dell puts the P in Premium
Instead of doing a full redesign to match its updated name, for 2025 Dell kept the same chassis it used on last year's XPS 14. And I'm not mad at all because it's still one of the most beautiful and elegant notebooks on the market today. Its aluminum chassis has clean lines, a Gorilla Glass 3 surface and just the right amount of ports for a laptop this size: three USB-C slots with Thunderbolt 4, a 3.5mm audio jack and a microSD slot. That's important, because the 14 Premium's smaller sibling — the XPS 13 (which isn’t being renamed yet because it isn't getting updated this year) — doesn't have a headphone jack or a built-in card reader. That said, at between 3.66 and 3.79 pounds depending on which display you pick, the 14 Premium is a touch heavier than some of its similarly-sized rivals like a 14-inch MacBook Pro (3.4 pounds). The difference is small enough that I'm not bothered, though.
Dell / Engadget 91 100 Expert Score Still one of the best Windows laptops Dell 14 Premium While Dell rebranded the XPS 14 with a new and frankly worse name, it's still every bit the world-class Windows laptop that its predecessors were. Pros Sleek design
Vivid optional OLED display
Solid performance
Giant touchpad Cons Divisive capacitive touch buttons
Optional discrete GPU is one generation old $1,500 at Dell
There's also a glass wrist rest with a touchpad that blends invisibly into the deck, which might make it seem potentially hard to use. However, because the tracking area is absolutely massive (it spans the entire area below the spacebar plus the right ALT and Copilot keys), I never felt cramped or like I needed to actively search for my cursor. I also appreciate how Dell found room for speakers on either side of the keyboard.
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