Dell 14S Review: Higher Price, Better Quality

The 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.

Stiff Competition

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The 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.