Dell Brings XPS Laptops Back From the Dead at CES

Dell just said something

that tech companies almost never do: they said sorry.

'Cause a year ago, they said XPS was dead,

and now, as you can see, it's back.

So this is the new XPS 16 and the new XPS 14.

And Dell has talked a lot about getting back to the basics

of what makes this brand what it is

and what makes it such a good MacBook alternative,

in particular.

They're thinner, they're lighter,

and they're as refined and high-end as ever.

So all the biggest changes

are actually kind of course corrections.

They're things that people really didn't like

about the XPS laptops in the past.

Now they're fixed.

The main one being that the function row of keys up here

is no longer the light-up touch buttons that they were,

which were cool looking, but kind of impractical to use.

Now there's just a standard row of keys,

including the power button on the top right.

The other big thing is that the touchpad,

which is still a haptic feedback touchpad,

now has these subtle lines here to kind of show you

where the edge of the boundary is.

So you no longer have to guess which part is the palm rest

and which part is the usable touchpad surface.

Now, that alone will make a lot of people happy,

but there's a couple actual new features here, too.

There is a 4K webcam up top,

which is not something you typically see on a laptop,

and in my short time with it,

it does look really nice and crisp.

The other big thing is the tandem OLED displays.

These were first introduced on the XPS 13 last year,

and now they're coming to the XPS 14 and XPS 16.

Now, these aren't brighter OLED displays.

They still get only around 400 nits.

However, they are much more efficient,

so that does lead to extra battery life.

There's also the new adaptive refresh rate,

which goes from 120 hertz

all the way down to just one hertz,

if you're not using the display at all,

which, as you can imagine,

leads again to extra battery life.

And just how long of battery life are we talking about?

Well, Dell is saying up to 27 hours of Netflix streaming,

or over 40 hours of local video playback.

That is a lot of battery life.

It's a lot more than what we've seen

in previous generations.

Now, another big reason for that

is that it uses the new Intel Panther Lake processors.

Now, obviously, these new chips are a big deal for Intel,

but for these new XPS laptops,

it means that there are no longer discrete graphics options,

so you're just relying on integrated graphics.

And Intel is saying that these new chips

have a big step forward in terms of integrated graphics,

but we'll have to wait and see

if they actually can compare

to, you know, an NVIDIA RTX 5050, for example.

So these two new laptops, the XPS 14 and XPS 16,

are both being announced as part of CES

and should be coming soon.

But later this year,

we're going to get a new silver color option,

as well as a redesigned XPS 13,

which Dell is saying is supposed to be the cheapest,

most affordable XPS laptop ever made.

And that's a big deal when you're comparing

to the really cheap MacBook Air that's available right now.

And speaking of big deals,

I wanna show you my favorite feature of this new laptop,

which is that you can finally open it with one finger.

That's pretty good.