Dell is trying again. It’s the annual ritual of tech penance where a multi-billion dollar corporation asks for forgiveness while reaching for your wallet. The XPS 14 (2026) has arrived, and it looks exactly like the future we were promised three years ago—for better or worse. Mostly worse for your bank account.
The chassis is still a slab of CNC-machined aluminum that could probably survive a fall from a high-speed chase. It’s gorgeous. It’s dense. It feels like money. But then you open the lid. The "seamless" glass palm rest is back. The invisible trackpad remains a ghost in the machine, forcing you to guess where the clicking starts and the frustration ends. It’s a design choice that screams "we have an aesthetic" while whispering "we don't care if you're productive."
Dell calls this a revival. A return to form. What they actually did was put the physical Escape and Delete keys back after the 2024 capacitive row debacle turned out to be a functional nightmare. Congratulations, Dell. You reinvented the keyboard. They want a medal for giving us back the buttons they stole. It’s a classic tech move: break something perfectly functional, wait two years, and then sell the "fix" as a bold new direction.
Under the hood, we’ve got the latest silicon. It’s fast. Obviously. Every laptop over fifteen hundred bucks is fast now. The real story is the $1,899 entry price for a configuration that still starts with 16GB of RAM. In 2026. That’s not a spec sheet; it’s a punchline. If you actually want the 120Hz OLED panel—the only real reason to buy this thing over a MacBook Air—you’re looking at $2,300 before tax.
The screen is, admittedly, a marvel. The blacks are deep enough to lose your soul in, and the color accuracy is tight enough for professional color grading. But you’ll be doing that grading while tethered to a wall. The power draw on this "revived" ultraportable is aggressive. If you’re pushing the GPU, expect about four hours of life. That’s not a mobile workstation. That’s a desktop with a very expensive battery backup.
Then there’s the port situation. Or the lack thereof. We’re still living the "dongle life" here. Three USB-C jacks and a microSD slot. That’s it. Dell includes a plastic adapter in the box, which is the tech equivalent of a "Sorry I Forgot Your Birthday" card. It’s clunky. It ruins the clean lines. It’s the specific friction point that keeps this from being a tool for professionals and keeps it as a high-end status symbol for people who mostly use Chrome and Slack.
The cooling system has been "reimagined," which is marketing-speak for "we put bigger fans in because the chip runs hot." It’s loud. Not leaf-blower loud, but enough of a consistent whine to remind you that physics doesn't care about your minimalist office vibes. When the fans kick in during a simple Zoom call, you start to wonder where that two-thousand-dollar investment actually went.
The dedicated AI button is still there, too. Staring at you. It’s 2026, and we’ve all realized that a physical key for a chatbot is the "Bixby button" of this decade. It’s dead weight. It’s a permanent monument to a trend that’s already cooling off, etched into your keyboard forever.
So, is it a hit? If you’re an executive who wants to look like you live in a sci-fi movie while you check emails at the airport lounge, sure. It’s a triumph of industrial design. But for the rest of us—the people who actually need to plug things in and type without looking at our hands to find the haptic feedback zone—it feels like another beautiful, expensive missed opportunity.
Dell managed to fix the things they broke, but they forgot to make the price make sense. You’re paying a premium for the privilege of helping Dell figure out what a laptop should look like. It’s a polished, shimmering piece of hardware that handles like a concept car: stunning to look at, but you wouldn't want to drive it to work every day.
Is a laptop really a "revival" if it still feels like it's having an identity crisis?
