Dell XPS 15 review (2022): Still the best 15-inch Windows laptop

The XPS 15’s 3.5K OLED show stays a knockout, with wonderful shade replica, black ranges and all the bonuses you’d anticipate. Nonetheless, I would like to see Dell push this show additional, particularly after each Apple and Microsoft squeezed excessive refresh price screens in competing notebooks. Having that further little bit of smoothness whereas scrolling by means of web sites (and taking up the occasional enemy Spartan in Halo Infinite) would make the already nice XPS 15 expertise even higher. (To not point out extra future-proof.)

Every thing else we liked in regards to the XPS 15 final 12 months stays intact. The keyboard feels snug and responsive, the trackpad is luxuriously clean and huge, and the quad-speaker system sounds nice. The XPS 15 additionally has many of the ports you’d must get some critical work executed. That features three USB-C ports (two of which help Thunderbolt 4), an SD card reader and a headphone jack. There is a USB-C to HDMI and USB Kind A adapter within the field, however you may nonetheless want extra dongles (or a USB-C mini-hub) in order for you Ethernet and a number of Kind-A ports.

I am glad Dell is sticking with the SD card slot, which can make it simple to dump pictures and video. It’s additionally good to see the XPS 15 make some battery life enhancements. In our benchmark, it lasted 13 hours and 12 minutes, an enormous enchancment from final 12 months when it clocked beneath 10 hours.

Regardless of my gushing, there’s nonetheless some room for enchancment. Whereas the keyboard, trackpad and wrist relaxation really feel nice, in addition they look a bit gross after mild use. I would like to see some kind of oleophobic coating that does not want a lot wiping down. And naturally, having extra helpful ports wouldn’t harm both.

The XPS 15 begins at $1,449 with a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM, however as ordinary, we would advocate bumping up these specs a bit. You will need a minimum of 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a Core i7 CPU to make this pc final for a number of years. Our overview unit got here in at $2,253 – a comparatively modest value given the {hardware} you get. Nonetheless, I would spend a bit extra to squeeze in a bigger SSD and probably extra RAM, particularly when you’re continuously juggling massive information.

At this level, the XPS 15 is the closest Dell has come to delivering a near-perfect workhorse machine. It is lovely exterior hides large energy for critical duties, however it might additionally deal with video games if you want some downtime. And on high of that, it packs just about each characteristic we would need in a contemporary laptop computer, particularly when you go for that beautiful OLED show. Identical to Apple, Dell proves {that a} good design can final for years.