XPS returns – Dell brings back popular laptop brand with XPS 14 and 16

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One of the biggest stories to come out at CES 2025 last year was Dell announcing it was retiring the XPS brand, along with its popular Inspiron, Latitude and Precision branding, replacing it with the rather bland Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max lines. At the time, the decision was widely maligned by just about everyone in the industry – including us.

Well, Dell has now admitted it was wrong to do so and is bringing back XPS, starting with the release of the new, refreshed Dell XPS 14, which the company is showcasing at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. Disappointingly, the budget Inspiron branding remains in purgatory as Dell persists with its bizarrely bland “Dell” branding for these laptops.

The new laptop looks a little like a MacBook Air in appearance with its flat top and bottom and rounded corners, but Dell says its 14in machine occupies less desk space than Apple’s 13in model. It’s not particularly light, though, weighing 1.36kg (3lb), measures 14.6mm thin and comes with a 120Hz variable refresh display.

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There’s still a zero-lattice keyboard, but with deeper dished keys to help those that struggled with the lack of delineation between keys. And the flush haptic touchpad is also still a feature of this year’s machine, but instead of being completely seamless, Dell is marking out where it starts and ends – another acknowledgement of a design misstep.

Plus, as with many other laptops announced around CES 2026, the Dell XPS 14 will come with an Intel Panther Lake chip on board – up to the top-of-the-range 12Xe model – which incorporates Intel’s exciting 18A 1.8nm manufacturing technology, an 18-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, so hopefully it will be a bit of a beast when it comes to all-out power and have the efficiency to be used on the road away from mains power for more than a handful of hours. We’ll know more when we get our hands on one for review.

That’s not the full story for XPS in 2026, though. Dell also said that it will be following up with the Dell XPS 13, which will be styled along similar lines to the new XPS 14 and released later in the year.

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Intriguingly, Dell said this laptop will be sold at the “most accessible XPS price point ever”. Quite how Dell is going to manage that in the midst of a RAM and storage price crunch is anyone’s guess, but if it manages to pull it off, it could well be onto a winner with plenty of other manufacturers forced to raise prices significantly in the coming months.

As ever, we’ll endeavour to get our hands on these new laptops and monitors just as soon as we’re able, and we’ll be putting them through our usual array of tests to find out just how good (or bad) they really are. Watch this space.

Written By

Jonathan Bray

Head of reviews at Expert Reviews, Jon has been testing and writing about products since before most of you were born (well, only if you were born after 1996). In that time he’s tested and reviewed hundreds of laptops, PCs, smartphones, vacuum cleaners, coffee machines, doorbells, cameras and more. He’s worked on websites since the early days of tech, writing game reviews for AOL and hardware reviews for PC Pro, Computer Buyer and other print publications. He’s also had work published in Trusted Reviews, Computing Which? and The Observer. And yet, even after so many years in the industry, there’s still nothing more he loves than getting to grips with a new product and putting it through its paces.

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