Dell’s new Premium laptops are here, for the XPS rebrand nobody asked for

After scrapping its XPS branding earlier this year, Dell has now launched two of the new “Premium” laptop models that are replacing it. Aside from being refreshed with Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 Arrow Lake processors, a slightly revised Dell lid logo, and a few other spec changes, the Dell 16 Premium and Dell 14 Premium are nearly identical to the popular XPS 16 and XPS 14 that preceded them.

“The new name signals a fresh chapter — one that makes it easier than ever to find the right PC while providing the same exceptional quality, design, and performance,” Dell’s product management lead, Kevin Terwilliger, said in the announcement blog.

Both laptops are available now in the US and Canada, with prices starting at $1,649.99 ($2,649.99 Canadian) for the Dell 14 Premium and $2,699.99 ($3,749.99 Canadian) for the Dell 16 Premium. There are still two color options available — a silver “Platinum” shade and a darker gray “Graphite” — which carry on the XPS legacy of being bland enough to blend into the school, college, and office environments that these laptops are marketed for.

Business as usual for the new Dell XPS- sorry, I mean the Dell 16 Premium.

Image: Dell

The Dell 16 Premium has been bumped to the latest generation of Nvidia RTX laptop GPUs, with the RTX 5060 available at launch. Additional models sporting the RTX 5050, RTX 5070, and integrated Intel Arc graphics will also be launching “soon,” with pricing yet to be revealed. The RTX 5070-equipped model specifically will also benefit from an upgrade to Thunderbolt 5.

Here’s the Dell 14 Premium in “Platinum” to show how that compares against the “Graphite” color option.

Image: Dell

The Dell 14 Premium retains integrated Intel graphics and the option to configure it with an RTX 4050 GPU, just as the 2024 Dell XPS 14, but it can now be configured with up to 64GB of LPDDR5 RAM compared to the previous 32GB maximum. It also now comes with Wi-Fi 7 support, bringing it in line with the XPS 16 and new Dell 16 Premium.

Not much else seems to have changed. Specs for the display, ports, and storage mirror those offered on last year’s XPS 14 and 16 lineup, as does the overall design — including the gapless “zero-lattice” keyboard with capacitive touch function row that we found to be lacklustre compared to keyboards on other laptops like the older XPS 15 or current MacBook Pros.