Customer Ratings & Reviews

The Dell Inspiron line of laptops is not one in my mind that has ever stood out in terms of high quality or excellence. Still, this model is certainly attractive given the exciting and innovative new chip it contains that is brand new in the CPU market. For the price, Dell has put a lot of good features into this laptop. One of the top features compared to Apple competitors is that this laptop has a fingerprint scanner AND Windows Hello face recognition for biometric security. Another feature that is a win over current MacBook competitors is that this laptop has a touchscreen. I personally don’t bother with touchscreens on laptops, but there are plenty of prospective buyers for whom this might be a make-or-break feature. Now to discuss more about the build quality and use of this machine. The build quality of the laptop is reasonable but not up to the standard of its price, nor does it stand up to the competition. It has an all-metal chassis with a strong keyboard deck, but it has a bendy lid, and the screen’s good looks are marred by the plastic bezel surrounding it. The laptop lid is not one-finger open capable, with a poorly tuned and very tight hinge that does not go flat or flip entirely over. The keyboard has a standard layout with a surprisingly excellent quiet and gentle typing feel. People with achy fingers or arthritis will love typing on this keyboard. The keycaps are a soft touch plastic and do not appear to hold on to finger oils the way my MacBook keys do. I am currently typing the review on this keyboard, and I would have zero problems using this for a full day of work or college-level essay typing. The touchpad on this laptop is disappointingly average. It is a traditional springboard-style trackpad with easier mechanical clicks at the bottom and impossible to click at the top. When compared to the Microsoft Surface laptops and MacBooks with their haptic/force touch trackpads, this does not compare. Also, this touchpad seems to have poor palm rejection when typing, and sometimes, my mouse cursor will bounce around the screen while I am typing if my palm touches the trackpad. The speakers on this laptop are slightly above average in the world of Windows laptops in terms of loudness and sound quality. I am picking up on four speakers, two top-firing tweeters, and two bottom-firing that sound like force-canceling woofers. This makes for a surprisingly good sound stage but lacks the clarity or brightness of other competing laptop models mentioned above. The webcam… looks like absolute hot garbage. I do not even understand how this is a 1080p webcam in 2024. I would be embarrassed to attend a Zoom meeting with this webcam; my coworkers would think I am borrowing grandma’s old 2008 dinosaur laptop when this is a 2024 machine. Come on, Dell! I attempted to use the Windows Studio AI enhancement features like portrait mode etc. to adjust it and no luck. It just looks like crud, and no amount of AI will fix what is evidently just a mechanically poor webcam design. The screen is a “good enough” 400 nits’ brightness capable QHD screen that looks great and performs as expected at this price. It has a 60hz refresh and does not support a variable refresh rate that can drop lower or higher based on your needs, which is a bummer as this can contribute to improved battery life, like in the Microsoft Surface line. The screen looks at least as good as a MacBook Air and has the added utility of the touchscreen, but it does not get as bright. Regarding some of the key specs, here is what you have on this particular laptop. It is equipped with the Snapdragon X Plus which is a 10 core (instead of 12 core in the Elite chip) processor with a ‘neural processing unit’ or NPU that is capable of handling modern AI tasks. This is not the fastest Snapdragon chip currently available, but I think it is going to be perfectly serviceable for most users. It has 16 GB of blazing-fast RAM built into the laptop, no upgradable RAM here after it leaves the factory. However, 16 GB is precisely the minimum of RAM I would recommend to most users these days, so I am glad Dell didn’t cheap out here with 8 GB of RAM as some manufacturers are still doing (cough cough, Apple). The 512 GB SSD in this laptop is large enough to be serviceable for most. It is not a blazing-fast SSD, but it is good enough, with a 4972mb/s read speed and 4344mb/s write speed. Benchmarks: Speedometer 3.0, which measures the performance of a machine for webapp performance (a crucial metric in today’s school and work environments that happen so much over webpages) returned a 23.5 score which is quite excellent. My 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro scored a 20.9 on this test, which means that this Snapdragon Plus chip is returning more Webapp performance than a previously nearly top-of-the-line 14” laptop. All these tests were conducted unplugged in balanced mode to imitate how I think most users will prefer to run this laptop in real-world use. The Geekbench 6 cores I got from this Snapdragon Plus chip on balanced power plan were highly respectable. I got a single core score of 2285 and a multicore score of 12790. This is actually a faster multicore score than my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro and almost as fast single core performance. It's really not bad for a machine that costs $900 less than that MBP did in 2021. In translation, even as the more budget option in the currently available Snapdragon processors, this one is still a beast and is positively up to the multitasking and computationally intensive standards of 2024. What this chip does NOT have, though, is good integrated graphics performance. It is very underpowered in terms of GPU performance. This Snapdragon Plus chip is not the one you want to get if you want to experiment with low framerate AAA gaming and/or do GPU-intensive computing tasks. Now, to clear up a few expectations on this laptop. This Inspiron model is NOT one of these proclaimed 20-hour battery-life laptops. Based on my real-world mixed power use and screen brightness on balanced battery life, this is shaping up to be a 10–12-hour battery to me, tops. This is still excellent and vastly better than what higher-end mobile Intel processors have managed to return in recent times, so I know Windows lovers are going to be stoked to have a powerful and efficient laptop. Another expectation to clear up is that this is not a silent machine like a MacBook Air. This has fans built in, and I was surprised to find that they span up a lot to cool the laptop, even when doing low-intensity tasks like web browsing and Word processing. I will say that according to HWmonitor, my temperatures stayed nice and cool even during intensive benchmarking. Regardless, hearing fans is never my favorite thing on a professional on-the-go laptop. Another clarification is that the CoPilot features, while incredibly cool for their long-term potential, have not yet been fully realized. I had a lot of fun playing with CoCreator in MS Paint, taking my zany drawing ideas and generating them into some cool AI art! Although the physical webcam on this laptop is poor, Windows Studio will be convenient for enhancing user’s webcam experiences. I absolutely LOVE the CoPilot+ features and the handy button right on the keyboard. I know I sound like a Microsoft Simp, but I mean it. I have long been a ChatGPT fan and love challenging it with hard questions and specific requests. I like to make new workout routines for myself. Having that built into the hardware with the NPU of the chip and the software of Windows 11 is epically cool. CoPilot+ is a super clean interface, too, and you can even adjust the conversation style to be more precise, creative, or balanced between the two. One of my biggest surprises in implementing this laptop in my daily use is how natural it became to click the copilot button when I have a question or something to look up rather than my typical routine of hopping on Google! I can see from using this that there is a future where AI search engines and software like this will dominate the space that typical web browser search engines currently hold. Should you pick up this laptop for professional or business use? Well, app developers and programmers are going to be in a long and bumpy process of developing and optimizing apps and programs for these new ARM-based chips since they are essentially different from previous architectures used in the past. As such, if you are considering this for a professional work environment, like a medical clinic, where you will be using application-based electronic health records and things like that, I would WAIT to jump on this bandwagon until the whole of the new ARM processors and CoPilot features mature. Programs like Epic, Allscripts, PCC, etc. can be picky even on standard Intel CPU equipped Windows machines and you may not want to be a beta tester for compatibility with these new Snapdragon ARM based devices. Suppose you are a standard user or college student who is just going to be using Web apps and Microsoft programs like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.. In that case, I think you are just fine with picking one of these up, especially if you are incurably a fan of Windows as an operating system and don’t want to mess with Apple notebooks. Altogether, I give this specific Dell Inspiron four stars out of five. A star has been removed for the terrible webcam, slightly poor build quality, and poorer-than-expected battery life, given the advertised efficiency. I think early adopters and people who are intractable fans of Dell machines should give this a try! But businesses and entrepreneurs should wait a little longer to go for ARM-based laptops until broader legacy program support is available and the AI features Windows and these chips promised come to fruition. Thanks for reading my review. I hope it has been helpful!