Dell XPS 16 (2026, DA16260)

The XPS brand was, by Dell's own hand, dead — and then it wasn't. The 2026 XPS 16 that arrived at CES is the apology tour, and it's a convincing one. The two most-complained-about quirks of the last generation are gone: the capacitive function row has been replaced with real, physical keys, and the invisible haptic touchpad now has a faint outline so you can actually find it. The rest of the redesign is about restraint. At 3.65 pounds for the OLED configuration and around 0.6 inches thick, this is close to a full pound lighter than its predecessor, which fundamentally changes what a 16-inch XPS is for.

What it is not for is graphics work that needs a discrete GPU, because there isn't one on offer at any price. Dell has committed entirely to Intel's Panther Lake silicon and its integrated Arc graphics, pairing the tested Core Ultra X7 358H with Intel-recommended 9.6 Gbps memory to squeeze the most out of the iGPU. That makes this a writer's, coder's, analyst's and road-warrior's laptop with a spectacular screen attached — a big canvas you can carry all day — rather than a portable workstation. If you were cross-shopping it against an RTX-equipped creator laptop, you're in the wrong aisle, even though the $2,350 as-tested price puts you squarely in that aisle's price bracket.

Judged as a premium thin-and-light, the XPS 16 is close to the top of its class. The 3.2K tandem OLED with its 20–120Hz variable refresh is the star of the show, and pairing it with the up-firing speakers Dell wisely kept makes this one of the better media machines you can fold shut and put in a bag. Battery life draws consistently strong marks, which is the reward for the 25W processor and the absence of a discrete GPU — a coherent set of engineering choices rather than a compromise.

The frustrations are real, though, and most of them are about value. Three USB-C ports and a headphone jack is a thin selection on a 16-inch chassis, and dropping the SD card reader on a machine whose whole pitch is a beautiful big display for visual work is a self-inflicted wound. The RAM and SSD are sealed in, so the configuration you buy is the one you keep for the life of the laptop — an uncomfortable thought when the review unit's drive is a mainstream DRAM-less Kioxia BG7 leaning on Host Memory Buffer rather than the fastest thing Dell could have fitted. The keyboard is the one area where reviewers genuinely disagree: some found the typing action shallow and noted a lack of anti-ghosting, while others rated the hardware highly but questioned why a 16-inch laptop has a compact layout at all. That split suggests you should type on one before committing.

Four stars, and comfortably so — but the half-star it loses is the price. Dell is charging creator-laptop money for something without creator-laptop graphics, and while the screen, weight and battery go some way to justifying that, the port omissions and locked-down internals make the premium harder to swallow. Buy it for the display and the portability; don't buy it expecting the horsepower its price tag implies.