Dell XPS 14z: Thoroughly Reviewed

Dell XPS 14z: Almost There

There’s a lot to like about Dell’s 14z, including an attractive design, reasonable performance and pricing, and a better build quality than many consumer notebooks. It won’t rival the enterprise class business notebooks for build quality, but it’s quite a bit lighter than most of those and is still a healthy step up from the mostly-plastic budget laptops. The 14z will handle most everyday tasks without trouble, and it will look good doing it, but we really would like a better than average display to finish out the package.

As far as office and Internet use goes, the 14z works well, but we can say that about any laptop with a Sandy Bridge or Llano CPU. HD video playback works fine, including streaming 1080p YouTube content. 24FPS video might not work flawlessly, but I’m not sure how much that matters for laptop users—it’s certainly not a pressing concern for me. Where the base model 14z won’t do so well is in games or computationally intensive workloads; users interested in games will want something with a discrete GPU (we’ll see what the GT 520M can do in the near future, but GT 525M would likely be a better target for moderate gaming), and for pure computation you’ll want a quad-core CPU. Otherwise, performance often isn’t a pressing concern on modern PCs, particularly if you’ve got an SSD.

My feeling is that the 14z has one item that could really benefit from an upgrade, and that’s the display. Apple has really done well at equipping their MacBook Pro and MacBook Air (and iPad and iPhone) devices with good and even great quality displays, and anyone wanting a piece of the upscale notebook market really needs to pay attention to that area. As Anand pointed out in our ASUS UX21E review, innovation is great but if you can’t innovate on a particular area it’s best to just copy what the leaders are doing. Dell offers display upgrades on their XPS 15/17/15z, and we definitely recommend spending the extra $100-$150 as a great way to get a high quality laptop display, but at least right now the 14z is missing that option.

One other area where I’d like to see some improvement is in the chassis design. I like the way the 14z and 15z look, but form has definitely pushed function to the wayside when it comes to upgrading or replacing hardware. Opening up the 14z and 15z chassis requires more than a little force to pry the casing apart, and while it’s not all that difficult the reassembly may result in a less than perfect fit. The aluminum casing on the bottom and the magnesium alloy palm rest are both a step up from the plastic construction found in too many consumer notebooks, but I don’t spend much time at all looking at the bottom of my laptops and I would happily give up the seamless bottom for easy access to the memory and hard drive.

Ultimately, the XPS 14z is a nice-looking design, but it’s not without compromises. It’s certainly not a clone of the MacBook Pro 13, but the two deserve to be compared. Apple’s unibody construction still provides a better fit and finish, and what’s more it’s a lot easier to access your memory and storage with the MBP13. The MBP13 also has a superior quality display, and while 1366x768 is technically more pixels than 1280x800, I’d rather have a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Where the XPS 14z wins out is in the component specs and pricing. The base model gets you 6GB RAM, a 500GB 7200RPM HDD compared to 4GB RAM and 500GB 5400RPM HDD in the MBP13, and you can get that for about $150 less than the basic MBP13. The upgraded MBP13 will net you an i7-2620M/i7-2640M, 4GB RAM, and a 750GB HDD for around $1400; Dell on the other hand will sell you an i7-2640M, 8GB RAM, 750GB 7200RPM HDD, and a GeForce GT 520M for $1300. In other words, it’s mostly the same old story: Dell will sell you a bit more performance for less money, but when it comes to the design and build quality Apple’s MacBook Pro wins out, and the Apple LCD is at least a $75 upgrade in my book.

Dell seems to understand the need for better displays at one level, as we have the Precision line now offering IPS panels as an upgrade (albeit one that will cost you $400 extra!), they've had RGB LED as an option for several years on certain models, and the XPS 15/15z have at least better than average displays. In fact, the 15/15z managed to one-up Apple's MacBook on the display front by offering 1080p in a 15.6" panel compared to Apple's 1440x900 resolution (though Apple does offer matte panels as an alternative). Toss in a better display and the 14z suddenly becomes far more compelling and flirts with another Editors' Choice award; without it, it's a laptop that looks good in every area except the one place where your eyes are going to be focused most of th time.