Dell 16 Premium review: I want to love this gorgeous Windows ultraportable, but 3 things hold me back

The Dell 16 Premium ($1,799 to start) is effectively the 2025 edition of the Dell XPS 16 with a new name that spells out exactly what it is: Dell's premium 16-inch laptop.

And when you see one in person it's hard not to agree with the branding, especially if it's the model with the optional 4K OLED touchscreen upgrade. I've long loved Dell's top-tier laptops for their elegant design with remarkably thin bezels that make the display seem to float in the air, and the 2025 Dell 16 Premium is no exception.

But I've also loathed some of the design changes that Dell has implemented in its Premium laptop lineup over time, including the decision to make the touchpad "invisible" and ditch physical function keys in favor of a dynamic row of capacitive touch keys. I can adapt to these peccadilloes over the course of a review, but they keep me from ever wanting to buy one myself.

However, there's still lots to love about the new Dell 16 Premium if you don't mind those details. I know because I've been using one for weeks and we extensively tested it in our testing lab, so let's dig into it!

Dell 16 Premium review: Cheat sheet

• What is it? The 2025 edition of Dell's premium 16-inch Windows laptop.
• Who is it for? Anyone who wants an elegant 16-inch laptop that's broadly customizable with everything from an OLED touchscreen to a high-powered Nvidia laptop GPU.
• What does it cost? The 2025 Dell 16 Premium is available for purchase from Dell.com and participating retailers for a starting price of $1,799, but it can climb to $4,000+ if you splurge and upgrade it to the max.
• What do I like? The eye-catching design, good performance and high customizability are strengths of the Dell 16 Premium, and it's also fairly thin (though not light) for its size.
• What don't I like? I really don't like the invisible touchpad or capacitive touch row, since they're both difficult to use without looking down at your hands. The fact that it has few ports and reliably lasted less than 8 hours in our battery tests is also disappointing.

Dell 16 Premium review: Specs

Dell 16 Premium review: The ups

While I grouse about the keyboard and touchpad, there's a lot to love about the Dell 16 Premium. Here's a few of the standout strengths I've appreciated during my time with our review unit.

Beautiful design

Our Dell 16 Premium review unit looks lovely on a desk, and it feels like a premium laptop in your hands.

Part of that has to do with the weight and heft of this machined aluminum machine. While it's not as heavy as a gaming laptop it does feel hefty and solid, and I couldn't feel any flex in the keyboard deck no matter how hard I tried to twist or bend it.

And when you open up our review unit (decked out in the Platinum color scheme) the remarkably thin bezels help emphasize the 16.3-inch display, making it seem to almost float in the air. And while I wish there was a little more lip at the top of the screen to make it easier to open with one hand, the Dell 16 Premium's lid is cut at an angle that makes it fairly easy to flip open with a finger.

While I wish Dell would axe the capacitive touch row and invisible touchpad because I find them frustrating to use, I can't deny they make the laptop look futuristic and unlike any other laptop at the coffee shop. I don't think that's worth the trade-off you're forced to accept, but I want to acknowledge that as much as I hate using these features they do look kind of cool.

Good gaming performance

One of the things I've long loved about the old Dell XPS 16 laptops is the fact that you could outfit them with enough beefy components that they could double as a gaming laptop in a pinch.

The same is true of the new Dell 16 Premium, which starts under $2,000 but gets a lot more expensive if you take advantage of the fact you can upgrade it with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU and up to 64GB of RAM.

With those specs it would be a pretty decent gaming laptop, which I love because this laptop doesn't look the part at all. So if you (like me) are a little tired of gaming laptop designs with all their RGB light strips and pointy edges, the Dell 16 Premium can be the most subtle gaming laptop you've ever owned.

The review unit Dell sent us isn't the top-of-the-line model but it does have that RTX 5070 laptop GPU, and when we put it through our testing lab it performed pretty well in our gaming benchmarks.

As you can see, our Dell 16 Premium review unit was reliably able to outperform both its predecessor and the latest MacBook Pro in every one of our gaming tests. But set your expectations accordingly, because as you can see from our test results we run all those tests in 1080p so we can compare them more effectively across laptops — so if you upgrade to the 4K OLED display and try to play your games at native 4K resolution, you're not going to see framerates like these in modern games.

For example, when I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my own I was easily able to get a pretty steady 60+ frames per second at native 4K resolution by enabling Nvidia's DLSS tech. But in our testing, when we run the game without DLSS at 1080p and 4K, the laptop could only manage a bit over 30 FPS at 1080p and roughly 2 FPS at 4K.

So while the Dell 16 Premium can absolutely double as a good gaming laptop if you outfit it with top-of-the-line hardware, don't expect it to ever outperform the best gaming laptops on the market.

A top-of-the-line Dell 16 Premium will, however, play games better than 90% of non-gaming laptops, including nearly every MacBook ever made.

A similar story played out when we put our review unit through our gauntlet of general performance tests, but in these challenges Apple's MacBooks have the edge and the M4 Pro MacBook Pro ($3,499 as tested) we reviewed beat the Dell 16 Premium in ever test.

But that's not terribly surprising since the best MacBooks have long outperformed the best Windows laptops in terms of raw CPU performance and video editing speed, thanks in large part to the remarkable efficiencies of Apple silicon.

So while the latest MacBooks still outperform Dell's premium 16-inch Windows laptop, that's par for the course these days. What's more notable here is that the Dell 16 Premium handily outperformed its predecessor in every test except one: SSD transfer rate.

As you can see from our test results, the SSD in our Dell 16 Premium review unit transferred files significantly slower than the SSD in its predecessor. That's not a huge deal-breaker for most people, but it's something you should be aware of, especially if you expect to be moving big files or file packages (like videos and video editing projects) around on a regular basis.

Gorgeous 4K OLED display

I love the 16.3-inch (3840x2400 pixels) 120Hz OLED touchscreen on our Dell 16 Premium review unit an awful lot.

Heck, I think it might be my favorite feature of the machine because it makes everything you do on it look lovely, plus it gives you the freedom to reach up and tap when you get tired of typing. So the fact that it costs at least $200 extra to get on the Dell 16 Premium is kind of a bummer, but it's such a small splurge that I really think upgrading from the 2K IPS to the 4K OLED display is a smart idea when buying one.

I'm not deaf to the complaint that touchscreen capabilities can literally smudge the value of a good OLED, because you're risking leaving fingerprints all over your beautiful display. But good hygiene and regular screen cleaning can take care of that issue, and it's worth the effort to enjoy this upgrade.

I really love this display and OLED screens in general because in my experience you get much brighter lights, deeper darks and more striking contrasts on OLED than you do on any other kind of screen. They making watching movies and playing games with support for HDR (high dynamic range) a real treat, and even just navigating around Windows is a little nicer on a fast OLED.

However, despite the higher contrasts you get on OLED they do tend to eat up more power and be less bright than other types of panels. You can see this play out in our display testing, as the Dell 16 Premium did well but actually ended up a bit less bright than both its predecessor and the latest 16-inch MacBook Pros.

Dell 16 Premium review: The downs

Our Dell 16 Premium review unit is an attractive machine with some impressive capabilities, but after using one for a week or two I have to also warn you about some potentially frustrating downsides.

Keyboard is frustrating and uncomfortable to use

I don't love the keyboard and touchpad on the Dell 16 Premium, but that's not a huge surprise given I didn't like them on last year's model either.

If you haven't seen one of Dell's new Premium laptops in person, they have these slick keyboards with a capacitive touch row, a flat rectangular keyboard with nearly no space between the keys and an invisible touchpad somewhere beneath it.

I love the ultra-thin bezels around the display, and at a glance the keyboard deck's similarly minimalist aesthetic looks attractive. But once you start using it, you might understand why I find the Dell 16 Premium's keyboard so frustrating to use: you have to constantly look down in order to use it well.

And hey, we all end up looking at our hands when learning a new keyboard. But in my experience the lack of physical features on the Dell 16 Premium's keyboard deck makes it especially frustrating to master because it's very hard to feel where you should place your fingers without looking down.

The same goes for the capacitive function keys and invisible touchpad. The fact that the capacitive touch keys change their icons if you hit the Function key is neat, but it's a pointless feature for touch typists because ideally you'll rarely look down at the keyboard while working.

And of course, since the "invisible" touchpad has no raised edges or visible markers there's no way to figure out where the edges are without trial and error — and lots of looking down at your hands.

If it seems like I'm complaining about looking down a lot, it's because that habit makes working on a laptop even more painful and unergonomic than usual. I know because I write about laptops for a living, so I spend much of my work day working on a laptop and I use accessories like Xreal AR glasses to keep my head in a comfortable, healthy position.

The Dell XPS 16's minimalist design may look cool, but in my experience it's harder for touch typists to master and forces you to look down at your hands more often while working, which could ultimately exacerbate back and neck issues.

Not enough ports

For a 16-inch productivity laptop the Dell 16 Premium's port array feels pretty disappointing.

Far from offering you a premium port offering, Dell gives you just three USB-C ports, a microSD card reader and a headphone jack. That's enough to get work done, especially if you invest in a good USB-C hub with the ports you actually need, but it's not great.

That feels like a letdown, especially when you consider that most other laptops of this size and price give you a more versatile selection of ports. The 16" MacBook Pro, for example, gives you all the same ports but upgrades the card reader to a full-size model and also gives you an HDMI 2.1 port for hooking up an external display.

Bad battery life

While using our Dell 16 Premium review unit in my day-to-day work I had no concerns about running out of battery, but I did notice that if I used it all day that it would require a charge by late afternoon.

That anecdotal experience is backed up by the results of our battery testing, which involves running our test (endlessly streaming video via Wi-Fi with screen set to low brightness) multiple times and averaging the results. And unfortunately, our Dell 16 Premium review unit reliably failed to last even eight hours on a full charge.

That's a pretty disappointing result that reminds me of the bad old days of Windows laptops, when getting 8+ hours of use on a full battery was a rare feat.

However, a high-quality modern Windows 11 laptop tends to last 10+ hours these days thanks to more power-efficient chips and designs. As you can see from our chart of recent test results above, the majority of Windows laptops we've tested in the past year last hours longer than the Dell 16 Premium. And of course, similarly priced and -sized MacBooks can easily last 15-20 hours on a full charge.

So while you can count on the Dell 16 Premium to get you through hours of work with no trouble, you may want to lug the charger with you if you take it out for a day of working on the go. And that's kind of a hassle that drags down the light, minimalist feel of this laptop.

Dell 16 Premium review: Verdict

The thing I've long loved about Dell's premium 16-inch laptops is the fact that they're highly customizable and potentially very capable machines (if you pay for the privilege) that look great on a desk.

The 2025 Dell 16 Premium is no exception, and the review unit Dell sent us hits that sweet spot of being a performance laptop that doesn't look like it. I'm currently playing through Assassin's Creed Valhalla on PC, and I love that I can play that (admittedly years-old) game with graphical settings cranked up high and still achieve a steady 60+ FPS on the laptop's luscious 4K OLED display. I also appreciate the fact that I can do this on a laptop that doesn't look like a gaming device in public, because there's no garish RGB lighting or ridiculously edgy design.

But I don't think I'd ever actually buy one of these for myself or anyone I know, because I think the capacitive touch keys and invisible touchpad are irritating to use. I'm also disappointed to see that our review unit performed pretty poorly in our battery tests, and I hate how few ports you get on this big, premium laptop.