Customer Ratings & Reviews

This is an ARM processor, this means that the battery life is going to be much better and it’ll just be quicker for light multitasking. My wife uses word, the internet, excel, the internet, Spotify, and the internet, so for her ARM is absolutely perfect. When you open the lid, it’s ready to go, even over night the wake-up time feels pretty instantaneous. The Wi-Fi is also more dependable, usually when I wake up my windows laptop the Wi-Fi will decide that it doesn’t exist for 30 seconds, windows on ARM hasn’t done this to me once, not on this laptop and not on the one that I’ve had for a year. I’ve been able to run normal applications, and it is getting better on what can be installed on ARM, however, if you are a gamer, engineer, or developer you will run into applications that simply wont work, so this is for the person that just needs has light computing needs which is probably most people. Now for the build quality, I’m not super impressed with the screen, it gets decently bright and works good, but it isn’t amazing. The speakers are actually really good, usually they are too quiet, these are nice and loud and sound pretty good. The keyboard is really nice, it is solid, the keys have good travel, and the typing depth feels good. I have used laptops at twice the price of this that have worse keyboards which is really impressive and I think is more important that an amazing 4k display especially at this price point as the purpose I see for this computer is to communicate with the world not be absorbed in content locally and the best way to communicate to the world is with a good keyboard. I like that there is an Aux port and a full USB A as well as a micro SD card slot and 2 USB C ports. I do wish that a USB C port was put on each side so that the power cord could be plugged into the most convenient side. Which brings up the part that it charges via USB C. I absolutely love this feature. I have a multi plug 65W charger that keeps this thing going as well as my phone without an issue, or you can use the included charger which looks like a traditional charger and is a little bulky for my taste, but I love the length of the charger. I think the biggest question is if this actually is a good value, if you value battery life and responsiveness while not needing access to more than basic games (unless you have an excellent internet connection and access to cloud gaming) then this is an excellent choice.

The Dell Inspirion pleasantly surprised me in two important ways. First the graphics are very clear and sharp. Second the keyboard has a very nice touch. The built-in mousepad is responsive but not overly helpful. (Overly helpful mouse is one that moves to the wrong spot, thus when I click, I get the wrong result!) Setup did take two hours. There were three very simple questions (location, keyboard style) prior to the install update screen. The process said there were three steps. The first step took 45+ minutes. After that the screen just stayed in the same spot saying the first step was 100% complete. It seemed to be stuck. I was going to end the process and start over, but the screen asked me if I really wanted to end the in-progress updates. So, I stayed on the screen and after 25 minutes the process seemed to move forward. All in all, going through the updates took almost two hours, so plan for it. I was very disappointed to find that all my files and Microsoft Edge settings were loaded even though I specifically said to setup as a new PC and not to bring forward my bookmarked webpages. Although not difficult to delete, it's a bit time consuming to delete the information. Ugh! The Dell Inspiron is a bit heavier than a Chromebook, barely. It's just the right size at 14" and has a nice simple, sleek look. Very portable. Copilot is as advertised. Asked for a one-page story about a polar bear. No delay immediately had a great short story. I'm keeping it to read to my cousin's kids. I asked for the same thing two more times to see if it would repeat itself, and I got two additional polar bear stories. It offered to illustrate and or read aloud. Pretty nice.

Great daily driver computer for basic productivity tasks, providing great battery life, copilot + compatibility, and pretty nice specs overall for the price point that it lands. It doesn't necessarily do anything great, but it does everything good enough that you wont regret going on the more affordable end of the snapdragon lineup. I really enjoy using copilot to help learn new things by having more of a "conversation" format (please fact check your AI to the best of your abilities). The Snapdragon X offers Copilot+ compatibility allowing it to depend less on the cloud for certain tasks. Another feature of the snapdragon that is really compelling is the battery life, and thankfully this has driven for more competition on that front from Windows based laptops in general. Because the Snapdragon is a ARM processor more like your phone processor than it is your desktop, it uses much less energy than a traditional x86 processor. The secondary advantage of this past the improved battery life is by using less energy it will inherently run cooler. By running cooler Dell was able to keep this laptop fairly light because it requires a less robust cooling system. For folks working out of most Microsoft office apps this will be more than enough and provide you with better battery life than most other laptops, especially in this price range. For those that need horsepower to run Adobe photoshop, Adobe premier, or any CAD software for example, look elsewhere. The monitor is unremarkable but works well, and has a matte finish for those that may be looking to work outside because it is not a touch screen. I like the 14" form factor for a laptop that I am commuting with frequently. The complimentary specs of 16gb ram and 512gb of storage is adequate, I would have liked to see a 1TB minimum at this point in 2025 but this is a great value laptop overall so they had to make some concessions somewhere, but they did it in a way that it doesn't ruin the experience in any way thankfully. Loaded with the typical Dell bloatware which is unfortunate, I am hoping one day they dial it back... I know they will never completely stop. Overall a great option if you are looking for something that can handle light workloads and provide long battery life.

Where do I begin? I have never wanted a device to be a five star, sure thing, beyond a shadow of a doubt recommend as much as this machine. On paper it sounds like a dream. 16 gigabytes of RAM, a brand spanking new ARM-based Snapdragon X processor, and the 512 gigabytes of storage is no slouch either. Finally, a definitive answer from Qualcom and Microsoft to the ARM-powered M1 Apple notebook computer that I use as a daily driver, I thought. I envisioned setting up this Dell and using nothing but this machine all the way through to writing this review. But here I am, not doing that. Because the Dell once again is at 0% battery even though it was fully shut down (not asleep! explicitly shut down) and not plugged in for a couple days. I did this intentionally. I wanted to verify that my prior experience could be replicated, and so I did. It seems the biggest flaw with this computer is that the battery will drain while unplugged no matter what. Even if you explicitly shut down Windows using the "shutdown -f -s" command. Something must be always running in the background draining battery life. It needs to be plugged in pretty frequently to maintain a decent charge if you want to use it on the go. Now, I will say that overall the experience using the machine when it actually has a charge or is plugged in is quite nice. While Windows on ARM still has quite a ways to go to get anywhere close to what Apple has achieved with their ARM Macs and Rosetta 2, the experience is still pretty solid. The machine feels zippy in all the right ways and, if it weren't for my aforementioned experience with battery life, I'd be comfortable recommending it to the older crowd looking to browse the web, do some emailing, and consume media. It could also have been an option for school-aged kids for research and homework. Unfortunately both of those groups tend to be used to things like Chromebooks which seem to have a real good grasp on energy conservation when fully shut down properly. All in all, it's a good machine that could perhaps be improved down the road with some software or firmware updates. I can't, however, recommend it as a daily driver at this time if you plan on using it away from wall power frequently.

Great PC for the price. Does everything I need it to do.

The battery life can be inconsistent like getting between 6 to 16 hours even though doing the same thing. Display quality had alot of backlight bleeding.