Dell's return to the XPS brand this year deserves credit for ambition. After a poorly received 2024 model and a forgettable rebrand to "Dell Premium," the company has engineered a laptop that looks genuinely premium, weighs just three pounds, and packs enough graphical muscle to play modern games. The problem is so fundamental it undermines everything else: you cannot rely on this keyboard to capture what you actually type.
Multiple reviewers have found that the XPS 14 does not recognise key presses as quickly as every other laptop tested, with quick key presses almost always recognised in reverse or sometimes not recognised at all.Dell engineers are currently testing review samples, both of which exhibited the exact same keyboard issue. This is not a matter of user adjustment.Other reviewers have also reported needing to type more slowly for the keyboard to work best.
The core problem appears to stem from design choices made in pursuit of minimalism.Gizmodo's Kyle Barr attributes the issue to Dell's seamless key design, which doesn't have spaces between keys. This aesthetic commitment creates practical pain:The issues mostly go away if you type more slowly and deliberately, but that seems like a ridiculous compromise for a premium machine in 2026.According to Dell, its engineers believe a firmware fix could solve the issues, but it's unclear when that will actually arrive.
Design Redemption Elsewhere
What makes the keyboard problem particularly frustrating is how effectively Dell has fixed everything else.The machine's smooth metal case is more MacBook-like than its boxy predecessors, and despite weighing just three pounds, it sits right between the 3.4-pound 14-inch MacBook Pro and the 2.7-pound 13.6-inch MacBook Air.
Previous XPS models committed egregious design errors that Dell has now corrected with clear thinking.The company removed the light-up function row on the 2024 XPS 14 models, which had made the ESC, brightness, and volume keys impossible to find when the laptop was turned off, representing an accessibility nightmare for people with low vision. The new function row works as it should.Dell also added two thin lines along the former seamless trackpad to help identify the area you can touch.
Performance and Battery Reality
On the computational side,the integrated Arc B390 GPU is one of the major highlights of the 2026 XPS 14, with year-over-year performance that is a massive improvement over the Arc 140T in the 2025 Dell 14 Premium and even matches or outperforms the 2024 XPS 14 with dedicated GeForce RTX 4050 graphics.However, the XPS 14 lasted just 10 hours and 21 minutes in PCMark 10's Modern office battery test, whilst the MSI Prestige 14 went for a whopping 22 hours and 15 minutes, far more in line with Intel's efficiency claims for Panther Lake systems.
The pricing structure also creates decision points.The configuration featuring the OLED display and Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor is priced at $2,259.99 on Dell's website, a significant increase from the $1,349.99 entry-level MSRP.The less expensive Core Ultra 7 configuration entails quite the performance gap, with the new Core Ultra 7 355 roughly 30 to 50 percent slower than the Core Ultra X7 358H when it comes to multi-threaded loads.
The XPS 14 represents a company course-correcting with skill and intent. Yet a keyboard that fails under ordinary conditions reveals an uncomfortable truth: industrial design excellence and technical performance cannot compensate for input devices that do not reliably register input.If judged purely on its specs and design alone, the XPS 14 would be a favourite Windows laptop; but it's hampered by an annoying keyboard. Firmware may yet salvage this machine, but until that arrives, anyone considering the XPS 14 must weigh premium pricing against a product that remains incomplete.