Dell axed its most popular laptop brand last year, but now it's back and I think I need an upgrade

The Dell XPS laptop series has gone down in history as one of the best. However, last year, the company decided to ditch the name as part of a confusing brand simplification process that was much-questioned at the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dell has done a swift U-turn on the decision: Dell XPS is back, and it has some brand-new laptop models to showcase.

Leading the charge on the new Dell XPS lineup are two new models that likely won't make it onto our list of the best gaming laptops, but are certainly sleek. The new Dell XPS 14 and XPS 16 house the latest Intel Panther Lake CPUs and include a choice of a stunning tandem OLED display or an LCD, along with a host of other improvements over Dell's previous equivalent models.

Among these improvements is a drop of 0.5lbs in weight for the XPS 14, compared to the company's previous 14-inch model. You also get the world's thinnest and narrowest 8MP 4K webcam, and both laptops can claim an impressive 27 hours of normal use battery life, with 40+ hours of video playback.

The LCD displays can also run at a refresh rate of 1Hz to 120Hz, giving you longer battery life on static images but smoothness during faster motion - the OLEDs run at 20Hz - 120Hz. You can also do a bit of gaming on this machine, with the much-improved onboard graphics of Panther Lake able to play many games at up to 1080p with medium detail settings, depending on the configuration you buy. All this and, of course, you get the stunning aluminum-framed build quality that is the signature of XPS machines.

The new machines also see the return of physical F keys, more sculpted keycaps, and a new texture on the haptic touchpad that makes it easier to tell where the touchpad starts and ends. These are all fixes to issues that users had identified with more recent XPS-equivalent models from Dell.

The Dell XPS 14 2026 price is $1,649.99 and the Dell XPS 16 2026 price is $1,849.99. These prices are for initial launch configurations that will be available from Jan 6, 2026 (tomorrow) but Dell hasn't detailed exactly what specs you'll get for those prices. Other configurations will be available later in the year.

Dell has also said it will be bringing the XPS name to a wider range of laptops than before, with a new 13-inch model (above) already shown to us - a model that apparently didn't even exist just 90 days prior to the briefing where we saw this prototype.

All in all, it might finally be time to upgrade my six-year-old Dell XPS 15…