Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 review: an impressive freshman laptop debut

Dell has undergone its biggest PC rebrand in years, completely revamping how it names and positions its various laptops and desktops. Simply put, the old branding was a bit confusing in finding exactly the PC that would meet your needs and your price point. Sticking with laptops, the Inspiron was aimed at mainstream users and included both budget laptops and midrange machines. The XPS represented the most premium Dell laptops, many of which have shown up on our list of best laptops, and they offered the performance demanded by “prosumers” like creators. From there, a demanding user could move up to the company’s Precision line of professional workstations, while businesses had the Latitude lineup to consider.

The company has now streamlined its branding. Now, there are just three main PC brands, Dell (mainstream), Dell Pro (professional-grade productivity), and Dell Pro Max (workstation-level performance), each with Base, Plus, and Premium tiers. So, a mainstream consumer — this site’s primary audience — will be most interested in the Dell Base, Dell Plus, and Dell Premium machines. That should make it easier to match price with capabilities without having to sort through a number scheme that was sometimes hard to follow.

The first in the new lineup to hit the market are Dell Plus machines, and I’m reviewing the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1. It straddles the fence between midrange and premium prices, while appealing most to users with demanding productivity and media consumption needs and who don’t need the extra performance of a discrete GPU. The Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 doesn’t break any new ground, but it offers up a solid convertible 2-in-1 that enjoys a spectacular mini-LED display.

Specs and pricing

Pricing is a key point in evaluating this new Dell lineup, and as mentioned, the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 starts at a midrange price and moves up into premium territory. The base model is $1,000, with an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 16.0-inch FHD+ IPS display – that’s the only configuration with that chipset. To configure more RAM and storage or to choose the QHD+ mini-LED display requires selecting a different chipset. For example, with a Core Ultra 7 258V, you get 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and the mini-LED display, for $1,450. That’s the configuration I reviewed. Upgrading to the fastest Core Ultra 9 288V increases the price to $1,600.

That makes the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 competitive with the Apple MacBook Air 15, which starts at the same $1,000 with less storage and then is more expensive when full upgraded. Several other Windows laptops are around the same price as the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1, like the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 that seems aimed at the same kind of user who wants a nicely built convertible 2-in-1.

Design

The Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 introduces a new streamlined design that’s clearly focused on minimalism. The lines are incredibly simple, a lot more akin to an Apple MacBook than some of Dell’s previous Inspiron designs. The Dell logo on the lid is subdued to the point that it’s hard to see, and outside of the keyboard, the dark or light blue color way is consistent across the entire laptop. There’s no chrome or other adornment, and while I personally like the no-nonsense look, it doesn’t really stand out. HP also revamped its lineup, and its new OmniBook Ultra 14 is an example of a laptop that has just enough aesthetic splashes to take on more of a personality.

The all-aluminum build is very robust, with only a bit of give in the keyboard deck to detract from a completely solid feel in hand. I’ll give the OmniBooks a tiny bit of an advantage here, and then the MacBook Air 15 offers up the highest overall impression of quality — but it’s not a major difference. The Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 is a 360-degree convertible, so the lid swivels around into tablet mode. That means it’s necessarily stiffer than I like, requiring both hands to open the lid but keeping everything in place. That’s particularly apparent in tent mode, where the hinge has to add a bit of extra stability. Overall, it’s a very good build that Dell has subjected to several tests for robustness, and I’m not surprised that it passed all of them.

Unlike Dell’s older generation XPS laptops that had the thinnest display bezels around, the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1’s bezels are a little thick on top and — again, because it’s a convertible 2-in-1 with a more complex hinge — in the bottom chin. It’s therefore a rather large laptop in width and depth, but it’s reasonably thin. It’s also heavy at 4.52 pounds, and some other laptops are quite a bit lighter. The Acer Swift 16 AI, for example, comes in at just 3.37 pounds. It’s a clamshell and so saves some ounces there, but it still fits in a 16.0-inch display. The Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 isn’t quite the thin-and-light machine that some other productivity-oriented 16-inch laptops represent. That’s most relevant in that it means you won’t likely be holding it in your hand when using it to write on the display with the available active pen. For that, you’ll want a lightweight tablet like the Microsoft Surface Pro 11.

I think the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 is a great new design to kick off the new branding. It doesn’t break new ground, but it doesn’t really need to.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard is something of a mixed bag for me. To begin with, Dell fits in a numeric keypad, which I think will matter most to a relative handful of people. Its major downside is that it steals space from the rest of the keyboard, resulting in a bit of a cramped layout that required some time to get used to as I wrote this review. The keycaps are also a little smaller than I like. The OmniBook keyboard and Apple’s Magic Keyboard are better. The Dell switches are light and snappy, and if I have any complaint with them, it’s that the bottoming action is a little abrupt. But overall, it’s not fatiguing and it gets the job done.

The mechanical touchpad was large enough, although there’s space for a slightly larger version. More and more laptops are offering haptic touchpads at these price points, but I suspect that Dell is reserving that feature for its Dell Premium lineup. I like haptic touchpads a lot more, with the best example being Apple’s Force Touch touchpad with Force Click functionality. HP also has great haptic touchpads. Maybe Dell will reconsider in the next generation, because while the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1’s mechanical touchpad was okay, it’s a lost opportunity to be better.

Of course, as a convertible 2-in-1, the display is touch-enabled. It also supports an active pen, which works well for writing and drawing on the display. As mentioned above, this makes for a large tablet format, and so you’ll want to place it on a surface when using the pen. It would be way too heavy to hold in hand, but the large display provides for a very nice canvas for digital artwork.

Connectivity and webcam

The Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 is closer to a thin-and-light machine in one respect: connectivity. There’s a decent mix of modern and legacy ports, but much larger and thicker 16-inch laptops (think gaming laptops and workstations) have more. Three things stand out as disappointing. First, only one USB-C port supports Thunderbolt 4. Second, the lack of a dedicated charging connection, like Apple’s MagSafe 3, means you give up on of the USB-C ports when plugged in. Third, there’s no SD card reader, which people who want the large display for working with photos would appreciate. Wireless connectivity is fully up-to-date, however, which is a plus.

The webcam is a 1080p version, which has become the new minimum standard. Some laptops, like Apple’s and HP’s, have higher-resolution webcams. The Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 is good enough for videoconference, with good low-light performance. The Intel Lunar Lake chipsets offer Neural Processing Units (NPUs) running at between 40 tera operations per second (TOPS) and 48 TOPS, all of which meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC requirement. That means the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 qualifies as a Copilot+ PC and offers up all of the usual AI features that will run efficiently on-device at reasonable speeds. Dell doesn’t include some of the additional features that other manufacturers provide,

Performance

I’ve reviewed enough Lunar Lake laptops to get a feel for their performance, and so far, they’ve been great chipset for demanding productivity users but not so great for gamers and creators. That’s because their integrated Intel Arc graphics aren’t fast enough for more than older titles or newer titles with graphics turned way down, and they don’t speed up creative tasks like video encoding. But that’s okay, because laptops like the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 aren’t meant as gaming machines and creative workstations. And, Lunar Lake (also known as Core Ultra Series 2) is aimed at making Windows laptops more efficient, not necessarily a lot faster.

The configuration I reviewed came with the Core Ultra 7 258V chipset. Like all Lunar Lake chipsets, it’s an 8-core/8-thread part that runs at a moderately fast speed. That’s what differentiates different chipsets, along with slightly faster NPUs. The Core Ultra 5 226V has Intel Arc 130V, while the others have the slightly faster Intel Arc 140V.

In our benchmarks, the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 was in the middle of the of those with the same chipset. That means it’s slower than two important competing chipsets, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Apple’s M4, the latter standing out most for its insanely fast single-core speeds that will make it the fastest for general productivity tasks and photo editing applications that tend to being single-tasking. The M4 also has the fastest graphics, although none of these machines is a bona fide gaming laptop.

You’ll find the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 to be plenty quick for productivity and general computing. That’s a reasonably strong showing given the types of users this laptop is designed for.

Battery life

Dell packed in a relatively small 64 watt-hour battery, where most 16-inch laptops have greater capacity. The Lunar Lake chipset is efficient, but the QHD+ mini-LED display is pretty power-hungry. If battery life is more important to you, then the FHD+ IPS display will net you battery life that’s upwards of twice as long. As we’ll see, the mini-LED panel is pretty great, so that will be an important decision for a lot of users.

As we can see, the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 fell behind our other comparison laptops. Some of those had higher-resolution OLED displays, which are also power-hungry. With just eight hours of web browsing, you’re going to need to carry the power supply with you for extended work away from a plug. Note that we changed our web browsing test because our previous utility was deprecated. The new test seems to produce slightly shorter results, so the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 might be a little better in comparison than the result listed here.

Display and audio

I reviewed the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 with its high-end 16.0-inch 16:10 QHD+ (2560 x 1600) mini-LED display. As we just saw, that option has a significant impact on battery life, but as someone who really appreciates a great display, I notice this one when I pulled it out of the box. Unlike most displays, there’s another touch layer over the usual glass, and maybe that contributed to the interesting “sheen” that I immediately perceived. I like it a lot — it adds some depth to images, or something that’s a little hard to describe. And it’s bright and colorful, with deep blacks that aren’t quite as inky as OLED, but a lot better than IPS. The panel runs at 90Hz, which isn’t as fast as some other recent displays that hit 120Hz, but still providing a more fluid interface than the more pedestrian 60Hz refresh rate.

My Datacolor SpyderPro colorimeter liked this display quite a bit. It’s bright at 460 nits, well above our 300-nit threshold. That’s not as bright as some others, including the mini-LED displays on Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops, but it’s still more than bright enough for most users. It helps quite a bit with high dynamic range (HDR) video, with support for HDR 600. The contrast was excellent at 10,360:1, well above the 1,000:1 threshold we established a few years ago and where most IPS displays fall around. Colors were very wide at 100% sRGB, 92% AdobeRGB, and 100% DCI-P3, which is a lot better than the average IPS panel’s 100%, 75%, and 75%, respectively. That’s also similar to OLED, which has led the pack in terms of color gamut support. Color accuracy wasn’t quite as great, coming in at DeltaE 1.68. We like to see 2.0 or less for productivity and 1.0 or less for creative work. So, that’s still within tolerance for the intended usage.

This is just a lovely display for everything you’ll want to do with this laptop. Productivity work will benefit from black text on white backgrounds, photo editors will appreciate the wide AdobeRGB gamut, and media consumers will enjoy the bright, colorful images. As mentioned above, you can step down to the FHD+ (1920 x 1200) IPS panel to save some money and get better battery life. But if you can swing the mini-LED display, I strongly recommend it.

A great way to introduce a new brand

The Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 is an important laptop for the company, meant to introduce a new brand that convince laptop buyers that although the names have changed, the design and quality remain the same. Dell has made it theoretically easier to buy a laptop, but it was vital to avoid letting the first users down.

I think the Dell Plus 16 2-in-1 does its job. It’s not a perfect laptop, by any means, but it’s reasonably priced given is quality build, and the decision to build around an excellent mini-LED display was a good one. That elevates this laptop into a strong recommendation, while the entry-level display will offer its own advantages.