You’ll find dozens of varieties of laptops, but the most fiercely competitive class barely registers at Best Buy, Costco, or vendors’ websites: 14-inch business systems bought in bulk for corporate fleets. Dell’s enterprise flagship, the Latitude 9450, has been replaced by a new Dell Pro 14 Premium (starts at $1,899; $2,679.27 as tested), which brings a lot of what we’re no longer supposed to call “XPS” flavor to the C-suite. It’s a sleek and capable slimline, but it doesn’t edge the legendary Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 as our business-class Editors’ Choice award holder.
Design: One Brand to Rule Them All
The Texas PC titan is replacing its venerable Latitude, Inspiron, and other brands with just the name Dell plus various combinations of Pro, Plus, Premium, Max, Deluxe, and Bodacious. (OK, I threw in those last two.) Latitudes are now Dell Pros and Precision workstations Dell Pro Max.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Modestly billed as “the world’s most premium commercial laptop,” the Dell Pro 14 Premium starts at $1,899 ($550 less than the Latitude 9450) with an Intel Core Ultra 5 236V processor, 16GB of memory, a skimpy 256GB solid-state drive, and a copy of Windows 11 Pro. Our test unit rang up at $2,679.27—though IT buyers will likely pay less per unit—with an eight-core, vPro manageability-enabled Core Ultra 7 268V chip, the max 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS non-touch display.
Dell says a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel touch screen with the tandem OLED technology it premiered in the latest Dell XPS 13 is coming soon. Models with 5G mobile broadband to supplement their Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth connectivity are also coming soon. All the company’s business PCs come with three years of next-business-day on-site service.
The Pro 14 Premium is a smidge heavier than the 2.17-pound X1 Carbon but easily qualifies as an ultraportable at 2.52 pounds. Its magnesium case measures 0.71 by 12.3 by 8.5 inches. Another corporate stalwart, the HP EliteBook 1040 G11, is 0.41 by 12.4 by 8.7 inches and 2.57 pounds. The Dell shows some flex if you grasp the screen corners but none if you mash the keyboard, flanked by speakers on either side.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Except for an SD or microSD flash card slot, the Pro has all the ports you could wish for. On either side of the system, you’ll find a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port suitable for the compact AC adapter. The left side also holds an HDMI monitor port and an audio jack, while the right adds a USB 3.2 Type-A port and a mini (wedge) security lock slot.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Using the Dell Pro 14 Premium: Classy Camera, Compromised Keyboard
Dell’s webcam provides face recognition for Windows Hello logins and presence detection, turning the screen off and on as you leave and return and dimming it if you look away. I appreciate that its sliding privacy shutter is on the top edge of the screen instead of the front. I also enjoy its sharp 4K stills and 1440p videos—they’re well-lit and colorful, with clear details.
The camera supports Windows’ Studio Effects auto framing and background blur. For a second Windows Hello option, a fingerprint reader is built into the power button at the top right of the keyboard.
Speaking of the keyboard, Dell flaunts its mini LED backlighting, which saves battery power (though PCMag runs its laptop battery test with keyboard backlighting off); the keys are not the brightest I’ve seen, but they’re more than bright enough.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The keyboard has the flat lattice design seen on 13- and 14-inch XPS laptops, which looks sharp but isn’t particularly comfortable. Its typing feel is more like a tablet’s keyboard cover or almost as bad as an on-screen virtual keyboard: shallow and unresponsive, with a nagging uncertainty about whether you’re hitting the right keys. I can manage a decent speed on these keys, but I make considerably more than my usual number of typos.
Also, while you’ll find dedicated Home and End keys on the top row, Page Up and Page Down are relegated to the Fn key plus up and down arrow keys. The latter two are half-size and squeezed between the left and right arrows in a row rather than the more comfortable inverted T; the former is the bane of my laptop-reviewing life. The large, buttonless touchpad is more successful, with a nice glide and light, quiet click; it also shows video and mic on/off and screen-share icons during Zoom and Microsoft Teams calls.
The 16:10 screen nails it, too. The display’s 1200p resolution is nothing to write home about, but its fine details are crisp, and its viewing angles are wide. The screen’s brightness and contrast are ample, and its colors are rich and well-saturated, with clean instead of dingy white backgrounds.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Audio from the dual speakers is fairly loud but somewhat hollow. The speakers get boomy at top volume but pleasant at more moderate settings. Their bass is minimal, but the speakers’ mids and highs are punchy, and you can make out overlapping tracks. As for preloaded apps, Dell provides software to centralize system updates and support. Thanks to its Intel Core Ultra 200V CPU, the Pro 14 Premium is also a Copilot+ laptop, giving it access to the full suite of Copilot AI tools in Windows.
Testing the Dell Pro 14 Premium: A Competitive Contender
We primarily pitted the Dell Pro 14 Premium against two of its 14-inch enterprise archrivals, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition and the HP EliteBook 1040 G11. Two more comparative laptops hail from the consumer side of the aisle: The Acer Swift 14 AI AMD provides an alternative to Intel, while the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition provides a larger 15.3-inch display.
Productivity, Content Creation, and AI Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC’s storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoding tool HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Creators rates a PC’s image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25. Geekbench AI is one of the first AI processing benchmarks, measuring image and text classification, among other AI tasks.
The Dell landed in the middle of a deeply capable pack (all five laptops easily cleared the 5,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for office apps). It didn’t shine in the CPU tests but took second behind Acer and its near-workstation-class Ryzen AI processor in Photoshop. These results indicate decent but not class-leading performance, which is acceptable for the intended corporate fleet audience rather than the average consumer.
Graphics Tests
We challenge laptops’ graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad’s regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance.
Even the best integrated graphics silicon is no match for the discrete GPU of a gaming or creator laptop. All these systems will be fine for basic image editing and video streaming, though only occasional or casual gaming—think Solitaire, not Skyrim.
Battery and Display Tests
We test each laptop’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and Windows software to measure a screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Pro 14 Premium had the longest battery life in the group and one of the brightest screens, though its color coverage didn’t match that of the two Lenovo laptops. However, this screen is more than adequate for business applications and enjoying Netflix or YouTube.
Verdict: Dell Shops Will Be Delighted
Dell’s Pro 14 Premium would flirt with a higher score if it came with a better keyboard. As is—and at roughly $350 more than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an 1800p OLED to the Dell’s 1200p IPS screen—it must settle for four stars and a thumbs up. This is Dell’s best business laptop yet, but the Carbon is the best laptop in the world.
Like What You’re Reading?
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links.
By clicking the button, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy.
You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
About Eric Grevstad
Contributing Editor
