The backlighting has two settings, neither of which is particularly bright, but they do help with legibility in a dim room.
The keyboard has well-separated, backlit keys with a nice tactile snap, just a hint of texture and about a millimeter of travel. Homing bars make the down arrow and Esc key easier to find by feel. The Acer Aspire 5 is a little better and the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5’s 400-nit OLED panel outclasses it in every way, but compared to the low-res, washed-out screens on many cheap laptops, the Inspiron’s is a relief. Like most cheap laptops, the color gamut is limited and backlighting is a bit dim even at peak brightness (which Dell claims is 250 nits) it was a little underpowered in a bright room.
That size and resolution combo are good for getting work done, especially in side-by-side windows, without blurry text. The 14-inch, 1920 x 1080 WVA display is competent but not amazing that alone is a victory at this price. The integrated graphics can handle the occasional light photo or video editing work, but don’t expect to run modern games. I regularly juggled 30-40 browser tabs, Slack, Spotify and several other open programs without a hitch, though the CPU fan did spin up audibly sometimes. The XPS 13 is smaller, lighter, fancier and has a much nicer screen, but you can get a $500 laptop that’s as powerful as a $1,400 laptop - something inconceivable even a year or two ago. These are the same basic guts as a $1,400 Dell XPS 13. There’s room for improvement almost everywhere - the screen’s a bit dim, the chassis flexes a bit and the speakers could use some oomph, but we didn’t hate any part of it, especially for $500.Īn 11th-generation Intel Core i3 CPU (four cores, eight threads) and 8GB of RAM means the Inspiron 14 will be able to handle normal office or school multitasking much more effectively than any cheap laptop from a couple of years ago, and the 256GB SSD is fast and big enough that you won’t run out of space right away. It even has a fingerprint reader, sliding webcam cover and a USB-C port that supports power delivery and video output, which is rare in this price range. It has surprisingly powerful guts, an excellent keyboard and trackpad, a serviceable screen, all-day battery life and pretty good build quality. The Dell Inspiron 14 has the best combination of power, battery life, usability and features - and the fewest major flaws - of any sub-$500 laptop we found.
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