Dell 14S: Another alternative to the MacBook Air, this time for school

With the new XPS 13, Dell already offers a premium alternative to the extremely successful MacBook Neo. With the Dell 14S, the PC manufacturer is now introducing another new notebook, which also explicitly competes against the Apple laptop and is primarily aimed at students.

14-inch displays with up to 120 Hertz & 2.8K resolution

The Dell 14S was announced today at IFA 2026 in Berlin. With the new notebook, which is offered in various configurations, the American PC manufacturer wants to compete primarily with the Apple MacBook Neo and score points with a larger selection of ports and long battery life. Customers can also choose an optional 2.8K display with a high refresh rate. At the center of the action on the new Dell 14S (DS14270) is a 14-inch LCD panel that has a resolution of either 1920 x 1200 or 2880 x 1800 pixels and, in the second variant, offers a maximum brightness increased to 450 candela and a refresh rate of up to 120 Hertz. The basic version has to make do with 300 candela and 60 hertz. Dell explicitly foregoes a touchscreen in the 14S.

‘Wildcat Lake’ under the hood, lots of ports, big battery

Under the hood, the Intel Core 5 320 or the Intel Core 7 350 are used, which are chips from the new “Wildcat Lake” family. In terms of performance, they lag far behind the previously common Core U series chips, but work more economically and therefore allow longer runtimes. Depending on the model, Dell installs eight or 16 gigabytes of LPDDR5X RAM in single-channel mode, while the PCIe 4.0 SSDs offered here offer capacities of 256 or 512 GB or one terabyte. Compared to the Dell

On the other hand, the Dell 14S is ahead when it comes to battery and variety of connections. The battery is significantly larger at 61.2 watt hours, which should ensure runtimes of up to 21 hours (Netflix streaming with low screen brightness). The Dell 14S also has two USB 3.2-capable Type-C ports, an HDMI output and an analog jack connection on board, while the XPS 13 is very sparsely equipped with two USB-C ports. On the outside, the Dell 14S is of course more of a classic entry-level notebook, so it looks less elegant than the visually appealing devices in the form of the MacBook Neo and Customers then have the choice between four different colors.