This is the best deal on a laptop I’ve seen all year. It’s one of the few Black Friday laptop deals that actually lives up to the hype, the kind that I hope for at every major sale event.
I’m talking about the new price of the Dell 14 Plus. Dell has dropped the price of the Dell 14 Plus to a new low: $500. I’ve been watching the price of this laptop all year, and this is rock bottom. This is a premium-tier laptop selling for a budget price. When I first tested the laptop earlier this year, it was only sold in high-end configurations, with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, 32 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage, and sold for $1,100.
As good as this laptop was, I didn’t think it was quite worth that much. But I did hope that Dell would drop the price. That’s exactly what happened. Now a laptop with great specs, excellent battery life, high resolution display, and quality touchpad is on sale for the price of a cheap laptop. They are easy features to compromise on, but they’re also what makes the average budget laptop feel so cheap. This configuration is currently on sale for $650, down from around $800, and it’s well worth the money.
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Photograph: Luke Larsen
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Photograph: Luke Larsen
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Photograph: Luke Larsen
This lower-tier $500 configuration really takes it to another level. It comes with the same 2560 x 1600 display, but drops the other specs slightly. You get an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage. These are still really impressive specs for $500. The Core Ultra 5 is slightly slower than the Core Ultra 7, but you still get the efficient, long-lasting performance of Intel’s highest end V-series chips. You simply won’t find another $500 laptop that feels this nice.
In fact, it’s the same price Dell normally sells its entry-level Windows laptop, the Dell 14, despite it coming with a lower resolution panel and a much worse Intel U-series processor that isn’t nearly as powerful or long-lasting.
In addition to all that, the Dell 14 Plus comes with a good mix of ports, including a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port, one USB-A (5 Gbps), an HDMI 2.1 port, and an audio jack. It’s also reasonably portable at 0.67 inches thick and 3.4 pounds. It’s not as thin as a MacBook Air, but it’s not much thicker than the 14-inch MacBook Pro. My only complaints about this laptop are the plastic (and somewhat thick) bezels around the screen, which make it look cheap. I also wish it had Windows Hello facial recognition, but the fingerprint reader built into the power button works well.
All in all, I can’t imagine a better option for both remote workers and college students. Trust me: don’t buy another Windows laptop around this price for Black Friday this year. You’ll need to act fast. This is Black Friday-only Doorbuster deal, meaning it’ll be gone starting Saturday and will only be around as long as supplies last. If you miss out on it, you can still opt for the $650 configuration, which gets you that faster processor and twice the storage.
