Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024)

Verdict

The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) is a surprisingly brilliant Windows laptop with fantastic performance, excellent battery life and a solid display. It may not look as sleek as more expensive Snapdragon X Elite-powered choices, but this is otherwise a marvellous choice that should be on your radar.

Introduction

The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) is perhaps the most surprising of all the Snapdragon laptops currently on the market.

For £1049/$899.99, it’s a more affordable entry into the world of Arm-based Windows than the likes of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and Dell’s own premium XPS 13 (2024) with the lower end Snapdragon X Plus chip inside, 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD in the sample I have here. There’s also a 14-inch QHD+ 60Hz IPS touchscreen display, solid port selection and fantastic efficiency helping to make this quite the surprise package.

I’ve been testing the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) to see just how well it stacks up against its Elite-powered brethren, and now the verdict’s in.

Design and Keyboard

• Well made, although with a coarser finish
• Decent port selection
• Tactile keyboard, but rougher trackpad

The Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024), being a slightly more affordable option, lacks the sleeker finish of the Surface Laptop 7 or new XPS 13 (2024). It’s still well-made, with a brushed aluminium chassis in a cool blue colour that also looks great. However, in places its finishing can feel a little coarse against the smoothness of its dearer siblings.

A weight of 1.4kg is on the heavier side for an ultrabook-style laptop, although it’s still more than portable enough for slotting into a bag without much thought. This is also still a reasonably slender laptop with a 14.69mm thickness, although lacks the cutting-edge finess of pricier choices. Nonetheless, it still looks the part.

Being slightly bigger provides the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) with the benefit of a more rounded port selection than its rivals, with the left side containing a pair of USB4-capable Type-C ports with power delivery and display out capabilities and a Micro SD reader, while the right side houses a singular USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port and a 3.5mm combo jack.

Its keyboard is also solid too, with a short throw distance, but snappy travel that felt excellent for typing all manner of articles over a couple of working weeks. It’s a sensible layout too, with a more compact 65 percent option with a function row and arrow keys in the bottom right corner. The top right corner is home to a fingerprint reader for convenient Windows Hello integration.

In-keeping with the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024)’s coarser chassis, the trackpad feels as if it’s made of the same material, lacking the slick and smooth finish of Gorilla Glass trackpads found on the likes of the XPS 13 (2024) and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024).

Display and Speakers

• Deep blacks and detailed images
• Solid, if unremarkable, colour accuracy
• Full-bodied speakers

The Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024), on paper at least, has slightly skimped out on its display against the likes of Lenovo’s Legion Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024) and the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge by opting to go for a more standard 14-inch IPS panel with a tidy QHD+ (2560×1600) resolution. This panel is also touch-enabled, and comes with the modern 16:10 aspect ratio.

However, looks can be quite deceiving. The IPS screen on the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) is excellent on the whole, with deep blacks, solid enough contrast and a perfect temperature coming out on my colorimeter, with respective results of 0.09, 1930:1 and 6300K.

It’s also quite vibrant with a measured peak brightness of 458.7 nits according to my colorimeter which sits in the middle of both the XPS 13 (2024) and the Surface Laptop 7, and means you can use the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) outdoors if you so choose.

Where this display isn’t quite as top-notch is with its colour accuracy. An sRGB result of 97% means near-perfect representation of mainstream colours, although both the 74% DCI-P3 and 75% Adobe RGB results are below the requisite 80% level for us to recommend this display for more colour-sensitive, creative workloads.

The Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) comes with an interesting speaker arrangement, with a pair of upwards-firing drivers on either side of the keyboard, and two downwards-firing drivers on the laptop’s underside. With this arrangement, it destroys laptops with a twin-speaker arrangement by offering a much fuller sound with more volume and far more detail on the low-end. They’re reasonably solid, all things considered.

Performance

• Surprisingly brisk performance
• 3D workloads aren’t the strongest
• Speedy SSD

It’s what’s inside the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) that’s most interesting, as it’s one of only a few current laptops from a range of manufacturers that use the Snapdragon X Plus chip. This is a 10 core SoC against the 12 cores inside the Elite model.

In theory, this would lead to lesser performance against other ultrabooks with the Elite chips, although its results in both Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 6 in single and multi-core areas are on par with its beefier brother, save for a few points. This translates also to zippy performance for productivity workloads such as writing articles with loads of Google Chrome tabs open and streaming music from Spotify without a hitch. The Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) can also be used comfortably for photo editing in Photoshop too, and more intensive workloads to boot.

As much as the Adreno GPUs in both the Plus and Elite are slightly different, that doesn’t sit with the result that the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) served up in the 3D Mark Time Spy benchmark. Okay, its 1871 score isn’t the most remarkable, but it’s exactly in line with those found in the Snapdragon X Elite laptops I’ve tested.

The Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024)’s 1TB SSD is also a high point, with some of the best and fastest speeds of any laptop I’ve tested. With measured reads of 6185.31MB/s and writes of 4793.16MB/s respectively, it’s easily the quickest of all the Arm-based Windows laptops I’ve used, and even gives some top-performing gaming laptops a run for its money both in speed and capacity. 16GB of RAM also helps along its sensibility for more intense workloads, and for providing a decent bit of headroom for productivity tasks, too.

Software

• Proper Windows 11 with minimal bloatware
• Windows Studio effects for webcam are nifty
• Prism translation layer offers solid compatibility with some small hitches

The Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) doesn’t spring any real surprises on the front of software, choosing to go for full-fat Windows 11, and coming with very little in the way of pre-installed software. The only thing of note here is MyDell where you can toggle basic settings for the display and battery power management, for instance.

It’s on the AI side of the equation where things get interesting thanks to the presence of that Snapdragon X Plus SoC. With this in mind, there are a range of functions baked into Windows apps, including generative AI smarts in the Photos and Paint apps to add some razzle dazzle to your pictures with filters, or to change the style of any art you make into anythihng from an oil painting to a watercolour.

There is also, of course, the Copilot key which is found on the bottom row of the keyboard, and acts as a wake button for Microsoft’s AI assistant. With it, you can ask for information, get feedback on an idea, or all manner of other things. While this may not be the main draw of the Copilot+ PC, it’s the cornerstone for its existence.

The most useful element of the whole Copilot+ PC thing though is the Windows Studio effects that are now present with the laptop’s webcam and accessible in the bottom right corner of the desktop where you access Wi-Fi, battery life and volume settings. These can do everything from auto framing to ensuring you maintain eye contact even if you aren’t looking at the screen. That’s particularly eerie at first, but works in a similar way to Nvidia’s AI tools that I’ve experienced before in webcams including the Elgato Facecam MK.2.

Microsoft’s Recall feature is still missing however. This would have taken screenshots every few seconds of use so you could look back and remember things you’ve looked at, even if you didn’t manually bookmark them in a browser or take a manual screenshot using the Snipping Tool. It will be available, although only for Windows Insiders at the moment due to security concerns.

Of course, being Arm-based, the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) has some minor compatibility issues against x86-based ultrabooks as apps have had to be translated to Arm through Microsoft’s Prism translation layer. For the most part, I had few issues with compatibility in running a range of benchmark software, as well as Photoshop and similar apps. The PCMark benchmark app didn’t run fully on Arm-based Windows in my testing, though, and there have been reports that games such as Dirt 5 and some VPN apps also refuse to load from elsewhere, too.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 16 hours 33 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting between one and two working days.

One of the major benefits of these Arm-based Windows laptops is their fantastic efficiency and longevity, and the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) is no different. While it may only have a 54Whr cell, in our video loop test with the brightness at the customary 150 nits, this laptop lasted for 16 hours 33 minutes, which means you’ll be able get nearly two full working days out of the Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) before needing to reach for the charger.

Thanks to the 65W USB-C charger, you won’t be waiting around for too long for this laptop to charge either. Getting it to 50% took just 28 minutes, while waiting around for a full charge took 75 minutes. Against Windows’ own estimate of 110 minutes, that’s fantastic.

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