This Shouldn’t Be Dell’s Best Laptop - Dell Inspiron 16 Plus

Dell, Dell, Dell... Alex used to fawn over you. Every XPS seemed to be better than the last and whenever someone wanted to buy a new laptop, it was such an easy recommendation. Then they started making odd design choices and raising prices until we had to put our foot down and say "The XPS is dead." Luckily, they have their new Inspiron 16, which puts upgradeability first! With decent specs and a great keyboard but some intense heat, can Dell get back on track?

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CHAPTERS
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0:00 You good, bro?
0:32 Unboxing and IO
1:46 Givin it a touch
2:26 Sponsor - MotionGrey
2:58 Weight and display impressions/LABS results
4:55 Specs
5:59 Keyboard and trackpad
6:39 Gaming impressions and extreme heat levels
7:50 Speaker and webcam impressions
9:09 Teardown and battery life
11:16 Overall thoughts
11:50 Outro

[dgschrei]

53°C on the keyboard .... So it's literally an illegal product. Maximum allowable surface temperature for consumer electronics according to IEC62368-1 for parts that are touched longer than 1 minute continuously is 48°C. You shouldn't gloss over this. Dell is literally selling an unsafe product here and they are not the only ones. Notebook manufacturers have been playing fast and loose with the surface heat regulations for a long time now.

[txcforever]

Sorry, but 100C on idle and 56C outside temp around the keyboard with a light game like Rocket League are unacceptable. In my country during the summer this would probably crash from overheating just by using it with the AC off.

How does it produce such temperatures without doing anything heavy?

[FRAMEDSKATEKREW]

dude wth im so sick of them using the same 300 nits display on everything
I dont expect 1000 nits but at least 500, thats the point where it feels like colors really pop out

[Stealth]

Dell's always been like that. Some really cool/good decisions along with some of the dumbest engineering possible. One of the downsides of having 20 different departments all working on a single product with financials being the most important thing.

[ruudlaff]

I have this with a 3060 in it from my employer…and it sounds like a goddamn spaceship taking off as soon as it gets even the tiniest amount of load.

[pdblouin]

Wow if I bought this without doing research I'd be so annoyed with HDMI 1.4 (even though I won't be buying a laptop in the foreseeable future, it's a good warning)

[willkrska]

Buyer beware! The Inspiron 16 Plus is notorious for their failing hinges. The plasic will fatigue abnormally quickly, and this can oftentimes damage the display controller board/cable in the process.

[aymanhassan]

So you are recommending laptop which
1- overheat from daily usage to the point that it's unsafe to touch
2- have 60tdp 4060
3- 300 nits screen
Just because it has a spare ssd slot and sodimm ram?

[Shells]

I used an Inspiron about a year back as it was lended to me for college. Honestly, I was surprised by how nice the screen was and really enjoyed using it.

[narwhal]

As someone that just buys used laptops whenever I need to upgrade, I've thought Dell's other models such as the Latitude and Inspiron have looked better on paper than the XPS for the last 4 years.

I paid $300 for my Latitude 3440, and it came with 8gb ddr4 (that I was able to upgrade) and a 256gb nvme SSD (that I was able to upgrade). Sure, it doesn't feel as premium as an XPS would, but at least I have I/O other than USB C, Dell.

[gargamel]

I bought a Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 3 years ago - actually was the first Dell Inspiron 16 Plus model. Things I will warn you about ahead of time:

#1 The Hinges! Actually the hinges are quite nice, but what they are anchored to, which is the plastic interior on the back of the lid, will eventually deteriorate (after about 2 years when the warranty runs out) and possibly crack the screen. If you are lucky enough that the screen isn't damaged, you can buy a lid and hinge assembly and replace it yourself. This is a common laptop issue not specific to Dell, but it is present in many Dell laptops including INSPIRON MODELS! To prevent this, you can take the laptop apart and use a screwdriver to loosen the torque on the hinges slightly (makes it a little easier to open with one hand, but will probably void the warranty), or use 1 hand always right in the middle, or 2 hands equally on the sides to open your laptop to balance the load on those hinge anchor points.

#2 Trackpad - this has been a widespread problem with Dell Laptops lately, but specifically with the Inspiron 16 Plus models. The trackpad over the past few years has not been properly grounded resulting in skipping/laggy/jumpy trackpad operation. This can be easily fixed with a little piece of wire and a soldering iron, but will most certainly end your warranty. The alternative is, Dell Service will open multiple tickets and replace your trackpad several times as they cannot figure out how to fix this problem. Ask me how I know! Or just search the Inspiron forums for "Trackpad" and see the plethora of posts about this problem.

#3 Thermal Paste - whatever they use isn't sufficient for laptops that stay in the 80-100C range all the time. I absolutely recommend Arctic MX-4 which has excellent durability in this range. There's also some good cooling pads with powerful fans that can sufficiently cool this laptop.

#4 Power Throttle - Mine came with a NASTY power throttle, after a few minutes of gaming, my CPU performance would drop to a mere 15%, game would get super laggy, but thermals were not the cause. Turns out the 11th Gen tiger lake CPUs are set to drop way down in power levels after their turbo boost expired, hobbling performance. Easily fixed with ThrottleStop, but it's not something that's obvious. Maybe they've corrected this since 2021 with the newer CPUs? Let's hope.

Hoping my Inspiron 16 tips are helpful if you are looking at this laptop. I've had mine for 3 years and it's fantastic, but I've had to repair several things myself on it (obviously from the comments above), something that a lot of people who watch this channel are comfortable doing. To Dell's credit, the design is very easy to get into and repair, but their tech service people do NOT want you repairing this yourself, and their warranty is not self-repair-friendly whatsoever. Just don't leave any permanent evidence that you opened it and you'll be just fine.

[mr.peanut]

1:32 As someone who works in a pc repair shop, having a dc barrel jack is really nice. They tend to be more durable and much easier to replace than type c chargers. When I type c connector breaks, you hyperthermia have to find someone how can solder a new connector on (which is much easier said then done) or you need a new motherboard. Barrel jacks are usually way more repairable, and can generally be done by anyone with an ifixit kit in under 30 minutes

[stanislasflipo]

48Hz is for watching movies at 24fps without judder while preserving battery life, more laptops should offer it.

[gamiepie]

i had a dell Inspiron laptop which had several issues in less than a month and Dell replaced almost all the parts in the system and later dell replaced my laptop to another upgraded Inspiron, that had bios chip issue and again replacement of another upgraded Inspiron which was a factory defect and again a replacement of dell g15, in the g15 motherboard was blown up and another replacement of another g15 which was a factory defect. During the next replacement, dell voided my warranty so now I've filed an FIR, Legal notice, high court case against Dell. It's annoying guys, i honestly don't recommend dell's Inspiron or g15 laptops as they suck. Many of my friends faced the same issue. I request y'all to be aware about what you're gonna purchase for yourself or your kids. I legit don't want anyone to suffer like me. Especially for the poor people who can barely afford a laptop like me. I had to pay a lot for filing the case against dell as well. Now i don't have laptop for my work at all, im just using my OnePlus 6 for my work purpose which sucks.

[entinator]

As someone who got an Inspiron in 2018 it always felt to me like it's essentially an XPS without the consumer sales pitch.
It's also one of the very few modern laptops that actually has a decent port selection instead of just a couple of type c's.

[leonardoterra]

I got one last month. Specs are - 32GB RAM DDR5, RTX4060 8GB VRAM DDR6, SSD 1TB, ULTRA 7 155H. It's running very well here. I use it for Data Science with Anaconda, Power BI, Excel, Tableau and other stuff. For games I didn't expect it to run so well. I was looking for a gaming laptop but this one has roughly the same specs as a new Alienware M2 and it's way cheaper. I've been running Starfield and Modern Wafare 3. When it's not plugged it runs silently but hot with GPU around 70c and CPU around 75-80c. For me that's good. The only issues that I had were related to when the laptop is plugged while gaming. The temp of the CPU goes to 85-90 and sometimes over 100c and I didn't like that. So I changed the CPU clock to run at 80% when plugged and it worked very well. Temperatures went back to 75-80c and didn't cause anything with the games. They keep running above 60 FPS with specs around Medium-High which is enough for me (I got a PS5 as well). I'm happy with the product and hope to keep it for the next 3-4 years.

[JohnneyleeRollins]

thank you for not saying macbook in the title

[Piketom]

The Inspiron and Latitude lines from Dell are their best products. They may not have the flare of something like the XPS but they are far more reasonably priced, have much better IO, and many of the interior components are upgradeable/repairable. If your wifi fails, just swap in a new card. If you need more storage, just replace the drive. If you need more ram, just add more. These things benefit individual consumers but they also show that Dell was thinking about larger scale deployments when designing the computer. In house IT can do most of the needed repairs and maintenance on these machines. It looks like the battery might even be replaceable. If any of those components failed in my MacBook pro, the computer would be a $4K piece of dead aluminum.

[HedgehogYK]

1:31 I noticed that too. My model 5620 (reverted to Windows 10 with bit locker and PTT turned off-you're welcome) has the same barrel connector as an alternative charge option.

[KyleDavis]

My Lenovo laptop came with a type-c charger but has the option for a barrel jack. So I guess it's not unheard of.