MacBook Pro 16 Vs Dell XPS 15 7590: LCD Vs OLED — First-Look Review

After some hands-on time with the spanking-new MacBook Pro 16, it’s ripe for a side-by-side with Dell’s badass XPS 15.

This story has been updated: please see the more recent review.

To set the stage, let’s start with the Dell XPS 15 7590 OLED, which I have in-house. Note that there’s a pretty big price gap between the XPS and MBP 16 – in Dell’s favor.

Dell XPS 15 7590 OLED config:

• 15.6-inch 4K 3,840-by-2160 AMOLED display, 500-nit brightness
• Intel Core i9-9980HK 8-core "Coffee Lake" CPU, turbo boost up to 5 GHz
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 mobile GPU
• 1TB Toshiba NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD
• 32GB DDR4-2666MHz
• Machined aluminum and carbon fiber palm rest
• 4.5 pounds
• Price: $2,649.99

A similar config for the 16-inch MacBook Pro uses:

• 16-inch 3072‑by‑1920 pixel IPS LCD, 500-nit brightness
• Intel Core i9-9980HK 8-core "Coffee Lake" CPU, turbo boost up to 5 GHz
• AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with support for up to two 6K external displays
• 1TB SSD
• 32GB DDR4-2666MHz
• Machined aluminum
• 4.3 pounds
• Price: $3,499.00

Keyboard:

Yes, the 16-inch MacBook Pro’s keyboard is a regression back to the scissor-switch keyboards of yore. But that’s fine because the old keyboard design proves to be better than the newfangled Butterfly keyboard on the MacBook Pro 15.

I spent some time doing comparison typing on the latest 13-inch MacBook Pro (with the latest Butterfly keyboard) and the new MBP 16: the difference was stark.

Stark enough that you might want to get the MBP 16 just for the keyboard if that matters a lot to you. In short, better travel and tactile feedback translate into a more pleasant typing experience.

Dell didn’t – and doesn’t – have a keyboard problem. It’s basically the same keyboard Dell has been using for a while on the XPS 15. It’s nothing to rave about (the keys can feel narrow coming from other laptops) but it gets the job done. And the carbon fiber palm rest is a great touch, setting it apart from the pack.

Display:

This is huge for both laptops. For Apple obviously because it’s upped the display size to 16 inches from 15.4 inches and shrunk the bezels in the process. For Dell because it comes with a drop-dead gorgeous AMOLED display.

From a pleasing-to-the-eye standpoint, Dell wins.

AMOLED displays are a very different animal from LCDs. Colors pop, blacks are really black, contrast is astronomically higher, and AMOLEDs offer the potential for extending battery life by turning off pixels in dark mode. All of the above is why the world’s best smartphones now sport AMOLED displays.

Dell claims an astronomical 100,000:1 contrast ratio. Dell also claims 100 percent coverage of the Adobe RGB color space. Testing has also shown that the DCI-P3 color coverage is 97.6 percent and sRGB is 99 percent.

The jury is still out on the new 16-inch MacBook Pro but like the 15-inch model, it is a DCI-P3-rated display.

The upshot, it’s up against some pretty stiff competition with XPS 7590.

Performance:

This matters a lot of course. The two are pretty evenly matched on CPUs. The top-end processor choice is identical.

The performance of the AMD Pro 5500M is said to be up to 2.1 x better than the old Radeon RX 560X.

Dell’s Core i9-9980HK and GTX 1650 generally get high marks on performance though some reviews cite thermal limitations with that high-powered combo.

Chassis / weight / design:

Apple wins on weight. Despite boasting a bigger display and longer (front to back) chassis, it’s lighter at 4.3 pounds versus the XPS’ 4.5 pounds. The thickness of both laptops is pretty much the same.

Design comes down to personal preference. The 16-inch MacBook Pro design is an improvement over the 15-inch because of the smaller bezels = better screen to body ratio.