Some cheap laptops still try to look and feel like more expensive ones, but the Inspiron 15 doesn’t do that. This is made of plastic, so there’s no question that it’s meant to be a cheap device. The plastics are pretty firm, but I noticed some deck flex in the middle of the keyboard, and the screen can bend in strange ways. The whole thing is made of plastic, so it is also slippery. When the laptop is open, the bottom doesn’t have much grip on the table because the grips on the hinge don’t do much. This makes it easy for the laptop to slide around on a smooth table or desk surface.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much to like about this keyboard. It doesn’t even have a simple white backlight to help you type at night. The keys are just shiny enough that they can be hard to see when they are in places where there isn’t enough light above them.
The up and down arrow keys are also too close together on the keyboard, which makes it hard to use them correctly. Some users may like that this model has a full number pad, which not all 15-inch laptops have (looking at you, 15-inch Surface Laptop 5). Instead, they leave empty space on either side of the keyboard.
Specifications
- Plenty of ports
- Decent price-to-performance ratio
- 120Hz display refresh rate
Where to get Dell Inspiron Laptop, 15.6″?
At least the chassis isn’t too big for a laptop with a 15.6-inch screen. It’s 0.8 by 14.11 by 9.27 inches, which is a little on the thick side, but the laptop only weighs 3.65 pounds, which is about right for its size. The system’s low-power processor and lack of dedicated graphics, which would have needed bigger cooling parts, shouldn’t have made it hard to keep the weight down.
Dell sells the Inspiron 15 in a number of different ways. The laptop will start with a Ryzen 3 3250U quad-core processor, 8GB of DDR4-2400 memory, and a PCIe NVMe 128GB SSD. That goes up to a Ryzen 7 5825U octa-core processor with 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory and 512GB of storage for $799 (though it’s currently on sale for $649).