(Credit: Dell)
I've been using several Copilot+ PCs lately, and Dell's Latitude 7455 is a well-made, high-end enterprise entrant.
Like the other Copilot+ PCs currently in the market, this one is based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X platform and runs various AI-centric applications primarily on the machine itself. Later this year, we should see these features on machines with AMD's Strix Point and Intel's Lunar Lake, but for now, Snapdragon X is the only option.
From a design standpoint, Dell's Latitude 7455 holds up nicely against the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q and the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6, the current competitive offerings for enterprise Copilot+ PCs. Of these, the Latitude and the EliteBook have more modern designs.
(Credit: Dell)Measuring 12.36 by 8.81 by 0.67 inches and weighing 3.16 pounds (3.77 with the included 65-watt USB-C charger), the Dell is larger and notably heavier than the EliteBook or the ThinkPad.
Some of that is no doubt due to the 14-inch 2,560-by-1,600 IPS display with 400 nits of brightness, which is denser and notably nicer than the displays on the other two machines. The aluminum chassis and "Titan Gray" color are typical of Dell's enterprise offerings and look good.
(Credit: Dell)It's somewhat lacking in ports compared with the ThinkPad. The Latitude has two USB-C 4.0 ports (which can be used for power, with support for DisplayPort 2.1) and a microSD slot on the left-hand side, plus a USB-A 3.2 and an audio jack on the right. I would have preferred an HDMI slot to the microSD one and/or USB-C on both sides for more convenient charging. Models with optional WWAN capabilities have a SIM slot.
For audio video, it has an FHD MIPI camera, two top-firing and two bottom-firing speakers, and two microphones. While it's not as high in resolution as the camera on the EliteBook, the one on the Latitude looked quite good, appearing bright and sharp. Audio quality was pretty good as well.
Like the other Copilot+ machines I've tested, the Latitude 7455 is based on the Snapdragon X Elite platform, but in this case, it's an X1E-80-100 instead of the X1E-78-100 that runs the others. Theoretically this allows a slightly higher boost speed (up to 4.0GHz). Again it contains 12 of the company's Oryon CPU cores, with this version theoretically offering a top multi-core speed of 3.4GHz with a boost of up to 4.0GHz. It also includes the higher-end version of Qualcomm's Adreno graphics and a Hexagon NPU rated at 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
The model I tested came with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Perhaps as a result of the bump in processor and the additional RAM compared with the HP, performance on most traditional benchmarks was a bit higher than I've seen on the other Snapdragon-based machines, and in the ballpark with what I've seen on the recent Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) systems, particularly with native applications such as the Microsoft Office suite. Graphics-based tests run notably faster on the Meteor Lake systems, and Snapdragon-based machines don't run nearly as many of the top games. On the other hand, this kind of system isn't designed for games anyway.
On my toughest tests, it could transcode a video using Handbrake in one hour and 15 minutes, a bit better than I've seen with most of the thin-and-light systems I've tested (Lenovo's Snapdragon-based Slim 7x was a bit faster, and PCs with discrete graphics do notably better). But it took 48 minutes to run a complex Matlab portfolio simulation, notably shower than current Intel or ARM-based systems, which usually come in at 32-34 minutes and even much slower than Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7, based on the same processor, which took 38 minutes, but close to the numbers I saw on the ThinkPad 14s and the EliteBook.
Running a complex big data table in Excel was better, though, at 47 minutes, comparable with the 46 or 47 minutes I’ve seen on current Intel Meteor Lake systems (13th Generation Raptor Lake systems remain even better, taking only 37 minutes). I got much slower times on the Snapdragon-based EliteBook and ThinkPad, and Yoga. Overall, I'd rate performance as very good.
Battery life using the 54 watt-hour battery was also good, lasting 19 hours and 26 minutes on PC Mark 10’s Applications test with 100 nits of brightness, and 20 hours and 26 minutes with 40 nits of brightness. This was slightly better than I saw with the EliteBook, but not as good as I saw with the ThinkPad. All the Snapdragon-based machines last notably longer than the most recent Intel or AMD systems I've tested.
Unlike the EliteBook, the Dell Latitude comes with mostly the Microsoft-supplied applications under the Copilot+ branding, including Windows Studio Effects, Windows Paint with Cocreator, and Live Captions. (For more details, see my earlier post and note that the much-touted Windows Recall feature has yet to be released.) All of these seemed to run pretty well, as did third-party applications such as Luminar Neo.
Dell's own applications include the Dell Optimizer, which lets you prioritize foreground applications, monitor and manage your battery, and adjust thermal settings, as well as Dell's Support Assist and Command Update applications.
As tested, the Latitude 7455 is currently selling for $2,400 on Dell's website, with models starting at $1,669 for a Snapdragon X1P-64-100 with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. For the configuration, it's a bit more expensive than the competitors, though Dell stresses that almost all sales of this class of machine go through enterprise sales rather than the website.
As I've said before, enterprise buyers aren't likely to want to do a wide rollout of Snapdragon-based machines because of compatibility concerns with things like device drivers and vertical market software. Instead, they are more likely to use them for proofs of concept right now. For that, the Dell Latitude 7455 is a solid choice thanks to good performance for a Snapdragon-based machine and excellent battery life.