Dell Inspiron 15 Carbon Black 2024 Review

This Dell stuffs 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD into a budget chassis, but a shady third-party SSD swap scam and Dell's silence turn a decent deal into a risky gamble. Buy it only if you're prepared to inspect the drive the moment it arrives.

The Dell Inspiron 15 is a confusing laptop. On paper, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD at this price point sound like a steal. And if you land a unit that hasn't had its SSD swapped by a shady third-party seller, it's a perfectly functional machine for students and office work. The catch? That 'if' is doing a lot of heavy lifting. A serious bait-and-switch scam has left more than a few buyers with a cheap, slow replacement drive and zero support from Dell.

What surprised us is how much the 32GB of RAM cushions the blow of that aging i5-1155G7. This CPU sits in the 23rd percentile of our database, but with that much memory, you can open dozens of browser tabs and multiple Office apps without the system grinding to a halt. The integrated Intel UHD graphics are predictably weak, earning a 44th percentile score, so don't expect any gaming beyond Solitaire. Boot times are snappy thanks to the SSD, though you'll want to verify it's the original 1TB drive when you receive the box.

The price spread on this laptop is wild, ranging from $640 all the way up to $4,509. At the low end from Amazon, the specs are hard to beat for a basic work or school machine, assuming you're willing to accept the risk of receiving a swapped SSD. If you find it priced above $800, just walk away, you're in MacBook Air territory.

The obvious comparison is the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i 83F3000HUS. It'll crush this Dell in any performance task with a dedicated GPU and newer CPU, but it's a gaming beast that's twice the weight and price. For a non-gaming student, the Dell's touchscreen and light weight edge it out, provided you don't get scammed. The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro or Apple MacBook Pro M5 are in another league of build quality and battery life, so if you can stretch your budget, they're far safer bets with consistent seller integrity.

If you're looking for a laptop that will last through four years of college without flexing or cracking, skip this. The all-plastic build is flimsy. Go get a Lenovo ThinkPad or a MacBook Air instead. And if you need any kind of GPU muscle, the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i is the better buy, hands down.

If you need a cheap laptop with obscene amounts of RAM and storage for basic tasks, the Dell Inspiron 15 is technically fine, but only if you're buying from a reputable vendor. The bait-and-switch SSD problem and flimsy plastics mean this isn't a laptop we can fully recommend without a giant asterisk. Factor in the cost of a return label into your mental budget.