The Dell Latitude 9420 is a premium enterprise 2-in-1 laptop aimed at the most demanding customers, with a wide variety of features.
Like the Latitude 9510 I tested last year, the 9420 is part of Dell’s high-end enterprise line, though the 9400 series has a 14-inch display. It’s available as either a standard laptop or a 2-in-1 convertible with a rotating hinge and pen support; I tested the 2-in-1 version.
With an aluminum case, the Latitude 9420 feels extremely solid Measuring 0.54 by 12.2 by 8.5 inches (HWD), it’s a bit smaller than its closest competitor, the Lenovo X1 Yoga. It’s also a bit heavier, with a starting weight of 3.2 pounds (the unit I had came in at 3.29 pounds by itself and 4.05 pounds with the charger, while the Yoga came in at 3.1 pounds for the unit and 3.79 pounds with the charger). Still, it’s relatively light and easy to carry.
The unit I tested had a QHD+ 2,560-by-1,600-pixel touch display in a 16:10 ratio. (The laptop version has a non-touch FHD+ 1,920-by-1,200-pixel display.) For typical office applications, the higher resolution doesn’t matter that much on a 14-inch screen, but the higher-resolution display is better with a pen, as you can be more precise, and the screen looked very good. (Note, though, that the competing X1 Yoga offers a 3,840-by-2,400-pixel display if you want high resolution). I’m no artist, but I used Dell’s optional Active Pen (PN579X), and found the screen worked well for drawing.
The left side of the 9420 has two USB-C ports (also used for charging) as well as an HDMI connection, microSD card slot, and headphone jack. The right offers a single USB-A port with power along with a large heat exhaust that can get quite warm—and a bit loud—if you’re heavily using the machine.
As with other laptops I’ve tried recently, I also tested it with dual external monitors using USB-C/Thunderbolt docks. I tried Dell’s WD19TB Thunderbolt 3 dock and OWC’s Thunderbolt Dock and it worked fine with external drives, an external keyboard, and with both a 2,560-by-1,440 HDMI monitor and an FHD DisplayPort monitor.
The unit I tested had an 11th Generation Intel Core i7-1185G7 (Tiger Lake), a 4-core/8-thread processor with a nominal speed of 3GHz and vPro support, made on Intel’s 10nm SuperFin process, with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. In general, it did nicely on most of the normal benchmarks I ran, a hair behind the Lenovo X1 Carbon.
On my most difficult performance tests, it took 41 minutes to complete a large Excel model with a data table and Monte Carlo simulations, about the same as the other Tiger Lake machines. It took 48 minutes to execute a complex MatLab portfolio simulation. Again, these were quite good scores—the Excel one was the fastest I’ve seen from any Tiger Lake-U machines.
The 9420 has a 60-watt hour battery; I got over 11 hours on my battery test, notably better than I saw with the X1 Yoga. PCMag got more than 14 hours in a video playback test. It comes with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth support; options not tested include 4G LTE (an extra $170) or 5G modems (an extra $389).
Dell Optimizer software controls a lot of the special features from the machine. Through it, you can set the camera and IR system with presence detection, so it sleeps when you step away from the machine and turns back on when you approach, courtesy of Windows Hello. Other options let the machine learn to optimize specific applications to run with the correct power settings; and to optimize the network bandwidth to give preference to a video-conferencing app. And you can adjust the audio so that it’s best for conferencing in a quiet room, noisy office, one with multiple voices speaking, or in a recording studio; enable 3D audio (something I didn’t care for); and automatically mute sounds when you are not speaking. It has two top-firing and two bottom-firing speakers, which sounded quite good.
Dell’s laptop has a 720p webcam, which seemed a bit soft in focus compared to others I’ve tried recently, although still adequate. It has a system called SafeShutter, in which a physical camera cover is controlled by a function key. Generally, this seemed to work well, and it’s more elegant though less obvious than the sliders found on competitors.
On the Dell website, the base laptop has a starting price of $2,059 with an Intel Core I5-1135G7 processor, 8GB of memory, and a 128GB hard drive. A 2-in-1 with a Core i7, vPro, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD like I tested came to $2,913. Despite a few reservations, I found the 9420 to be a sleek, full-featured 2-in-1, one of the best I’ve seen.
