Dell is finally joining the fray with its first-ever Windows on Arm laptop, and it's a surprisingly good deal, at least at first glance. The laptop is the new Dell Inspiron 14, which Dell already offers in Intel and AMD variants, and it costs just $500.

For that price, the Arm-powered model of the Dell Inspiron 14 comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 processor, which is already a pretty high-end chip as far as Arm laptops go. Sure, the newer Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is much better, but to see this processor in a $500 laptop is still very impressive, and it makes it one of the best cheap Arm laptops you can buy. It also comes with 8GB of RAM, though it's fairly slow at 2133MHz, and it has a 256GB SSD for storage. Overall, that's a good set of specs for the price.

And it's not like the rest of the specs are terrible, either. You get a 14-inch Full HD display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, and there's even a 1080p webcam above that screen. That's very rare on such a cheap laptop, especially when it already has solid specs otherwise.

Of course, you can only ask for so much, and this is still a pretty basic machine. It only has two USB Type-C ports, one USB Type-A, a headphone jack, and a microSD card reader, so it's not exactly packing a ton of ports. You also shouldn't expect the most premium build quality, and it comes in a fairly generic-looking silver chassis. Perhaps most notably, the keyboard doesn't have a backlight.

Considering Windows on Arm has been around for about six years at this point, Dell is definitely pretty late to the party, but this is a great budget offering for anyone who wants to dip their toes into Windows on Arm now that Windows 11 has big improvements for it. It can even be a relatively cheap machine to test apps on if you're a developer. It's cheaper than Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023, and that machine doesn't even include a display (though it is much faster). If you're interested, you can check it out below.