The Dell Pro Max 18 Plus is a huge laptop. When it first arrived, I was frankly lost. By the time you read this, I will have taken 98 flights in 2025, so the idea of an 18-inch laptop is completely foreign. At the same time, I think I figured out why folks might love this class of laptop. It is immensely powerful with a 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX processor, the NVIDIA RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell laptop GPU, 128GB of memory, RAID 0 SSDs, and a giant display. It is a different set of optimization points that really grew on me the more we used it, crossing around 15,000 miles of distance with the machine.
Dell Pro Max 18 Plus External Hardware Overview
First off, let us get to the dimensions at roughly 0.71-0.77in or 17.92-19.56mm tall,
11.02in or 279.95mm deep, and 15.83in or 402.00 mm wide. This notebook starts off at 7.17 lb (3.25 kg) and goes up with options. Today’s ultra-thin and light notebooks you might casually toss around. This is so big and heavy that you purposefully move it.
As a notebook, it has a giant screen, trackpad, and keyboard. The keyboard also has a numeric keypad, so if you are an accountant or someone who does a lot of numerical data entry, you are set.
The display is 2560 by 1600 and 120Hz non-touch QHD+.
Our system had both Intel vPro enabled, as well as a fingerprint reader option.
The top bezel had our cameras.
On the side, we get many useful features.
One of the more exciting features is that this has a 2.5GbE NIC built in. There is also a HDMI port and then two Thunderbolt 5 ports.
Since we have a huge laptop, we get a built-in SD card slot, and we have the optional Smart Card reader.
On the other side we get more ports.
There is an audio jack, a Thunderbolt 4 port, and two USB 3 5Gbps Type-A ports.
On the back, we have space dedicated to cooling and the hinge.
On the bottom, we have many vents.
Let us next take a quick look inside the system.
It’s a nice machine, but it somehow feels a bit half-baked. That fingerprint reader seems to be the same thing they used on the E7270, back in 2016 and I can’t fathom what made them decide to use an internal SIM slot instead of a tray. It looks as if the whole thing was designed a decade ago, which may be the case because they simply don’t expect to sell large enough quantities of this to warrant designing a “proper” chassis for it, but if the MSRP is this close to the 5-digit territory, I would expect them to do better than this.
They were using that style fingerprint reader in the Precision M6600 (Sandy Bridge, 2011) mobile workstation era. Considering the Dell Pro Max Premium 16 (MA16250) sibling has a reader properly integrated into the power button on the keyboard, one has to wonder what they’re doing on this model.