Dell says it learned a lot from the previous Alienware OLED machine -- in particular, it figured out ways to deal with the technology's higher power usage and heat dissipation. Up until now, we've seen companies toy with OLED sporadically in laptops, like HP's Spectre x360 and Lenovo's Thinkpad X1. Both of those laptops were released in 2016, and since then PC makers have focused on bringing better quality LCD panels to notebooks. But no matter how good an LCD screen is, it can't really match the inky black levels and high contrast of OLED.

During a brief CES demo, I saw both the XPS 15 and Alienware m15 equipped with OLED, and they looked just as good as I expected. Colors popped off the screen, and HDR 60FPS YouTube videos looked almost three-dimensional. Hopefully we'll see the technology extend across Dell's other 15-inch notebooks eventually. The company hasn't settled on a price yet for the OLED screens, but I'd expect a significant premium over LCD.