Image: Dell
The MacBook Neo shook up the budget laptop market with its combination of performance, design quality, and price, and it’s “captivating customers all around the world,” according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Windows PC makers, who sat around putting out crap for too long, are scrambling to do something while Apple takes away their sales.
The latest company to respond to the MacBook Neo is Dell, which this week announced the XPS 13 laptop. Priced at $599 for students ($699 regular price), the XPS 13 looks like a quality laptop. It has an aluminum case (to the disappointment of hardcore PC fanboys), and a couple of nice features that Dell is happy to point out aren’t on the Neo: a backlit keyboard and an OLED display with a variable refresh rate.
The funny thing about Dell’s announcement is that it is basically admitting that Apple forced them to do better with its budget laptops. “Apple’s MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there’s real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices,” Dell states in its press release. In other words, Dell wasn’t going to offer premium quality at an affordable price until Apple forced them to do so. Because it didn’t think people wanted them, I guess?
“Where Dell differs is what we think premium [emphasis Dell’s] means at this price point and what we were willing to build to deliver it.” Which is basically saying that before the MacBook Neo came along, Dell had a different idea of what premium meant at this price point. That idea changed, thanks to Apple.
But how it looks is the only thing about Dell’s new laptop that’s not a compromise or a bait-and-switch tactic. The $599 XPS 13 uses the new Intel Core Series 3 Wildcat Lake processor, and according to benchmarks spotted by TweakTown, it has a multi-core advantage of about 22 percent over the A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo.
That sounds all well and good (though remember, the A18 Pro is an iPhone chip), but TweakTown also reports that the two chips have nearly identical single-core scores. That means that you could notice a difference when using apps that take advantage of multi-core processing, such as video or audio editors. But when using the apps you use most frequently—word processors, spreadsheets, browsers, email clients, etc.—there won’t be a noticeable difference.
At least not when it comes to processing power. Memory is another story. The XPS 13 starts at 8GB of RAM, the same as the Neo. You might remember that PC fanboys immediately attacked the Neo for having such a small amount of RAM when most Windows laptops have 16GB or 32GB.
What those arguments fail to consider is that macOS is heavily optimized for small amounts of RAM. I was able to make basic edits to a 4K video in Adobe Premiere without a problem on a MacBook Neo. But with Windows, 8GB of RAM is, according to Microsoft, “adequate for basic use,” while 16GB of RAM is the recommended baseline memory.
Which leads to the question, after weeks of criticism, why is 8GB of RAM suddenly okay for a Windows laptop? Won’t the 8GB of RAM negate the purported multi-core performance gains of the Intel Core Series 3? Since the XPS 13 isn’t shipping yet, we can only speculate, but I’m betting it will have a negative effect, if not out of the box, then after a few months of use.
Oh, one more thing. The $599 student pricing for the XPS 13 is only available until November 20. After that, it’s $699, whether you’re a student or not. Apple’s student price doesn’t have an expiration date, so it’s either $499 for 256GB of storage or $599 with Touch ID and a 512GB SSD now and after November 20. That’s nice if, say, you don’t need a new laptop right now or want to wait for the second-gen model, which is almost certain to have an A19 Pro processor with 12GB of RAM.
Ultimately, Dell and all the other PC makers can step up their game (finally) and make better hardware, but in the end, they still run Windows. Windows’ ads and bloatware will look particularly nice on the XPS 13’s OLED display. Also, that multi-core performance advantage of the Core Series 3 will surely be hindered by Windows 11’s Copilot, which Microsoft itself admits is so bloated that it hinders performance.
So students, the choice is clear: Spend $599 on a MacBook Neo with an optimized operating system built to run on 8GB of RAM, or spend it on an 8GB laptop running an OS built for 16GB of RAM before the offer expires in less than six months.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor, Macworld
Roman is a Macworld Senior Editor with over 30 years of experience covering the tech industry, focusing on the Mac and other products in the Apple ecosystem. He is also the host of the Macworld Podcast. His career started at MacUser, where he received Apple certification as a repair technician (when Apple did that kind of thing). He’s also worked for MacAddict, MacLife, and TechTV.
