You know that corners must be cut to reach this price level. But it’s hard to see where those cuts have been made.
The XPS 13 has a larger display at 13.4 inches against the Neo’s 13.0 inches. It manages that in a lighter and smaller body, which is a genuine engineering achievement.
Color choices differ in personality. The MacBook Neo comes in Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo, while the XPS 13 offers two more restrained options in Sky and Storm.
The display is one of the XPS 13’s strongest arguments. It uses a 2.5K panel at 2560 by 1600, against the MacBook Neo’s 2408 by 1506.
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Both reach 500 nits of brightness. The XPS 13 covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, the standard used in film and photography work.
The display in the Dell is marginally bigger, and a touchscreen. The MacBook Neo covers sRGB, a narrower gamut. For color-accurate creative work, the XPS 13 has a wider range.
Refresh rate is another clear difference. The XPS 13 runs a variable 30-120Hz panel for smoother motion, while the MacBook Neo is fixed at 60Hz.
The XPS 13 display is also a touchscreen. The MacBook Neo has no touch input, in line with Apple’s wider Mac approach.
The two laptops take fundamentally different chip approaches. The MacBook Neo uses Apple’s A18 Pro, the same chip generation found in the iPhone 16 Pro.
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The XPS 13 uses Intel’s Core 5 320, a new Wildcat Lake chip. It has six cores: two performance and four low-power efficiency cores.
Both chips have a six-core CPU layout. The A18 Pro pairs two performance cores with four efficiency cores, a similar split to the Intel design.
On graphics, the comparison is harder to call from specs alone. The A18 Pro has a five-core GPU with hardware ray tracing, while the Intel chip uses a two-core Intel Graphics setup.
The neural processors are closely matched on paper. The MacBook Neo has a 16-core Neural Engine capable of 35 trillion operations per second (TOPS), and the XPS 13’s NPU delivers 16 TOPS for on-device AI.
Dell includes a backlit keyboard as standard across the range. This is not the case for the MacBook Neo’s Magic Keyboard.
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When it comes to trackpads, neither uses particularly stellar versions. Apple and Dell have avoided using haptics that could’ve made the experience better, though Dell does still provide touchscreen control.
Both have 1080p displays. The XPS 13 has a higher-resolution touch display, a wider color gamut, a variable refresh rate, Wi-Fi 7, quad speakers, double the base storage, and a lighter body with a bigger screen. Dell has clearly built this machine to win the spec sheet against the MacBook Neo.
For students aged 16 and up, the XPS 13 is a strong contender, but only during the back-to-school window. At $599 with 512GB of storage and that feature set, it undercuts what the MacBook Neo offers for the same money.
For everyone else, the calculation is closer. The XPS 13 costs $100 more at $699, and for that upgrade, you’d get Touch ID and additional storage for the MacBook Neo.
