The Dell XPS 13 is the closest a Windows PC has come to the MacBook Neo

The new XPS 13 weighs a kilogram. One. You pick it up and your wrist over-corrects, because the brain expects more resistance than what’s there. Closed, the chassis is 12.7mm thin. CNC aluminium, the same construction Dell has been using on XPS for years. Four screws on the base. Parting lines you have to angle the lid against the light to find. It’s the XPS as you know it, just that it’s $699 (and if you do some currency conversion, it'll come around Rs 65,000).

And you may ask, what? Yes, that’s how I and everybody I’ve been telling about it have been reacting. But why an XPS at one-third of the previously cheapest XPS? Because of Apple. In comes the MacBook Neo, and every Windows laptop that exists in this price starts to look like a compromise. The Neo isn’t doing much different. Other than having an iPhone chip, yes that’s been its headliner. Plus the aluminium shell, the colours, and macOS. All the Apple shenanigans, at a lower rung.

Which is the point. It’s bringing the “Apple experience” to a shelf that had never been its. The $600-to-$800 laptop has been Windows by default for as long as the laptop has been a category. Apple’s cheapest had never been Windows-cheap.

Not entirely. People still buy Windows laptops at this price—they have been, they will. But whatever has been on the shelf these past three months couldn’t survive a side-by-side with the Neo. Most had crept up enough that they weren’t really at this price anymore.

That’s the market Computex opened into this week. The biggest show on the calendar, Taipei all week, and Dell has brought its new XPS 13 to it. Not because it’s an XPS. Because of where it sits on the shelf now.

That explains why it's here. The laptop has to do the rest.

A kilogram, and what Dell did to get there

The lid tapers a little tighter than past XPS models. The keyboard deck sits lower into the chassis. The slots on the bottom edge double as both intake vents and downward-firing speaker grilles. There are four screws on the base where there'd usually be more. Parting lines pulled in tight enough that you have to angle the lid against the light to find them. The design doesn't draw attention to itself—which at this price usually means there isn't much to draw attention to. Here it means Dell didn't need to.

Two colours. Sky is a cool pale silver that drifts off-white under warm light. Storm is graphite with some warmth running through it. Sky photographs better. Storm is the one I’d actually carry out.

Lift the lid. The display is 13.4 inches, 2.5K, 30 to 120Hz variable refresh, 500 nits, full DCI-P3, touch, anti-glare. The number that lands first in use is the 120Hz. Windows ultraportables at this price have been stuck at 60Hz for so long that even basic scrolling on this panel reads as a category jump.

The keyboard has gone back to a traditional islanded chiclet, after two generations of Dell pushing zero-lattice across the line. I didn’t mind the lattice. Plenty of people did. The new layout has 0.8mm of travel, real spacing between the keys, and a backlight that reads the ambient light and adjusts on its own. It types soft and quiet. Whether you’ll prefer it over the lattice depends on what you got used to, but the chiclet is the safer call at a price where buyers are least likely to want to learn a new keyboard.

Below it, the trackpad is glass, multi-touch, windowed—a visible boundary around the pad rather than the seamless surface on the bigger XPS models. Diving-board click instead of haptic. At this price, fair. Which is when you notice the MacBook on the same table.

The MacBook Neo, six inches to the left

PC makers don’t usually do that. The reason they don’t usually do it is that it usually goes badly for them.

The Neo weighs 2.7 pounds. The XPS weighs 2.2. Half a pound. Sounds like nothing. Hold both in succession and it stops sounding like nothing. The Neo on its own is light. The Neo after the XPS is a laptop. The XPS is a notebook somebody slipped into your bag without telling you.

Optics do the rest. The numbers say both laptops are about the same thickness. The eye says otherwise. The XPS hides its hinge better and the deck sits lower. The kind of design work that doesn’t show up on a spec sheet and shows up in the hand.

The displays widen the gap. The Neo is 60Hz, no touch. Pull up the same webpage on both. Your eyes find the 120Hz first. Then they find the bezels, which on the Neo aren’t bad until the XPS is sitting next to them.

The smaller things stack. The XPS keyboard is backlit; the Neo’s at this tier isn’t. Face unlock works on the XPS, doesn’t on the Neo. Touch ID is a $100 upgrade. The trackpad on both is a diving-board click—the haptic pad you get on the pricier MacBooks isn’t here—and the XPS’s larger windowed glass surface is the nicer one to use. Wi-Fi 7 against Wi-Fi 6E.

None of these wins a comparison alone. Stacked, they’re the difference between a Windows laptop that looks smaller next to a MacBook and one that doesn’t.

What Neo still buys you

macOS. Big one. Nothing on the XPS argues with it, and nothing on the XPS is built to. The OS still gets the app it wants first—every serious creative tool, every productivity suite, every developer workflow has a macOS build that’s either the lead version or near enough. The system itself asks for less. No driver updates that ask permission three times. No background processes you have to learn the names of. You open it and use it.

Then there’s the rest of the kit. An iPhone or an iPad already in the bag means files, calls, messages, and Wi-Fi passwords land where you need them without anyone asking. The ecosystem isn’t a feature list, it’s an absence of friction. The XPS lives in the Windows version of all of this, which works, but works the way Windows works—you do some of the lifting.

And the Neo is still a Mac. Aluminium, apple on the lid, the whole thing. Whatever the price says, what you’re carrying around is a MacBook, and that does work in a classroom or a coffee shop that no Windows laptop does. None of which has anything to do with what’s actually inside either machine.

About those 8 gigs

The base configuration ships with 8GB of RAM and a six-core Intel Core 5 320 from the Wildcat Lake family. On Windows 11 in 2026, 8GB is the kind of number that gets a laptop priced, not the kind that gets it used. A few Chrome windows, Slack open, a Teams call running, and you’ll feel the laptop deciding which app gets to be alive next.

8GB is also what the Neo gives you, with no option to step up. Only storage scales. It isn’t generous there either, but macOS handles memory more tightly than Windows 11 does, and 8GB on a Mac feels different from 8GB on a Windows machine. The XPS doesn’t get that cushion. The 16GB step-up is the configuration to actually buy. The 8GB is what they advertise. The 16GB is what you buy.

The chip itself is a separate question. Wildcat Lake is Intel’s low-power family, efficient rather than muscular, built for thin-and-light bodies that don’t want to deal with heat. That’s the base. Step up the XPS and the chip changes too. The higher configurations get Intel’s Core Ultra 7 355, and the laptop scales with it. The Neo doesn’t have that range. It sits on a single chip.

The A18 Pro on the Neo isn’t an M-series chip. It’s the silicon that ran last year’s iPhone Pro before Apple put it in a laptop. Same architectural family as the M-series, and the track record to show for it. Still a phone chip, though, on an entry-level laptop. Neither it nor the XPS (the $699 one) is going to feel slow on day-to-day work. The XPS has two fans. The Neo doesn’t.

The ports are tier-dependent, which is mildly irritating. The Intel Core variant gets two USB-C with DisplayPort 2.1 and power delivery. The Intel Core Ultra 7 355 variant gets the same two ports as Thunderbolt 4. Same hole, different speed, depending on what you spent. No headphone jack. No SD slot. No HDMI. All of which is downstream of one thing.

The shelf, three months later

For three months, the Windows side didn’t have an answer worth taking to a press table. The XPS 13 is the first laptop to walk up to the table Apple set in March and put something on it that doesn’t look out of place. $599 for students, $699 for everyone else, in a band that used to belong to Windows by default. That’s $100 over the Neo, and the XPS does enough to justify it. Which isn’t the same argument as winning a MacBook buyer over.

It isn’t a Mac killer. Nobody buying a MacBook is probably getting talked out of it by a thinner aluminium shell and a 120Hz panel. They’re buying macOS, and an ecosystem. None of that has changed. Microsoft is building a Windows ecosystem of its own. The MacBook buyer isn’t waiting for it.

What’s changed is that the answer to “what’s the best laptop at this price” isn’t automatic anymore. In a segment Windows used to own, it’s a question again. And Dell isn't the only one. A run of $699 Windows laptops is on the way, all chasing the same shelf.