The Dell XPS 13 is the first real competitor to the MacBook Neo

Dell’s last XPS 13 was meant to be a farewell before the company sunset the entire XPS brand. But it was a bitter ending, and an overpriced one as well. Earlier this year, Dell resurrected the XPS name with the excellent (and very expensive) XPS 14 and 16. And now, it’s reinvented the XPS 13 as a much more affordable thin-and-light to take on the MacBook Neo.

Call it another comeback.
The 2026 XPS 13 has the nicest hardware you’ll find in a new $700 laptop outside of Apple’s Neo. The core components — the screen, keyboard, trackpad, and speakers — are all great or excellent. It’s an exquisite package in a sleek and very thin ultra-portable.

And unlike other Windows 11 laptops that struggled to get by with 8GB of RAM, the XPS 13 feels competent even with that limited memory allocation. But even though it’s great that there’s an 8GB Windows laptop in 2026 that’s not dead on arrival, you’re still going to want the 16GB version (which I’ve also been testing) for $1,000. And sadly, no configuration of the XPS 13 includes a headphone jack.

I’ve been testing two XPS 13 configurations with the same six-core Intel Core 5 320 “Wildcat Lake” processor and 512GB SSD. Their singular difference is memory: The base $799.99 model has 8GB of RAM and the $999.99 one has 16GB. I’ve been working off this pair quite a bit for a couple weeks, and the hardware is brilliant. When I got them, that 8GB / 512GB configuration was the base model and cost $699.99. But in early September, Dell created a new $699.99 base model with just 256GB of storage, and raised the price of the 512GB models by $100 each. Sadly these kinds of pricing shenanigans are commonplace in our ongoing RAMageddon nightmare.

The XPS 13 is the nicest-looking and -feeling Windows laptop you’re going to find at this price. It’s just as sleek as a MacBook Neo or Air, and at 2.2 pounds / 1kg and 0.5 inches / 12.7mm thick, it’s lighter than the Air and almost as thin. The XPS is an exquisite laptop to hold, and it practically disappears into a bag. The screen has much thinner bezels than a Neo, and it’s equally bright and colorful — but with 120Hz refresh and touch support rather than the Neo’s 60Hz non-touch screen. It even has an anti-glare finish the Neo doesn’t offer.

The speakers sound surprisingly good for such a compact laptop, offering a well-rounded sound that gets plenty loud. The mechanical trackpad is small, even shorter than the Neo’s, but its only major downside is that it doesn’t physically click in all four corners. Even the webcam impressed me, rendering very good color and handling poor light or backlighting just fine. And the keyboard? Somebody tell Dell’s designers to put this nice tactile chiclet-style keyboard on everything and give up on that latticeless look on other XPS laptops.

Battery life and thermals aren’t amazing, but they’re adequate. The bottom chassis frequently warms your lap, with its hottest point reaching as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit / 40 degrees Celsius, but the keyboard deck stays cool. As for the battery, it typically got me seven hours of continuous mixed usage (lots of Chrome tabs, a few video calls, and streaming a few albums with the screen on most of the time) or up to 10 hours during a much lighter meeting-free day. I’d usually prefer a thicker laptop for the sake of more battery, but I’ve been smitten enough by the XPS’s small and light frame to feel this is passable — even though the Neo lasts several hours longer on an even lower-capacity battery.

The XPS 13 has two 10Gbps USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports, one on either side, and both support charging and video-out. But why, oh why, does this laptop not have a headphone jack? Even if you rarely use 3.5mm audio it’s nice to have as a fallback option.

As for raw performance, both versions of the XPS 13 fall well behind the MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro in synthetic benchmark tests like Geekbench, though the 16GB model is significantly closer in our Premiere 4K export test. And the XPS’s six-core Wildcat Lake chip is night-and-day better than the five-core version found in the Chuwi UniBook, which took over an hour to export. The extra performance core and extra GPU core in the XPS 13 make a notable difference, and so does its speedy storage. The XPS 13’s SSD read speed is nearly three times as fast as the Chuwi, and nearly four times as fast as the Neo.

In day-to-day use of the XPS 13, 8GB of RAM actually feels passable, unlike with the Chuwi and recent Surface Laptop 13-inch. I have used it without any major failings or crashes, and it’s mostly gotten by okay when all I ask of it is simple web-based stuff. But having only 8GB of memory does occasionally slow you down while multitasking. For example, with a dozen or more Chrome tabs open on it I occasionally had to wait for my tabs to reload when I switched back and forth between them. That’s a normal Chrome feature to save memory, but it happens a lot on the 8GB XPS 13. And when I was bouncing between a couple dozen Chrome tabs and messaging colleagues on Slack — not an unusual workload — even tabs I had used just minutes before got dumped from memory and needed to reload.

I was working late one night, writing up some recent news, and slowly getting frustrated as those split-second delays added up. Switching tabs, swiping between virtual desktops, swiping up into Windows’ Task View — it all worked, but every so often the swipes and quick changes felt a little slower. I then made the mistake of opening Adobe Photoshop to do a few simple image crops, and I suddenly regretted life itself. It was the kind of edit that normally takes me a couple minutes, but every little drop-down menu or drag-and-drop in Photoshop felt excruciatingly slow.

These are the ways you still feel the friction of 8GB of RAM on Windows, even in an otherwise brilliant laptop. The 16GB XPS 13 doesn’t have those same pain points — not at this workload, at least. Going up to 16GB of RAM gives you adequate headroom so Windows isn’t constantly trying to reallocate memory, and you can actually do the occasional demanding task like opening and resizing an unexpectedly large image file. The XPS’s speedy SSD seems to help compared to other 8GB laptops I’ve used recently, but you know what helps even more? More RAM. It’s just a shame you’re paying an extra $300 to get it in the 16GB / 512GB XPS 13 config, which now costs $999.99 — it was a $200 upcharge mere weeks ago.

While the MacBook Neo is still the clear winner in performance, the XPS 13 is its best competition yet. Dell has positioned this as an affordable student laptop, just like the Neo, and the company has mostly nailed it — at least in the US, where the XPS 13 seems to be much cheaper than in other regions (sorry, international friends). The models with 8GB RAM are even the same price as the Neo, at $699.99 for 265GB of storage and $799.99 for 512GB.

At the time of this review, Dell still offers a $100 discount for high school and college students, matching Apple’s education discount on the Neo. But the promo is temporary, whereas Apple’s own $100 student discount has no set expiration. You could still save much more with a laptop like the HP OmniBook 3 that I just reviewed, getting you more RAM, more ports, better battery life, slightly more performance (except in graphics), and a much bigger screen for only $500-ish — but it’s a bulkier laptop that doesn’t feel or look remotely as nice as the XPS 13.

The MacBook Neo has jump-started new competition in this $700-ish laptop space, all while RAMageddon rages on and makes everything more expensive (including the Neo itself). We’re about to see even more laptop makers launch their answers to the Neo, and hopefully that means more great, affordable choices — for students or just about anyone in need. The XPS 13 is the frontrunner of MacBook Neo competitors for now, and it shows that an 8GB Windows laptop can actually work okay. But you should still get the 16GB model if you can swing it.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge