Field Note
For years, shopping for a sub-$700 laptop meant choosing between compromises: flexy plastic chassis, washed-out displays, and underpowered chips that aged like milk. When Apple pushed into the entry-tier space with the MacBook Neo, it forced PC makers to stop treating budget buyers as second-class citizens. Dell’s response—the $699 XPS 13 configured with Intel’s Core 5 low-power silicon—marks a major turning point in how much machine you can get for the money.
The headline claim circulating around this machine is that Intel has finally caught Apple Silicon in efficiency. In narrow CPU compute metrics, the data backs that up. Running floating-point heavy workloads like the Linpack Top500 supercomputing benchmark, the low-power Intel chip posts roughly 6.2 GFlops per watt. That is an astonishing result for an x86 architecture, surpassing several desktop-class chips and running neck-and-neck with modern ARM designs. At idle without the display powered, power draw drops to between 0.5 and 0.7 watts at the wall, translating into genuine all-day battery life for basic document editing and web browsing.
However, efficiency in CPU arithmetic is only one part of everyday computing. The moment graphics enter the picture, the playing field tilts heavily back toward Cupertino. The integrated Intel graphics processor remains modest. In rendering and gaming benchmarks like GravityMark, Apple’s A18 Pro silicon delivers roughly double the frame rate. If you plan to run 3D games—even older titles through translation layers like Proton—you will be dropping resolutions to 720p to maintain smooth playback. Intel solved the idle power drain and light compute penalty, but the integrated GPU remains strictly utilitarian.
Where the Dell pulls ahead is in deliberate hardware utility. Apple stripped the MacBook Neo down to a 60Hz glossy panel and eliminated keyboard backlighting entirely. Dell equipped the budget XPS 13 with an anti-glare matte touchscreen running at 2560x1600 with a 120Hz variable refresh rate. Dell also retained a proper backlit keyboard and installed two full-bandwidth 10 Gbps USB-C ports that both support DisplayPort output and charging, avoiding Apple’s odd pairing of one high-speed port and one throttled USB 2.0 connection.
Yet Dell made its own baffling missteps. Chief among them is the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack. On an ultra-compact road warrior or a student laptop, omitting a basic analog audio port is user-hostile cost-cutting masquerading as minimalism. Furthermore, the XPS 13 uses an older hinged trackpad design that resists clicking along the upper edge, and its built-in speakers sound noticeably thinner than Apple’s unibody setup.
Thermals and software noise present another clear distinction. The MacBook Neo runs completely fanless, operating in absolute silence under every workload. The XPS 13 includes an active fan. While quiet during light tasks, the fan spools up when Windows decides to run background update tasks, index files, or serve lockscreen promotions. If you stick with the pre-installed Windows installation, expect the usual modern Windows irritations: unsolicited service prompts, background telemetry load, and unexpected fan spin-up at idle.
Fortunately, hardware ownership remains a tangible advantage on the Dell side. Unlike Apple's completely sealed, soldered architecture, Dell provides an accessible M.2 SSD slot. Upgrading the stock 512GB drive to a larger, faster drive takes five minutes with a torx driver.
That physical drive access opens the door to long-term longevity via Linux. While Dell does not officially support Linux on this specific SKU, modern distributions like Fedora 44 with recent kernels recognize the Wi-Fi 7 chipset, power management states, audio stack, and touchscreen after a standard post-install update. Running a clean Linux environment strips out the background bloat that triggers unwanted fan noise, improves sustained thermal performance, and ensures the hardware remains fully usable long after vendor software lifecycles expire.
Choosing between these two machines comes down to your personal computing values. If you want a silent, sealed appliance with strong graphics performance and a seamless media experience, the fanless MacBook Neo remains the default entry point. But if you value an adaptable high-refresh matte display, upgradeable internal storage, and the freedom to run a bloat-free operating system on efficient x86 silicon, the budget XPS 13 offers far more long-term utility than anything PC makers offered at this price point in the past decade.