Dell's new XPS 13 drops the price and the RAM to chase Apple's cheaper MacBook Neo.
Dell resurrected the XPS brand at CES 2026 after quietly killing it off the year before, and this 13-inch model breaks from the flagship XPS 14 and XPS 16 by chasing budget buyers instead of premium ones. The base configuration pairs a hexa-core Intel Core 5 320 chip with just 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD for $699 - the same price as Apple's 256GB MacBook Neo. Stepping up to a more usable 16GB of RAM forces a jump to 512GB of storage and pushes the price to $899. The review found the hardware handles everyday work fine and praised the battery life and display, but flagged the 8GB base RAM as inadequate for multitasking on Windows 11.
That 8GB baseline is where the MacBook Neo rivalry claim wobbles: Apple's unified memory is more efficient at the same RAM figure, so Dell is asking buyers to pay extra just to reach parity. Pricing also splinters outside the US - Australia's cheapest configuration skips the 256GB SSD tier entirely, and a 16GB unit outside the US costs a steep £1,099 / AU$1,897.50. A laptop built to hit one attractive US price point ends up asking non-US buyers to cover the difference.
Blame the ongoing RAM shortage driven by AI data center demand if you like, but a budget laptop that needs $200 more just to reach usable memory is a modest bargain at best.