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Back when the MacBook Air first launched, it seemed like no Windows laptop was going to be able to compete at this price point. That was up until now. This is the XPS 13, and not only does it come in at the same price point as the Mac, but on paper, it has the specs to actually beat it. So, today, we're going to be putting these laptops through nearly everything in our lab, from measuring their displays and their speakers to testing their cameras and microphones. And we're even using our robots to test their battery life and their performance in real apps like Photoshop and Premiere. So, that way we can see whether or not the XPS is really as good as it seems on paper, or if the MacBook is still the better deal. Let's
find out. This episode is sponsored by WhisperFlow, which has honestly changed the way I input text on both my computer and on my phone. So, I already type pretty quickly, around 100 words per minute, but with WhisperFlow's voice dictation, I can easily double that. And on my phone, it's actually closer to about five times faster than typing with my two thumbs. But, speed isn't the only reason I've been impressed with WhisperFlow. It's also how it handles voice attacks in the real world. So, for example, let's say I'm sending a message to our researcher about our next speed test. I could say, "For our next speed test, let's include the following Snapdragon 8 Elite devices. So, a Galaxy
S26 Ultra, Xiaomi 17 Pro Max." No, I mean, never mind. Uh Xiaomi 17 Ultra, Vivo X300 Ultra, and uh Oppo Find X9 Ultra. Now, with the built-in voice attacks, not only did it stumble over some of those names, but it also transcribed my mid-sentence corrections. But, with WhisperFlow, it actually recognized what I was actually trying to say. It got the names right, it corrected my mid-sentence mess-ups, and it even formatted everything into this clean list automatically. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can get 1 month of WhisperFlow Pro for free by using my promo code PhoneBuff at the desktop checkout when you use the link in the description down below. All right, we'll start off with the displays
because this is probably the area where the XPS has me the most excited. Where first off, it has a touchscreen while the MacBook obviously doesn't, but then second, that screen also supports a faster 120 Hz refresh rate, where at least compared to the MacBook's 60 Hz, makes scrolling through webpages, moving windows around, or just opening apps feel a little bit smoother on the Dell. Now, when it comes to brightness though, they are basically tied. We measured each display across five different points, and the XPS only came out around 10 nits brighter on average. So, nothing that you would actually notice. But,
what you might notice though, is how each of these displays handles reflections. Where on the one hand, the XPS does a good job at making individual reflections look softer and less distracting. But then on the other hand, the way the XPS diffuses that light across the panel can actually make it harder to read anytime there's a source of glare. We actually tried to measure this objectively, and we found that on screen, the XPS reflected 38.9% of the glare compared to just 21.7% on the Neo. So, at least in terms of visibility, I actually think the Neo has the edge. But then, when it comes to color, the XPS gets itself right back into the win column. Both of them are about the same in terms of accuracy, at least within their respective native
color spaces. But, where they're different is the XPS actually supports a wider range of colors with it having support for the P3 color gamut. Which means when you're watching a movie or viewing content that's mastered in P3, those colors are going to be closer to how they were intended to look. So, overall, while the MacBook does have the advantage in terms of visibility when you're in a bright environment, the XPS has the advantage in pretty much everything else. But, the story isn't quite as simple when it comes to the speakers. Where on paper, the XPS has the advantage of having four speakers compared to the MacBook's two. But, in reality though, things are a little different. Just take a listen for
yourself. Now, how much of that difference you're able to hear always depends on the quality of the speakers you're listening to this on. But, looking at the data, one thing was clear in our testing, and that the XPS is a definitely the louder of the two. When it comes to actual sound quality, though, the Neo actually has more output through the mid-range, which just gives it a fullness that the XPS is kind of lacking. While the XPS is pushing more of its energy into the top end. So, it does pick up some detail there, but you know, to the ear, it can sound a little bit thin at certain points. And then, at the low end, while neither laptop can produce meaningful bass, it does look like the MacBook is
producing harmonics to create the perception of it. So, the takeaway for me is this, if you want the louder speaker system, then the XPS is clearly going to give you that. But, if you want the fuller and more natural-sounding speakers with a little bit more perceived bass, I think the MacBook has the edge. Moving on, one thing I was super curious about was how the battery life stacks up on these laptops. Since on paper, the XPS has the advantage of having that significantly larger battery. But then again, since we're comparing an x86 Intel processor with an ARM-based chip, how it actually plays out in the real world, though, could be very different. And right away, the Neo's efficiency shows up, with it
losing just 19% over those 2 hours compared to the 21-point drop on the XPS. Of course, that was just a single task, right? Like, what happens when you start multitasking? To simulate that here, we're copying and pasting text between Word and Excel, while also typing on every letter on the keyboard, and we have music playing in the background on Spotify. And this time, it is the opposite result, with the XPS doing significantly better, dropping by only 18 points compared to the whopping 26-point drop on the Neo. Here in Zoom, we're simulating a video call as closely as we can while still keeping everything controlled, where we have this silly cutout of my head moving around on a robot. Where after 30 minutes, the Neo
actually did slightly better, clawing back two points from the XPS's lead. Of course, the big question with a lot of Windows laptops, especially when they're running on x86 based chips, is standby. So, we closed the lids on both laptops, and we left them there untouched for 16 hours straight. And the results were pretty dramatic. The Neo only lost 3% over those hours, while the XPS dropped by eight. Here in Disney Plus, we're playing the same movie on both laptops, and as always, we calibrated both screens to the same 200 nits of brightness, while also matching the speakers to the same volume level. Now, here I actually think the XPS's display might give it an advantage, since unlike the Neo, which is locked in at 60 Hz,
the XPS can drop its refresh rate as low as 30 Hz, which in theory should make it more efficient. And after 2 hours, that may have made a difference, with the XPS only draining by 20 percentage points, compared to the 26-point drop on the Neo. So, at this point, the XPS has a healthy eight-point lead over the Neo. However, this Premiere test is different from the rest, where unlike the other ones, this one is actually really taxing on those chipsets. Now, it's worth noting that during the rendering portions of these edits, the XPS was moving a lot slower. Even though the clip we were exporting was less than 10 seconds long, it was just struggling, to the point where we had to stop the render on each loop in order to match
the time under load compared to the Neo, which doesn't make this a perfect comparison, since technically it does mean that the Dell was completing less work than the Neo. But even then, despite having that advantage, it just burned through its battery, shutting down after only 31 minutes, which means the MacBook, which entered the task with an eight-point disadvantage, actually ended up lasting 12 minutes longer. Of course, when you zoom out, and you consider that this battery test spanned over 20 hours, that 12 minutes kind of feels like it's within the margin of error. So, to me, it's effectively a tie, and it really comes down to how you use the laptops. Where if you're doing
lightweight stuff like multitasking or watching movies, that bigger battery on the XPS is going to last you longer. But, if you're doing more heavy-duty stuff like video editing or you're just leaving your laptop on standby for like days at a time, then the MacBook has the advantage. But, either way, when it comes to charging the laptops back up though, the result is pretty definitive. Where the 20-W charger that came in the box, the MacBook was only able to get to 22% in 30 minutes, while the XPS and its 65-W charger was almost able to double that, reaching 41% in the same amount of time. All right, the moment we have all been waiting for, in the performance tests, which I think is arguably the
biggest concern when it comes to laptops in this price range. As we wait for each device to boot up, let's quickly go over the specs. So, we configured the XPS 13 with the Intel Core i5 320, whereas on the MacBook you essentially get what's an older iPhone chip in Apple's A18 Pro. With both laptops here being paired with the only 8GB of RAM. And there you go, right off the bat, the XPS grabs its first win, reaching the desktop fully loaded in just 24 seconds, compared to the 40 seconds it took on the Neo. But, the first real-world test here is in the browser. Where on our locally hosted website, we're doing a bunch of different things, from loading videos and 3D models to displaying maps and
running calculations. And by the end of it, the results are honestly pretty close. The XPS does finish slightly faster though, in 19 seconds compared to 21 on the Neo. So, not a huge difference, but still a pretty good start for the XPS. But, we'll see how it does here in Microsoft Word. Where this time, the MacBook is faster. Loading that 500-page document in just 7 seconds compared to the 12 seconds it took on the Dell. Of course, those last two tasks were pretty lightweight, but this next one is a little bit more heavy-duty. where each laptop has to unzip the same 6 GB file. And oh man, you can see the difference right away.
The Neo just zips through it in under 15 seconds, while in the XPS, it takes over three times as long. So, a pretty significant win for the Neo in file extraction. But, we'll see if the XPS can reverse things here in Photoshop, where we're loading the same high-resolution photo on each laptop, and then performing a series of real-world edits. First, we start with some spot healing, then we use the smudge tool across that roller brush on the vacuum. We do an object selection for the cone in the background, and then we remove it with a content-aware fill. And the MacBook does all of that just significantly faster, finishing the entire edit in just 35 seconds, while the XPS takes almost exactly twice as
long. So, not the best showing for the XPS in those two heavier-duty apps. But, we'll see if things will change here in Premiere, since this is a longer task, and the XPS is the only one with an active cooling fan. Again, we're just trying to do a real-world edit here, so after opening Premiere and creating a project, we imported a couple of clips, we applied a color grade to the first one, and a warp stabilizer to the second one. After waiting for the warp to finish, we also render it for preview, and then finally, we export the entire sequence to storage. But, it doesn't look like that cooling fan really helped out here, with the Neo doing significantly better once again. It wasn't fast by any means, right? Like,
these laptops really aren't designed for this, but it did finish over a minute faster than the XPS did. Now, here in Blender, things got pretty interesting. All we were trying to do was load and render this 1080p image. But, on the XPS, we kept running into issues. The app would either crash or hang on us, and we struggled to even get a single trial. I don't know whether that came down to the limited 8 GB of RAM on Windows, the graphic drivers, or just Blender's optimization, but either way, while the MacBook was still slow at completing the task, it did at least finish it. Where on the one run that the
XPS was able to get all the way through, it took it 1 minute and 22 seconds, but even the stopwatch froze during that attempt. So, definitely a big asterisk on that result. But, at least when it comes to loading Cyberpunk, the results were a lot closer. But, it was still an easy win for the Neo, with it loading the game at 27% faster. Of course, loading the game is one thing, but actually running it is another. And while we couldn't run the in-game benchmark at the ultra settings like we did last time, since the XPS just wouldn't give us that option, the results were at least fairly close, with the Neo delivering just under 20 FPS, compared to 16 FPS on the Dell. And if you play around with the resolution scaling and the frame generation, both
of them improve pretty substantially, with them each reaching around 38 FPS, which, you know, for some people, is perfectly playable. But, overall, while the XPS had the advantage in the boot-up test and a small advantage in the browser, anytime we threw more demanding tasks at these laptops, the MacBook pulled ahead, and sometimes by a pretty big margin. We obviously didn't run every app out there, but at least for the ones that we did, it's a clear win for the MacBook when it comes to performance. Now, we also tested the cameras on these laptops across a variety of lighting conditions, from low light to scenes with higher dynamic range. And while the XPS does give you a
wider field of view than the MacBook, it also has noticeably more grain. Like, the MacBook just seems to do a slightly better job at cleaning up that noise, while also keeping the colors looking natural and the image looking sharper in general. When it comes to the microphones, I think they're actually pretty close, but just take a listen for yourself. After two long years of R&D, the PhoneBuff Camera Test is finally here. After two long years of R&D, the PhoneBuff Camera Test is finally here. The XPS does seem to be a bit more aggressive when it comes to filtering out background noise, sometimes to the point where it also filters out part of the voice. So, I'd say it's a win for the MacBook in both
camera and microphone. Now, when it comes to the IO, technically, the MacBook does give you more options, where in addition to the two USB-C ports that you get on the XPS, you also get a headphone jack. But, there is a difference between those USB-C ports though. Where on the XPS, both of them support the faster USB 3.2 speeds, whereas on the MacBook, only one of them does with the other being limited to USB 2, which couldn't even connect to and power our external SSD. But, the good news for both laptops is when you use their fastest ports, they performed roughly the same in our 50 GB file transfer test. When it comes to Wi-Fi though, the XPS does support the newer Wi-Fi 7 standard. So, if you have a
faster network like we do, the XPS will give you faster speeds. Now, in terms of storage, this is an area where I think the XPS has a big advantage. Not only does it come with double the storage at the entry starting price, but the Dell's SSD is also removable. And then, when it comes to the laptop's overall design, I think they both look and feel pretty premium for the price point. However, when you open them up, the XPS does have the advantage of having thinner bezels, which to me just makes it look a lot more modern. The Dell's also a half pound lighter than the MacBook. And it also has the advantage of having a backlit keyboard, where Apple reserves those only for their more expensive models. However, when it comes to the
trackpads, the story kind of flips. While they're both similar in size, the newer trackpad is easily clickable across the entire surface. Whereas on the XPS, it requires progressively more force as you move from the bottom up to the top of it. But, even then, when you look at the design as a whole though, I still think the XPS has the small advantage over the MacBook here. But, overall, these laptops are extremely close. And as far as which one is the winner, well, when I look at the MacBook, it's got the better performance, at least across the apps that we tested. It has the cleaner and fuller sounding speakers. It has an advantage when it comes to the webcam and microphones. And that fully clickable trackpad just gives it a
strong argument. But then, when I look at the XPS though, it has equally strong reasons to choose it. So, it's got the more modern look of the two with those thinner bezels. The screen itself is just on another level in nearly every way, and it's also coming with more storage at 512 versus 256 at the starting price. Not to mention that the storage is expandable. So, obviously, the choice is yours. Our job is just to give you the data, and let me know what you think is the better deal. Anyways, that is it for me in this video. Thank you for watching, and as always, I'll see you in the very next episode.
