Everyone Has Their Targets Set on the MacBook Neo

The MacBook Neo was like throwing a giant boulder into a still, peaceful pond—and we’re still feeling the ripple effects. Thanks to its dramatic $599 price, it tossed Apple into a brand-new laptop demographic. The response from the Windows side has been soft—until now.

Cheaper laptops with only 8 GB of RAM are coming—most notably, the new Dell XPS 13 and Microsoft Surface Laptop 8. Following suit with the MacBook Neo, Dell is making its brand more accessible than ever, using many of the same tricks as Apple. Microsoft? Not so much.

The MacBook Neo was rightly criticized for having only 8 GB of RAM in the base model, as it limits what this otherwise great laptop could do. Then again, this is a $599 laptop. It’s not meant for demanding workloads, and even though I think 16 GB should be the new established baseline, I don’t want laptops to get more expensive than they already are. The memory shortage that’s swept through the entire industry’s supply chain is taking effect—and not even Apple has been able to move forward without making some necessary changes.

Either way, there should be room in the market for a device for people who don’t have heavy computing needs but want something that looks and feels premium. That’s the MacBook Neo to a T. The new Dell XPS 13 takes a nearly identical approach. It's made entirely of aluminum; it's half an inch thick and every bit as premium-looking as XPS laptops always have. It even uses a high-end IPS screen with a higher resolution (2560 x 1600) and refresh rate (120 Hz). Dell even says it goes up to 500 nits of brightness. This is deliberate. It matches the Neo's sharpness and max brightness exactly, and has a faster refresh rate to boot.

Yet it's only $699 (or $599 for students). The XPS 13 makes similar trade-offs as the MacBook Neo. First, it starts with only 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. It also starts with a slower Intel Core 5 processor (note: not Intel Core Ultra). I'll be interested to find how the performance and battery life stack up against the MacBook Neo, but Dell is clearly taking notes from Apple, which used a slower iPhone chip in the Neo instead of an M-series laptop-grade processor.

What's nice about the Dell XPS 13, though, is that you can scale it up appropriately. The MacBook Neo is capped in both storage and memory, but the XPS 13 can be configured up to 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage.

I've been testing a lot of $500 to $600 laptops recently from companies like Acer, Lenovo, and HP, many of which take a more conventional Windows approach to rivaling the MacBook Neo by offering better