Dell's New $699 XPS 13 Takes Direct Aim at Apple's MacBook Neo

A comeback a year in the making

At CES 2025, Dell retired XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, and OptiPlex in favor of a three-tier scheme: Dell (consumer), Dell Pro (business), and Dell Pro Max (workstation). The rebrand was widely criticized, and Dell's own search data, per product head Kevin Terwilliger, showed customers still hunting for "XPS."

At CES 2026 (January), Dell un-retired XPS. Jeff Clarke declared, "We're getting back to our roots with a renewed focus on consumer and gaming. XPS is back, better than ever." Dell launched a redesigned XPS 14 ($2,049.99) and XPS 16 ($2,199.99) at the high end and pledged to deliver products "at every price point." This $699 launch is that promise kept. 

What you get for the money

This is the thinnest and lightest XPS 13 Dell has ever shipped, at 12.7mm thick and just under 1kg. The CNC-machined aluminum body comes in two colors, Sky at launch and Storm later in the summer. The rest of the sheet is genuinely strong for the price:

• 13.4-inch 2.5K touch display with a 120Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of brightness
• Intel Core 5 chip at launch, with a faster Core Ultra option arriving later this summer
• Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, and a 1080p webcam with Windows Hello face unlock
• Quad speakers, a backlit keyboard, and a rated battery life of up to 17 hours
• 8GB or 16GB of memory, scaling to 32GB on the Core Ultra model, plus storage up to 1TB

US availability begins in June, with the higher-end configuration following later in the season.

Where it beats the MacBook Neo

Dell is not being subtle about the comparison, and the spec gap is real. Apple's $599 MacBook Neo ships without a touchscreen, without a backlit keyboard, with only one fast USB-C port, and with no face unlock on the base model. The Dell XPS 13 answers every one of those: a sharper touch panel, lit keys, two quicker ports, Windows Hello, and four speakers instead of two. It is also lighter and carries a bigger battery.

Apple still has cards to play. The Neo costs $100 less at every tier, runs macOS, stays completely silent with its fanless design, and keeps a headphone jack that Dell dropped. So the choice comes down to what you value rather than which one is flatly better.

The catch worth knowing

Two things to flag before you get excited. The base model is not a Copilot+ PC, since its chip falls short of the AI performance bar Microsoft set, so the on-device AI features only arrive with the pricier Core Ultra version. There is also no OLED option and no headphone jack, and the entry RAM is a modest 8GB. None of that sinks the laptop, but it does explain how Dell hit such an aggressive price.

For a line that launched near $1,300 just two years ago, a $699 starting point is a serious shift, and it makes the XPS 13 one of the strongest budget Windows laptops to watch in 2026.

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