Dell has been making good on its display since CES and is finally announcing a new XPS 13. The XPS 13 is back as a budget-friendly option, launching in July at a promotional student price of $599 — though that introductory deal only runs through September for back-to-school purchases; For everyone else, it will start at $699. The $599 promo exactly matches the MacBook Neo’s starting price, but students can actually get Apple’s budget laptop for $100 less. That means Dell has done its job to prove that the XPS 13 is worth the extra money.
This will be Dell’s thinnest and lightest XPS to date, measuring just 0.5 inches / 12.7 mm thick and weighing just 2.2 pounds / 1 kilogram. It will only have two USB-C ports and no 3.5mm audio jack, just like the previous XPS 13, which cost a lot more. Sadly, it also won’t have a dedicated audio jack on the higher-end configurations that come later with Intel Panther Lake chips and Thunderbolt 4 – which will go up to 32GB of RAM.
In the entry-level configuration you’ll get a six-core Intel Core 5 320 “Wildcat Lake” chip, 512GB of storage, and a meager 8GB of RAM. (I’m seeing a trend.) But the good news is that every configuration of the new XPS 13 will have a 13.4-inch anti-glare touchscreen with a 2560 x 1600 resolution, 30-120Hz variable refresh rate, 500 nits brightness, and 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space.
The XPS 13 boasts a backlit keyboard and up to 17 hours of “streaming” battery life. Dell representatives say it should be efficient enough to get through a student’s entire day of classes. There was no word on what Dell is aiming for with the XPS 13, as COO Jeff Clark did call out the MacBook Neo by name in an early media briefing. But while the XPS 13 is lighter than the Neo and has a few extra features, the MacBook lacks the backlit keyboard and higher-end configurations, using 8GB of RAM on Windows 11 remains the gorilla in the room.
Dell also teased another thing it’ll be showing at Computex this week: the return of an XPS with discrete graphics. It should have some level of Nvidia RTX GPU, an extra-bright tandem OLED screen, a dedicated HDMI port, and an SD card slot. No further details so far, but it sounds like a bigger and stronger XPS to compete with some of the MacBook Pros while the new XPS 13 is gunning for the Neo.
The XPS 14 and XPS 16 models reintroduced by Dell at CES correct some of the company’s past mistakes when it killed off the XPS brand in 2025. But competing with the MacBook Neo at $599/$699 will be a tough test for the revived brand.
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