Dell's new budget XPS 13 puts the MacBook Neo on notice

Dell finally announced its new XPS 13 laptop at Computex 2026 in Taiwan on Monday, almost five months after teasing it at CES. With a premium CNC aluminum build and a launch price of just $599 for students, the device is poised to aggressively compete with Apple's budget bombshell, the MacBook Neo.

On that battlefront, Dell is coming out swinging. "I'll give [Apple] credit, it's a good product...The difference is, we built something better," Dell COO Jeff Clarke told reporters during a briefing ahead of Computex.

Dell XPS 13 specs

The XPS 13 will be the thinnest and lightest XPS laptop Dell has ever made. It's just as slim as the Neo but half a pound lighter, weighing in at just 2.2 pounds. It will come equipped with a 2.5K touchscreen, keyboard backlighting, and WiFi 7, three features the Neo lacks.

The XPS 13's display will offer up to 500 nits of brightness and full DCI-P3 color coverage, so it should look very crisp and vibrant. It will also support a variable 120Hz refresh rate that can drop to just 30Hz when it's displaying static content, maximizing its battery life.

Dell's XPS 13 is rated for up to 17 hours of video streaming per charge. If that holds up in testing, it'll beat the Neo's battery life by just over two hours.

The XPS 13 will launch sometime later this month in a silvery "sky" finish with Intel's new entry-level Core Series 3 chips ("Wildcat Lake"). The base configuration comes with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and until Nov. 2, students ages 16 and up can buy it for just $599. Everyone else pays $699 (the same price as an identically configured Neo).

Later this summer, Dell will add a second "storm" finish and scaled-up variants with the flagship Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips ("Panther Lake"). Those upgraded models will have two Thunderbolt 4 ports, while the cheaper Wildcat Lake versions will have two USB-C ports. None will have a headphone jack, so there's one point on the Neo's side.

A cheap XPS laptop? In this economy?

The Neo's arrival this spring sent many PC makers scrambling, but Clarke said it didn't affect Dell's planned features for the XPS 13, which was developed over the course of "around 30 weeks." The company first hinted at its existence at CES in January, describing it in a blog post as "our most accessible XPS price point yet."

Dell previously sold an XPS 13 laptop from 2012 to 2024. But it was basically just a compact version of its XPS 14 and 16 laptops, not a budget machine targeting a whole different user base.

The new XPS 13's cheap price tag is quite the feat amid the global RAM shortage that's forced most PC makers to raise their prices — Dell included. Last month, select configurations of its latest XPS 14 got up to 31 percent more expensive. And its new entry-level Alienware 15 gaming laptop debuted at a higher price than expected.

Dell delivered a premium-feeling budget laptop in the current market to fulfill the accessibility commitment it made at CES, Clarke said, though it also took "a change in mindset and attitude."

"We had this belief that XPS was this incredible premium product, which it is, and it couldn't go below a certain floor," he explained. "We put our minds to it, making the XPS experience more affordable. We wanted to share that experience with a broader range of consumers."

So far, Acer is the only other major PC maker to announce a Wildcat Lake-powered budget laptop with U.S availability. (Out this August, the new Acer Swift Air 14 also starts at $699.) Other models launched in China last month.

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