Dell finally announced its new XPS 13 laptop at Computex 2026 in Taiwan on Monday, nearly five months after teasing it at CES. With a premium CNC aluminum construction and a starting price of just $599 for students, the device is poised to compete fiercely with Apple’s budget flagship, the MacBook Neo.
In that fight, Dell comes out swinging. “I will give [Apple] Credit, good product…The difference is, we built something better,” Dell COO Jeff Clarke told reporters during the Computex conference.
Dell XPS 13 specifications
XPS 13 will come into the sky and the storm will finish (left and right, respectively).
Credit: Dell
The XPS 13 will be the thinnest and lightest XPS laptop ever. It’s as thin as the Neo but half a pound lighter, weighing just 2.2 pounds. It will come equipped with a 2.5K touchscreen, keyboard lighting, 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, so it should look crisp and vibrant. It will also support a variable 120Hz refresh rate that can only drop to 30Hz when displaying static content, increasing its battery life.
The XPS 13 doesn’t have a lattice-style keyboard or a seamless touchpad, two signature features of Dell’s XPS 14 and 16 laptops.
Credit: Dell
Dell’s XPS 13 is rated for up to 17 hours of video streaming per charge. If that holds up to the test, it will surpass the Neo’s battery life by just over two hours.
The XPS 13 will be launched sometime later this month in a silver “sky” complete 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 16 years and older can purchase it for only $599. Everyone pays $699 (the same price as a similarly configured Neo).
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Later this summer, Dell will add a second “hurricane” with an increased variant with the latest 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. Neither will have a headphone jack, so there is one point in Neo’s favor.
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The XPS 13 is half a pound lighter than the MacBook Neo.
Credit: Dell / Mashable composite
The Neo’s arrival this spring sent many PC makers scrambling, but Clarke said it doesn’t affect Dell’s impressive XPS 13, which was developed over “about 30 weeks.” The company first announced its presence at CES in January, describing it in a blog post as “our most accessible XPS price point yet.”
Dell previously sold the XPS 13 laptop from 2012 to 2024. But it was basically a compact version of the XPS 14 and 16 laptops, not a budget machine targeting a completely different user base.
The new XPS 13’s cheaper price tag is a factor amid a global RAM shortage that has forced most PC makers to raise their prices – Dell included. Last month, select configurations of its latest XPS 14 went up a whopping 31 percent. And its new entry-level Alienware 15 gaming laptop has been released at a higher price than expected.
Dell brought a premium-feeling budget laptop to the current market to fulfill the affordability commitment it made at CES, Clarke said, though it also took “a change in mindset and attitude.”
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“We had this belief that XPS was this incredible, premium product that it is, and you can’t go below a certain floor,” he explained. “We put our minds to it, making the XPS experience more accessible. We wanted to share that experience with a wider range of consumers.”
So far, Acer is the only other major PC maker to announce a Wildcat Lake-powered budget laptop available in the US. (This August, the new Acer Swift Air 14 also starts at $699.) Other models were launched in China last month.
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