Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “2019 Dell XPS 13 vs Retina Macbook Air”.
What’S up folks how’s it going! This watch hope you guys are all doing well and today we’re going to be taking a look at the latest generation of the dell xps 13 and comparing it directly against apple’s uh latest offering in terms of ultrabooks the macbook air. With the retina display now, the xps 13 comes in a lot of different configurations. We’Re actually taking a look at the baseline configuration the most economical version, which is actually about 8.99 available in a lot of different places, including amazon, and that’s about a hundred to two hundred dollars less than the comparable macbook air with the retina display. And if we take a look at the actual design side by side, you’ll notice that we have a slightly smaller footprint on the xps 13 about 30.2 centimeters by 19.9 centimeters compared to the macbook air, which is slightly larger, both in terms of width and depth.
It’S also a little bit lighter on the xps 13 and only weighs about 1.23 kilograms versus 1.25 kilograms on the air. But if we actually factor in the thickness on both pcs uh, including the feet themselves, the xps 13 at its thickest point is about 19 millimeters and 16 millimeters at its thinnest point versus the air at its thickest point, including the feed only measures around 15.6 millimeters. Now, in terms of build quality and materials, the xps 13 does definitely feel like a premium ultrabook pc.
It’S actually made out of this woven fiberglass material on the palm rest itself. It kind of looks like carbon fiber and it certainly aids in the rigidity and overall premium, look that the notebook does have it can leave a little bit of fingerprints, especially grease marks, so definitely be careful of that. Most of the body is made out of aluminum uh unibody construction, just like the macbook air, so i would definitely put both of these on par in terms of build quality fit and finish, and everything like that, i do like the amount of ports and connectivity options.
We have on the dell, we have a thunderbolt 3 connection as well as two additional usb type-c ports, a micro sd card slot, which is nice and handy as well as a headphone jack and a noble, lock slot on the macbook air. We have two thunderbolt 3 connections and a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and that’s pretty much it so we do have a little bit more connectivity options on the dell, which is definitely nice and convenient, especially for such a portable machine. Now, moving on, let’s talk about the keyboard and trackpad combination on both machines. Now the xps 15 has an awesome keyboard. It’S fully. Backlit has a decent amount of spacing and a decent amount of key travel about 1.3 millimeters of travel, which is a little bit more than the low profile butterfly switches. We have on the air and all the new macbook pro pcs, which i’m not a big fan of definitely not as comfortable as the more traditional style keyboard that we have on the dell. So uh. Definitely a plus one on dell side. For that – and i do have to say that the trackpad is also fairly good, although it’s not a forced touch like we have on the macbook air, it still feels very responsive. It’S a glass, so the texture is really nice to use and it is a mechanical system, so you can only physically click at the bottom portion of the trackpad.
Unfortunately, you can’t click on the top, because it’s mounted on a hinge, but other than that. It’S definitely perfectly usable for most things, you’re going to do on this thing now moving forward. Let’S talk about displays now both of these are led ips backlit display, so they have excellent viewing angles: color rendition. Everything like that, the xps 13 was actually the first windows based laptop to have super thin bezels uh.
They call this their infinity edge display. We can get a 4k resolutions on some of these models. We have the baseline version, which comes with a full hd 1920 by 1080 resolution, and we have a screen size about 13.3 inches, which gives us a ppi account about 165, which is uh, definitely not as dense and as high resolution. As what we encounter in the macbook air, but i do like the aspect ratio which is 16×9, so most of your full hd videos will be full screen, which is definitely a nice addition.
Additionally, the display itself has a matte finish, so it’s awesome for bright offices or even outdoor conditions, and we have plenty of luminosity to the screen. It’S rated up to 400 nits compared to the 230 nits on the macbook air. So it definitely has that versatility going for it, even though resolution wise, it’s not as high, but in most real life applications and watching videos, and things like that. It’S perfectly reasonable. Perfectly sharp now in terms of the internal specifications, as we mentioned before, the baseline configuration of the xps 13 comes with a core: i5. 82. 8250.
U processor! That is a quad core chip with a thread since it has hyper threading enabled, and we also have a built-in 620 uhd intel graphics, 8 gigabytes of ddr3 memory, collector about 1866 megahertz and in most cases this is definitely superior than the only option of the processor Uh that we have on the air, which is uh the i5 82 10 y processor, that’s a dual core chip with four threads uh. It can turn back to 3.6 gigahertz and we have eight to 16 gigabytes of ram available with 6 17 uhd graphics. Now, let’s actually take a look at uh, the benchmark results. To give you guys an idea in terms of the performance differences and taking a look at center bench. You can see that there’s a massive difference between the two. Essentially, we have double the performance on the dell with 440 points compared to 287 points, and we take a look at our geekbench results. Although the single core performance is superior on uh, the macbook air, but in terms of most things these days, it’s mostly about multi-threaded performance and we’re getting over 10 000 points on the xbs 13 versus 70 800 points uh roughly on the macbook air. If you’re interested in terms of the graphical performance on the integrated graphics, we ran valley, benchmark uh, that’s the unigen’s at high details at 720p resolution and we got around 24.4 average frames per second on the dell about 17 frames per second on the macbook air. That’S definitely not impressive, and both of these machines are certainly not geared towards any sort of gaming based applications or any multimedia style creation applications they’re both kind of media consumption devices for general computing use, and if you want something higher end, obviously there are other options Out there, but really the key thing about these is going to be the endurance on the battery life and that’s going to be the main selling points of both pcs. So how do they compare well in terms of battery capacity? The dell definitely has a fairly large battery.
It has a 60 watt hour, 4 cell lithium ion battery versus the macbook air is using a 50.3 watt hour battery. In terms of capacity now, based on our video playback drain test uh, we essentially just run a video on loop with airplane mode on 50 screen brightness, and we just see until it goes from 100 to zero percent and uh based on those exact same scenarios. The dell xps 13 did fairly well uh, not bad for a windows based machine.
It scored around nine hours and two minutes before it ran out of juice, but it’s still not as good as the macbook air, which ran about 11 hours and 17 minutes now. In terms of general computing uses uh stuff. That is not that intensive. You can definitely get throughout the 12-hour day cycle in both of these machines, no problem in most scenarios, so you should be definitely fine in terms of battery life endurance, and this is really one of the few pcs uh that can keep up with the macbook air Uh in terms of its battery performance, so that’s definitely a awesome feature on the xps 13..
Now it’s always interesting, uh doing a comparison between an apple based product versus a windows based product because they certainly attract different crowds and audiences. But the key thing is, if you’re coming from the apple side and are not really too attracted by the current problems of the current generation air. Perhaps you are a fan of the previous generation and just not uh find the new one as appealing. I think this is an awesome offering from dell.
It’S certainly a little bit more economical has its advantages in terms of being slightly faster and giving you almost as good as battery life. So this is definitely an awesome alternative solution for those of you guys that want a great build quality, great overall mobile computing experience and aren’t detracted from the windows operating system so definitely check out the xps 13. I think it’s my favorite uh windows based ultrabook pc for the current moment, right now, certainly in 2019. But besides that guys, that’s really it.
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