Jeff Geerling
Intel just matched Apple Silicon. Seriously.
Jeff Geerling tests the $699 Dell XPS 13 ($599 for students and teachers) and argues it would not exist if Apple had not shipped the MacBook Neo in March: Dell copied the idea and did most of it one notch better, with a matte 120 Hz variable refresh touchscreen at higher resolution, a backlit keyboard on par with Apple's, two 10 gigabit USB ports that both drive displays instead of Apple's single 480 megabit USB 2 port, and a 512 GB SSD that doubles the Neo's base storage, runs faster, and can be swapped by the owner. The losses are real: weaker speakers, no headphone jack at all, audible fans, Windows as the only officially supported OS complete with an Xbox ad and a OneDrive nag, and a Core i5 iGPU that cannot hold a candle to the Neo's A19, with the almost entirely GPU bound Gravity Mark showing the Mac nearly doubling the Dell's score. The surprise is efficiency. On the Top 500 supercomputing benchmark the chip throttles after ten seconds to settle at 20 watts and still crushes every other x86 chip Jeff has ever tested for compute efficiency, and when he re-ran the suite on the four e-cores alone and then on the performance cores alone, each set separately landed among the most efficient computers he has measured, beating most Apple Silicon Macs. Idle draw matches Apple at under a watt with the display off and about 4 watts at half brightness, and Wi-Fi 7 sustains a gigabit for a few watts. He pops out Dell's drive, installs Fedora 44, gets every piece of hardware working after a USB Ethernet adapter and a round of updates, and recommends the machine at the price largely because Linux will keep it alive long after both Dell and Apple stop caring.
HardwareLinuxAppleAug 7, 2026
13:58
