2022 MacBook Air vs Dell XPS 13 Plus Comparison
Dell XPS 13 Plus vs M2 MacBook Air – Physical Design. Like Apple does with the MacBook Air, Dell refers to its XPS 13 Plus as having a “lightweight design.” Like Apple, Dell uses an aluminum outer enclosure for its notebook, which lends itself both to the weight and a premium finish. Indeed, a closer inspection of the closed XPS 13 Plus offers many similarities with Apple’s hardware.
The M2 MacBook Air, packing Apple’s latest Apple Silicon chip and overhauled with various new features, is arguably one of the best value notebooks you can buy. Combining a slim profile with performance, it is an attractive combination. Naturally, this is territory that many notebook producers also try to occupy with their products. In the case of Dell, its XPS 13 Plus is a notebook that directly competes against the MacBook Air.
While the MacBook Air has moved away from a taper to a more uniform thickness, Dell tries to fake a taper with its own enclosure. The sides start out thicker at the rear, with the edge narrowing towards the front to give the appearance of a taper, but really it is decoration for the edge. The two are very similarly sized, with the MacBook Air having a footprint of 11.97 inches by 8.46 inches, while the Dell is smaller at 11.63 inches by 7.84 inches. Though Dell wins with a smaller footprint, it does lose out on thickness at 0.6 inches to the MacBook Air’s 0.44 inches.
Dell has been working on the fans in the model, increasing the airflow of its dual-fan system without impacting noise levels. In theory, the Dell should be less affected by longer, more involved workloads, but that shouldn’t really be a factor for the real world’s lower intensity and shorter single-core workloads.
The weight is an oddity, as the configuration options for the Dell can slightly change its mass. The non-OLED version has a starting weight of 2.71 pounds, but going for OLED brings it up to 2.77 pounds. The MacBook Air is referred to as 2.7 pounds, regardless of configuration. Really, this makes the two notebooks quite similar in weight overall, give or take a small number of ounces.
Even though the fans did kick in during benchmarks, they weren’t overly noticeable. They did, however, stumble in properly cooling the machine. In high-performance mode, it reached nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the bottom while our MacBook Air was only about 85 degrees at its hottest. On the graphical side, the MacBook Air is offered with 8 GPU cores in the base edition, with an option to go for 10 if required.
Dell uses Intel Iris Xe Graphics, which refers to the integrated graphics built into Intel’s chips. It scored a 13743 on the OpenCL Geekbench 5 graphics test. Apple is known for having a rather minimalist approach when it comes to ports on devices. It started to shift away from that viewpoint with the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro releases, and it somewhat continued with the MacBook Air.
Source:bollyinside.com