Dell XPS 13 vs. MacBook Air – Which One To Choose For Long Term Work?

The MacBook Air is known for its exceptional battery life, lasting an entire day like a high end smartphone, under normal use. This laptop is challenged by Dell’s XPS 13, whose price starts at 808 dollars on Amazon. This laptop has the same battery capacity (54-watt-hour) as the large variant of the MacBook Air 2015, and if you’re curious which one lasts longer, you’ll find the answer in this article.

Designs

The MacBook Air has a redesigned trackpad which uses a new taptic engine and a “Force Click” feature, while the keys from the keyboard are individually backlit. The exterior of the laptop is made of aluminum and it’s extremely beautiful. The smaller version of the MacBook Air measures 300x192x3 to 17mm, while the bigger version measures 330x227x3 to 17mm, but they look identical.

The Dell XPS 13 has a carbon fiber and aluminum chassis, but it’s narrower and slimmer, measuring 304x200x15mm and it has a thinner bezel, allowing the screen to be very large.

Displays

The larger MacBook Air has a 13.3-inch screen with an aspect ratio of 16:10 and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels, while the smaller model comes with an 11.6-inch screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio and a lower resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. The Dell XPS 13 sports a 13.3-inch UltraSharp QHD+ touch display supporting 3,200 x 1,800 pixels.

Hardware and Performance

Apple’s new MacBook Air is using a dual core Intel Core i5 5250U processor clocked at 1.6GHz, but there is an optional variant with a dual-core Intel Core i7 5650U processor clocked at 2.2GHz, while the GPU is an Intel HD Graphics 6000. The configuration is backed by 4GB of 1600 MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM and the users can choose one of the two available variants on internal memory of 128 GB or 256 GB, or they can upgrade to 512 GB.

The Dell XPS 13 is powered by a dual-core Intel Core i5-5200 processor clocked at 2.2GHz, whose speed can be boosted up to 2.7GHz, and the device is using Intel HD Graphics 5500 and 8GB DDR3 (1,600Mhz), while the internal memory has a capacity of 230GB.

Both laptops have been tested and these are the results they obtained in a series of benchmark tests:

The MacBook Air scored 314.66 in the Xbench test; 98cb (Single Core) and 209 cb (Multi Core) in the Cinebench R15 test; 2,299 (Single Core) and 4,423 (Multi Core) in the Geekbench 3 test, while the battery lasted 7 hours and 5 minutes when looping HD video over Wi-Fi with a brightness set at three-quarter.

The Dell XPS 13 obtained 258 points in the CPU test of the Cinebench benchmark and the graphics scored 28.76 fps, but in the PCMark 8 Battery Life test, it managed to last 4 hours and 21 minutes. However, when playing a video with a lower screen brightness and audio volume, the laptop cranked out 7 hours and 40 minutes.