I'm a little bit torn, I'll leave the judgments fully up to you guys but I like the sharpness that the higher resolution camera on the MacBook Air provides, but I think the color representation is better on the Dell XPS 13 Plus. So, color is better here on the Dell, but it's a bit sharper there on the Mac. I don't know which one is more important and I'll have to leave it up to you guys based on these sample images to make that final call.

Battery life is another crucial aspect to consider. The MacBook Air easily wins out in this department. The Mac has always had exceptional battery life, and the M2 MacBook Air is more power-efficient than ever. I get more than a full day of use out of the M2 MacBook Air, but as I was just using the Dell XPS 13 Plus, not even benchmarking, just trying to use it for normal days of work and writing, I did not get that far. I only got about seven or so hours on my model, which isn't great at all. I got probably double that here on the MacBook Air if battery life is most important to you, I would lean towards the MacBook Air over the Dell XPS 13 Plus.

It's also worth noting that the MacBook Air is thinner, with a thinner machine and yet the battery life on it is almost double what I'm seeing from the Dell XPS 13 Plus. This is a notable difference in both design and performance.

Before getting into the performance testing of the M2 versus the Intel silicon, I wanted to touch on the heat of these two machines. I thought this was kind of crazy. The MacBook Air is entirely passively cooled, with no actual fans spinning inside, which means it gets a completely silent machine when you're using it. However, I would always worry that it would get warm and it does get a little bit warm when you're putting this thing under load. But the Dell XPS 13 Plus gets absurdly hot, like I noticed it on my lap - it was getting very, very warm, and it is actually actively cooled, with things in there that do spin up when it's under load.

I pulled out my infrared gun to check the temperature, and on the hottest spot on the bottom of the MacBook Air, I was only getting about 85 degrees. On the Dell XPS 13 Plus, however, it was north of 100 degrees when this thing was under full load. A hundred degrees is a notable difference in terms of heat.

Rounding up by talking about performance, the MacBook Air has Apple's latest M2 processor, which started off with just an 8-core CPU and then an 8 or a 10-core GPU. The Dell XPS 13 Plus, on the other hand, has an Intel chip inside, specifically this model using the Dell or the Intel 12th generation Core i5, with 4.4 gigahertz and 12 cores.

While both machines were capable, the M2 MacBook Air did eek out the i5 processor in my testing. There are several reports out there that the i7 version of the Dell XPS 13 Plus does outperform the M2 chip. I tried a bunch of different tasks between gaming, text editing, browsing, and playing some basic level games, and each of them did great. However, I think the MacBook Air has just a little bit better performance than the entry-level Dell XPS 13 Plus.

Let's finish this up by which one is better. Well, it's a toss-up - they're both outstanding machines that do great jobs for their ultra-thin design. But I'm really impressed with the change that Apple has made on the Mac - they've brought back additional ports, have a new streamlined design, physical function keys, and a gorgeous display that is larger than the last generation. Improved camera on it, all of these things. Dell went out on a ledge here with some interesting designs, such as the touch bar-like function keys and the hidden trackpad in this really flat keyboard.

However, it falls short in several ways - I don't like the keyboard or the function keys, the battery life isn't great, and it gets really hot. It absolutely wins in terms of just raw numbers SSD speeds and performance if you're looking for best performance, you've got to go with the Intel here on the Dell XPS 13 Plus. But I think a more well-rounded machine for what these ultra-book type things are - that's where I would lean towards the MacBook Air. Not just because I'm on an Apple channel, but let me know what you guys think - down below in the comments or on Twitter at Andrew underscore osu. Stay tuned to a lot more videos and more comparisons coming your way.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe new m2 macbook air or the new dell xps 13 plus these are some pretty amazing ultra portable laptops and this is gonna be a fun comparison let's dive into all of this welcome everybody to apple insider it is andrew here and as you can tell i have two tiny lightweight great laptops that i'm going to be breaking down in further detail in this video and before i even get into any of the specs and details and the hardware differences it's important to acknowledge first that this is a mac versus a windows comparison so not everything's going to be apples and oranges it's hard to compare things like gaming when platforms are so different in how they support them so for many of you out there there's there's no reason to look too much into this because you're always going to prefer mac os you're always going to prefer windows and if that's the case that's fine it's still really neat to see how the competition is stacking up so if you are platform agnostic and you don't care if you're looking at a windows pc or a mac os pc this video is going to be for you so let's go ahead and jump into this starting off with the design of these two machines these are both incredibly portable and light machines if we're looking at weight they're pretty much the same the dell is technically a slightly slightly slightly lighter than the macbook air and it's also slightly smaller as you can see in this view the uh dell xps 13 plus is just a little bit shorter there than the macbook air and it's not quite as wide that said the macbook air is a bit thinner than the dell xps 13 plus the dell has sharper corners which i kind of hate it's very kind of sharp towards the front and along the back it's very just sharp edges all the way around apple changed things with its latest version of the macbook air and got rid of that tapered wedge that did go to a finer point in the front now everything is a little bit softened up so all the edges have curves and i like it a bit better there's also a nice lip on the macbook air that makes it easy to open it up there is no lat lip at all on the dell but it does angle itself out a bit to give it a little bit of a kind of a lip to open it up but i still struggled a little bit in opening this each time kind of helps to grab two hands otherwise i felt like i was just kind of sliding the laptop back each time when we open them up we can see the keyboards on the inside and this is a big differentiator between these two models it's kind of funny that this is where we are because apple had come out with its first kind of butterfly keyboard that people hated like a lot and while apple eventually went away from that design dell seems to have almost embraced it dell has a almost perfectly flat keyboard on the xps 13 plus seriously the back the keyboard all the way up to the front palm rest and the trackpad it's all uniform in height the macbook on the other hand there's a little bit of a differentiation in a well where that keyboard sits when you're typing on the dell the keys just feel flatter though they probably don't have that much travel distance than the macbook air it just feels like you're tapping on a flat piece of glass because there's not much difference in between the keys themselves then we have to talk about the function row despite apple killing off the touch bar dell is trying to bring it back that's right there is no physical row of function keys on the xps 13 plus instead you have an illuminated row there along the top very similar to apple's ill-fated touch bar now i'll be one of the first ones out there saying i loved the touch bar i really did but what made the touch bar different was that you could program it based on the application and there was all these really neat features that you could do with it just replacing those physical keys with touch sensitive surfaces is not the same thing i liked more of the advanced features of the touch bar you could see image previews and timelines whether you're working in a photo editor or a video editor you don't get that with this kind of touch bar like surface on the dell xps 13 plus so for me i did not like having to use that touch sensitive surface in replacement of the function keys they did something different with the trackpad as well they completely blended it in you don't see it at all but this i did like it has a seamless look to it and it didn't bother me at all when i was using the trackpad i i knew generally where it was and i didn't stray too far off of that so the glass or this touch surface here in the front where the trackpad is i was a big fan of apple does have a massive trackpad on the front of its laptop on the macbook air and it has that haptic feedback when you tap it or press it so about ports on these two machines the dell xps 13 plus has two ports available to you there are two thunderbolt 4 ports you can see there one on the left and one on the right side of the machine i really like that they did put one on the left and one on the right because it makes it a little bit easier depending on where you want to plug in your laptop to charge from because you do use those two ports to charge the dell xps 13 plus now the macbook air on the other hand oddly has more ports apple is criticized a lot for reducing the number of ports it has on its machines but the macbook air here while not a lot has it more than the dell does we have two thunderbolt ports but they are located on the same side i do wish they were split up but we do have two thunderbolt ports on the left hand side then we have a headphone jack located on the right side of the machine yes there's still a headphone jack on the macbook air and finally a magsafe 3 port what's nice is that you don't have to use one of those type c ports to charge your laptop you can but you can rely on mag safe to charge instead freeing up one of those ports to be used for connecting things whether an external display storage anything like that so this is a little bit of a toss up the macbook air is winning out with more ports here but they are on the same side so you know pros and cons between the two but i think i prefer more ports than less for what it's worth dell does include some adapters in the box that you can use a wired set of headphones with the dell xps 13 plus but come on who wants to carry around more dongles what about the displays both of these qualify as 13-inch displays apple measures in on the diagonal at 13.6 inches whereas the dell xps 13 plus is 13.4 the macbook air has a resolution of 2560 by 1664 giving a pixel density of 225 224 225 pixels per inch the dell xps 13 plus on the other hand on this model is a 13.4 inch uh fhd plus which is 1920x1200 they also call it the infinity edge non-touch anti-glare screen there are two other screen versions including touchscreens and 4k versions and oled versions that you can choose to get but that's going to bump the price tag up we're looking at base units here so this is the 1300 base unit compared to our new m2 macbook air which only has one screen setup to choose from by the way the pixel density on the dell xps 13 is only 169. looking at them they both seem to have similar brightnesses and colors everything like that it looks like the dell's a little more over saturated but they both look great i think really what it comes down to is there's just a much higher pixel density on the macbook air than there is on the dell and i want that higher pixel density that's what i'm always looking for whether it's on my laptops or on full-fledged monitors each of these laptops has a built-in camera of course whether you're taking uh classes whether you're remoting in for work conference calls anything like that apple has a new 1080p camera on its macbook air and the dell xps 13 is still a 720p camera now you'd think it'd be pretty easy to sign with the macbook air here but i'm a little bit torn i'll leave the judgments fully up to you guys but i like the sharpness that the higher resolution camera on the macbook air provides but i think the color representation is better on the dell xps 13 plus so color is better here on the dell but it's a bit sharper there on the mac i don't know which i'd say is more important and i'll have to leave it up to you guys based on these sample images to make that final call for battery life the macbook air easily wins out the mac has always had exceptional battery life and the m2 macbook air is more power efficient than ever i get more than a full day of use out of the m2 macbook air but as i was just using the dell xps 13 plus not even benchmarking just trying to use it for normal days of work and writing i did not get that far i only got about seven or so hours on my model which isn't great at all i got probably double that here on the macbook air if battery life is most important to you i would lean towards the macbook air over the dell xps 13 plus and it's also crazy because the macbook air is thinner it's a thinner machine and yet the battery life on it is almost double what i'm seeing from the dell xps 13 plus before i get into the performance testing of the m2 versus the intel silicon here i kind of wanted to touch on uh the heat of these two machines i thought this was kind of crazy so the macbook air is entirely passively cooled right there's no actual fans in there spinning which means it gets a completely silent machine when you're using it but i would always worry that it would get warm and it does get a little bit warm when you're putting this thing under load but the dell this gets absurdly hot like i noticed it on my lap it was it was getting very very warm and it is actually actively cooled so there are things in here that do spin up when it is under load and when i was doing a little bit more testing i pulled out my infrared gun and on the hottest spot on the bottom of the macbook air i was only getting about 85 degrees and on the dell it was north of 100 degrees when this thing was under full load a hundred degrees people criticized the macbook air for getting warm the dell is on another level when we're talking about heat rounding this up by talking about performance the macbook air has apple's latest m2 processor this thing started off with just an 8 core cpu and then an 8 or a 10 core gpu the dell xps 13 plus on the other hand has an intel chip on the inside specifically this model is using the dell or the intel 12th generation core i5 1240p it's a 4.4 gigahertz chip and 12 cores in my testing while both machines were capable the m2 macbook air did eek out that i5 processor that said there are several reports out there that the i7 version of the dell xps 13 plus does outperform the m2 chip i tried a bunch of different tasks between gaming text editing browsing uh trying to play some basic level games and each of them did great but i think the macbook air and the new m2 has just a little bit better performance than the entry-level dell xps 13 plus so let's finish this up which of these machines is better well it's a toss-up like i said 10 times already they're both outstanding machines and they do great jobs for their ultra thin design but i'm really impressed with the change that apple has made on the mac they've brought back additional ports they have a new streamlined design there's physical function keys here like a lot of stuff that we like and it's got a gorgeous display that is larger than the last generation improved camera on it all of these things dell went out on a ledge here with some interesting designs such as the the touch bar like function keys and the hidden trackpad in this really flat keyboard but it falls short in several ways i don't like the keyboard or the function keys the battery life isn't great and it gets really hot it absolutely wins in terms of just raw numbers ssd speeds and performance if you're looking for best performance you've got to go with the intel here on the dell xps 13 plus but i think a more well-rounded machine for what these ultra book type things are i would lean towards the macbook air and not just because i'm on an apple channel but let me know what you guys think let me know down below in the comments or on twitter at andrew underscore osu and stay tuned to a lot more videos and more comparisons coming your way youthe new m2 macbook air or the new dell xps 13 plus these are some pretty amazing ultra portable laptops and this is gonna be a fun comparison let's dive into all of this welcome everybody to apple insider it is andrew here and as you can tell i have two tiny lightweight great laptops that i'm going to be breaking down in further detail in this video and before i even get into any of the specs and details and the hardware differences it's important to acknowledge first that this is a mac versus a windows comparison so not everything's going to be apples and oranges it's hard to compare things like gaming when platforms are so different in how they support them so for many of you out there there's there's no reason to look too much into this because you're always going to prefer mac os you're always going to prefer windows and if that's the case that's fine it's still really neat to see how the competition is stacking up so if you are platform agnostic and you don't care if you're looking at a windows pc or a mac os pc this video is going to be for you so let's go ahead and jump into this starting off with the design of these two machines these are both incredibly portable and light machines if we're looking at weight they're pretty much the same the dell is technically a slightly slightly slightly lighter than the macbook air and it's also slightly smaller as you can see in this view the uh dell xps 13 plus is just a little bit shorter there than the macbook air and it's not quite as wide that said the macbook air is a bit thinner than the dell xps 13 plus the dell has sharper corners which i kind of hate it's very kind of sharp towards the front and along the back it's very just sharp edges all the way around apple changed things with its latest version of the macbook air and got rid of that tapered wedge that did go to a finer point in the front now everything is a little bit softened up so all the edges have curves and i like it a bit better there's also a nice lip on the macbook air that makes it easy to open it up there is no lat lip at all on the dell but it does angle itself out a bit to give it a little bit of a kind of a lip to open it up but i still struggled a little bit in opening this each time kind of helps to grab two hands otherwise i felt like i was just kind of sliding the laptop back each time when we open them up we can see the keyboards on the inside and this is a big differentiator between these two models it's kind of funny that this is where we are because apple had come out with its first kind of butterfly keyboard that people hated like a lot and while apple eventually went away from that design dell seems to have almost embraced it dell has a almost perfectly flat keyboard on the xps 13 plus seriously the back the keyboard all the way up to the front palm rest and the trackpad it's all uniform in height the macbook on the other hand there's a little bit of a differentiation in a well where that keyboard sits when you're typing on the dell the keys just feel flatter though they probably don't have that much travel distance than the macbook air it just feels like you're tapping on a flat piece of glass because there's not much difference in between the keys themselves then we have to talk about the function row despite apple killing off the touch bar dell is trying to bring it back that's right there is no physical row of function keys on the xps 13 plus instead you have an illuminated row there along the top very similar to apple's ill-fated touch bar now i'll be one of the first ones out there saying i loved the touch bar i really did but what made the touch bar different was that you could program it based on the application and there was all these really neat features that you could do with it just replacing those physical keys with touch sensitive surfaces is not the same thing i liked more of the advanced features of the touch bar you could see image previews and timelines whether you're working in a photo editor or a video editor you don't get that with this kind of touch bar like surface on the dell xps 13 plus so for me i did not like having to use that touch sensitive surface in replacement of the function keys they did something different with the trackpad as well they completely blended it in you don't see it at all but this i did like it has a seamless look to it and it didn't bother me at all when i was using the trackpad i i knew generally where it was and i didn't stray too far off of that so the glass or this touch surface here in the front where the trackpad is i was a big fan of apple does have a massive trackpad on the front of its laptop on the macbook air and it has that haptic feedback when you tap it or press it so about ports on these two machines the dell xps 13 plus has two ports available to you there are two thunderbolt 4 ports you can see there one on the left and one on the right side of the machine i really like that they did put one on the left and one on the right because it makes it a little bit easier depending on where you want to plug in your laptop to charge from because you do use those two ports to charge the dell xps 13 plus now the macbook air on the other hand oddly has more ports apple is criticized a lot for reducing the number of ports it has on its machines but the macbook air here while not a lot has it more than the dell does we have two thunderbolt ports but they are located on the same side i do wish they were split up but we do have two thunderbolt ports on the left hand side then we have a headphone jack located on the right side of the machine yes there's still a headphone jack on the macbook air and finally a magsafe 3 port what's nice is that you don't have to use one of those type c ports to charge your laptop you can but you can rely on mag safe to charge instead freeing up one of those ports to be used for connecting things whether an external display storage anything like that so this is a little bit of a toss up the macbook air is winning out with more ports here but they are on the same side so you know pros and cons between the two but i think i prefer more ports than less for what it's worth dell does include some adapters in the box that you can use a wired set of headphones with the dell xps 13 plus but come on who wants to carry around more dongles what about the displays both of these qualify as 13-inch displays apple measures in on the diagonal at 13.6 inches whereas the dell xps 13 plus is 13.4 the macbook air has a resolution of 2560 by 1664 giving a pixel density of 225 224 225 pixels per inch the dell xps 13 plus on the other hand on this model is a 13.4 inch uh fhd plus which is 1920x1200 they also call it the infinity edge non-touch anti-glare screen there are two other screen versions including touchscreens and 4k versions and oled versions that you can choose to get but that's going to bump the price tag up we're looking at base units here so this is the 1300 base unit compared to our new m2 macbook air which only has one screen setup to choose from by the way the pixel density on the dell xps 13 is only 169. looking at them they both seem to have similar brightnesses and colors everything like that it looks like the dell's a little more over saturated but they both look great i think really what it comes down to is there's just a much higher pixel density on the macbook air than there is on the dell and i want that higher pixel density that's what i'm always looking for whether it's on my laptops or on full-fledged monitors each of these laptops has a built-in camera of course whether you're taking uh classes whether you're remoting in for work conference calls anything like that apple has a new 1080p camera on its macbook air and the dell xps 13 is still a 720p camera now you'd think it'd be pretty easy to sign with the macbook air here but i'm a little bit torn i'll leave the judgments fully up to you guys but i like the sharpness that the higher resolution camera on the macbook air provides but i think the color representation is better on the dell xps 13 plus so color is better here on the dell but it's a bit sharper there on the mac i don't know which i'd say is more important and i'll have to leave it up to you guys based on these sample images to make that final call for battery life the macbook air easily wins out the mac has always had exceptional battery life and the m2 macbook air is more power efficient than ever i get more than a full day of use out of the m2 macbook air but as i was just using the dell xps 13 plus not even benchmarking just trying to use it for normal days of work and writing i did not get that far i only got about seven or so hours on my model which isn't great at all i got probably double that here on the macbook air if battery life is most important to you i would lean towards the macbook air over the dell xps 13 plus and it's also crazy because the macbook air is thinner it's a thinner machine and yet the battery life on it is almost double what i'm seeing from the dell xps 13 plus before i get into the performance testing of the m2 versus the intel silicon here i kind of wanted to touch on uh the heat of these two machines i thought this was kind of crazy so the macbook air is entirely passively cooled right there's no actual fans in there spinning which means it gets a completely silent machine when you're using it but i would always worry that it would get warm and it does get a little bit warm when you're putting this thing under load but the dell this gets absurdly hot like i noticed it on my lap it was it was getting very very warm and it is actually actively cooled so there are things in here that do spin up when it is under load and when i was doing a little bit more testing i pulled out my infrared gun and on the hottest spot on the bottom of the macbook air i was only getting about 85 degrees and on the dell it was north of 100 degrees when this thing was under full load a hundred degrees people criticized the macbook air for getting warm the dell is on another level when we're talking about heat rounding this up by talking about performance the macbook air has apple's latest m2 processor this thing started off with just an 8 core cpu and then an 8 or a 10 core gpu the dell xps 13 plus on the other hand has an intel chip on the inside specifically this model is using the dell or the intel 12th generation core i5 1240p it's a 4.4 gigahertz chip and 12 cores in my testing while both machines were capable the m2 macbook air did eek out that i5 processor that said there are several reports out there that the i7 version of the dell xps 13 plus does outperform the m2 chip i tried a bunch of different tasks between gaming text editing browsing uh trying to play some basic level games and each of them did great but i think the macbook air and the new m2 has just a little bit better performance than the entry-level dell xps 13 plus so let's finish this up which of these machines is better well it's a toss-up like i said 10 times already they're both outstanding machines and they do great jobs for their ultra thin design but i'm really impressed with the change that apple has made on the mac they've brought back additional ports they have a new streamlined design there's physical function keys here like a lot of stuff that we like and it's got a gorgeous display that is larger than the last generation improved camera on it all of these things dell went out on a ledge here with some interesting designs such as the the touch bar like function keys and the hidden trackpad in this really flat keyboard but it falls short in several ways i don't like the keyboard or the function keys the battery life isn't great and it gets really hot it absolutely wins in terms of just raw numbers ssd speeds and performance if you're looking for best performance you've got to go with the intel here on the dell xps 13 plus but i think a more well-rounded machine for what these ultra book type things are i would lean towards the macbook air and not just because i'm on an apple channel but let me know what you guys think let me know down below in the comments or on twitter at andrew underscore osu and stay tuned to a lot more videos and more comparisons coming your way you\n"