Dell is bringing back the XPS 13 as a competitor to the MacBook Neo — with a temporary discount of up to $599.

Dell is doing well its mocked by CES and finally announcing the new XPS 13. The XPS 13 is making a comeback as a budget model, which launched in July at a student retail price of $599 – although the discount only runs until September due to back-to-school purchases; it starts at $699 for everyone else. The $599 listing is exactly the same as the MacBook Neo’s starting price, but students can get Apple’s budget laptop for $100 less. That means Dell has its work cut out for it to prove that the XPS 13 is worth the extra money.

This will be Dell’s thinnest and lightest XPS to date, measuring 0.5 inches / 12.7mm thick and weighing 2.2 pounds / 1kg. It only has two USB-C ports and no 3.5mm audio jack, either The last XPS 13 which costs a lot of money. Unfortunately, it won’t have a dedicated audio jack on the higher-end versions that will arrive later with Intel Panther Lake and Thunderbolt 4 chips – which will go up to 32GB of RAM.

The entry-level configuration gives you an Intel Core 5 320 “Wildcat Lake” chip, 512GB of storage, and a modest 8GB of RAM. (I see way.) But the good news is that every configuration of the new XPS 13 will have a 13.4 inch anti-glare screen with a 2560 x 1600 resolution, 30-120Hz refresh rate, 500 nits brightness, and 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space.

The XPS 13 will also have a backlit keyboard and a “fast” battery life of up to 17 hours. Dell reps say it should be efficient enough for students to get through a full day of study. There were no whispers of what Dell was aiming for with the XPS 13, as COO Jeff Clarke called the MacBook Neo by its name at the initial press conference. But while the XPS 13 is lighter than the Neo and has more features the MacBook doesn’t have like a backlit keyboard and a high-end layout, using 8GB of RAM Windows 11 remains the gorilla in the room.

Dell also teased one more product it will show at Computex this week: The return of the XPS with better graphics. It should sport a standard Nvidia RTX GPU, a bright OLED screen, a dedicated HDMI port, and an SD card slot. There aren’t many details yet, but it looks like a bigger and stronger XPS to compete with the MacBook Pros while the new XPS 13 Neo devices.

The XPS 14 and XPS 16 models that Dell introduced at CES fixed some of the company’s previous mistakes. they killed the XPS model in 2025. But competing at $599/$699 with the MacBook Neo will be a tough test for the refreshed model.