All roads still lead to Apple; Dell is very close behind
After all the back and forths, the MacBook Air with the M1 chip is my favorite laptop, although the Dell XPS comes very, very close. Both weigh in at less than 3 pounds.
For several years I’ve gushed to friends over my MacBook Air. Light, stylish and fast, the Air satisfied most of my mobile needs. But like other Apple products, it’s not cheap. The 13-inch model I have costs $1,000, with a 256-gigabyte solid state hard drive and 8 gigs of RAM. Its display is nothing short of breathtaking. The keyboard is backlit and the touch pad is sensitive.
But it doesn’t have a touch screen. Apple has introduced a sorta, kinda touch screen in its high-end MacBook Pros, but it’s not your teen-age son’s touch screen.
I like touch screens, but my budget is limited. On a visit to Dell.com I found the laptop of my dreams. A 2-in-1 tablet and PC, the Dell XPS has a 13-inch touchscreen, a decent keyboard and the best touch pad on par with the iPad Pro. But it costs $1,800 with the 11th generation i7 chip, 16 gigs of RAM and an amazing 1 terabyte solid state drive. A comparable MacBook Air, which doesn’t have a touch screen, costs about $1,650.
The neat part about the Dell 2-in-1 is that it’s 1. a typical laptop, and a nice one at that, and 2. it folds over to reveal a beautiful tablet that can be positioned at any angle. Working on a Microsoft Word document was surprisingly fast.
Aside from the touchscreen, the XPS boot-up takes seconds. It handles running multiple applications or having multiple web pages open without slowing down. My desktop, which has 32 gigs of RAM and a solid-state drive should be that fast. The MacBook Air, which weighs barely three pounds, has an lesser i5 processor; still, it’s almost as fast as the XPS. And, with the new M1 chip it’s refreshingly quiet.
The Dell offers a three-year warranty, for hardware, software and damage coverage costs. $299 Premium support is a must, since basic hardware warranty is terrible. A comparable three-year AppleCare warranty for the Air costs $199 and also covers damage.
Both laptops have passable speakers, webcams and sturdy cases. The Dell has a USB-C port the MacBook has two USB-C ports. If you want to connect USB 3 components, you need an adaptor. If you need an external DVD drive, you’ll need to spend about $50 on Amazon. Oddly, the Apple DVD drive only connects with a USB3 port. Again you’ll need an adaptor. Both the Dell and the Apple have high speed wifi built-in. In my tests, working with Word and Pages. surfing and playing part of a movie on Netflix, the Air ran for nearly 10 hours on a charge; the Dell lasted for about three hours.
The Air comes with the excellent Monterey operating system and apps for writing, preparing spreadsheets and presentations, along with software for photo and video editing and music composition. The Dell comes with Windows 11; you’re on your own for word processing and other software.
Here’s something that will tilt the decision even more. If you absolutely need to run Windows, a program called Parallels (reviewed here) will let you run both Monterey and Windows 11 right on your Mac.
For more information, visit: www.Dell.com and www.Apple.com and http://www.parallels.com
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