hey guys it's max today I'm comparing two brand-new 2020 laptops we have the
new MacBook Air which Apple made some great upgrades to and the new Dell XPS
13 90 300 which Dell also made some excellent upgrades to and we're gonna
see which one of these is the better laptop for your money now we're not only
going to look at things like CPU and graphics performance we're gonna talk
about the new keyboards both of these have been updated the track pads the
displays the microphones the webcams and more let's go ahead and jump into it
with the exteriors now you guys might see that the Dell is little bit shorter
I'm going to go ahead and close it up here and Dell has really made this thing
as slim as possible you guys see by stack these on top of each other over
here the MacBook Air is both a little bit wider and a little bit taller now as
far as the thickness here they are very similar they both use this wedge-shaped
design the MacBook Air does get a little bit slimmer at the very end here and
that's because they have more room to play with and as far as ports you guys
see the Dell does have a USB type-c Thunderbolt 3 ports over here with the
headphone jack and then the other other side the MacBook Air has two Thunderbolt
3 ports and the Dell XPS also has the second one on this side so you have one
on each which is convenient and we have a micro SD card slot which I really like
as far as build quality both are excellent both are made out of aluminum
Dell stepped up their game there hinge now right here is all aluminum and then
the whole bottom chassis is milled out of aluminum where the ports are and then
if we go ahead and open these up they also improve the hinge as you guys can
see I have now have a one-handed open and as you guys just noticed the XPS
just recognized my face and logged me in using Windows hello there's an array of
sensors up here at the top next to the webcam just like face ID on your iPhone
and I've been asking for Apple to include this in their mac books for a
while now is just so convenient of course the MacBook Air does have touch
ID built in over here the Dell XPS also offers scanner built into the power
button and on the inside I feel like it makes it seem a little bit more premium
with the all aluminum design now the XPS has a soft coating over here it doesn't
get us cold it's a little bit more comfortable.if now another thing that
you guys probably noticed right away is the difference in bezels the MacBook Air
doesn't look bad but the Dells look excellent it's super thin over here and
even at the top it is incredibly thin now let's look lower at the keyboards
Apple just updated it to the magic keyboard that's included in the 16 inch
MacBook Pro it feels excellent a big improvement over the the butterfly
keyboard both in reliability and in feel we have more travel nice tactile kind of
response they'll also mean there's there has a
one millimeter travel distance it's also very responsive and believe it or not I
can't really give a winner to either one of these the key sizes are nice and
large both are excellent I think anybody's complaint is going to complain
with these keyboards now if we look a little bit lower we have our track pads
this is where Apple absolutely takes the wind they have the magnetic force touch
trackpad when you click there's an even feel everywhere you can actually just in
the settings how hard you want that little click that's simulated to be the
XPS trackpad it's accurate I don't have that much complaints but you can't
compare these two if you want the best trackpad Apple offers those now let's
talk about displays the MacBook Air uses Apple's 16 by 10 aspect ratio Retina
display just over 4 million pixels nice and sharp whereas the XPS also uses 16
by 10 which is great and you have the option of 1080p or 4k and non
touchscreen or touchscreen so we have a lot of options now I'm watching back
this video right here and the Dell definitely looks better I do have the 4k
touchscreen option in front of me now as far as the brightness they might look
similar right now maybe the Dell looks slightly brighter but the MacBook Air is
actually maxed out 315 it is what it can offer whereas the XPS actually goes up
to 500 nits for this year doesn't matter if it's 1080p or 4k and I actually don't
have it maxed out so let me click this up right here in the Dell with that
brightness is HDR capable so I'm watching in HDR it looks better there is
no doubt about it now as far as the color accuracy both can do 100% srgb so
overall if you get the base XPS with the 1080p it's not going to be as sharp but
it's still going to be bright or if you go for the 4k it definitely is
gonna look nicer now it's time to compare the speakers make sure you guys
get your best pair of headphones I have to say that last year's XPS the speakers
were not good that was probably my biggest complaint they did upgraded this
year which is great but let's see if it can compete
[Music] [Music]
[Applause] [Music]
the XPS is good enough for most people you can watch movies you can listen to
music it's a lot louder than before but with that said the MacBook Air still is
a little bit louder and the sound quality is better as well not as big of
a difference line it was a huge difference last year so I'm glad Dell
really stepped it up but it still isn't as good I wonder if that's because it is
down firing if it was firing up maybe it would have a little bit of a better time
both of these laptops feature 720p webcams but this is the quality that you
can get from the MacBook Air both the video and also the microphone quality
and this is the webcam and microphone quality from the new Dell XPS 13 go
ahead let me know any differences that you notice down in the comment section
below now let's compared the SSDs both of
these models are configured with 512 gigabyte SSDs man okay
the MacBook just got smokes we have 2,200 right 2600 read compared
to 1300 and 1300 let me do that again very very interesting all the settings
here are exactly the same and we're using aja just because it works with
both let me go ahead and pull up here black magic speed test let's see what we
get here and it looks like even in black magic the performance is coming out
about the same so the Dell XPS does have the better SSD and for the base model it
comes with 256 just like the MacBook Air does but for the MacBook Air it costs a
lot more to go to 512 here it was just a $50 upgrade but not only that you can
actually swap out your SSD yourself it's very easy and simple to do you can pop
in a one terabyte or a twos here but if you want to in the future and that is
really nice to have that flexibility now it's time to talk about CPU and graphics
performance I have Geekbench 5 pulled up here and for the base models the MacBook
Air comes with an Intel attention i three processor it's a dual-core and we
get about a thousand single core and about 2300 multi whereas the XPS the
base model does cost more money it's about $200 more expensive but we have a
quad core i5 and the single core score is faster by about
200 points multi-core is significantly faster we're looking at 4,300 now with
the MacBook Air you can't step up to either an i5 or an i7 quad core as well
by 5 and i7 they perform very similarly because of the thermal design which I'll
talk about in just a bit we do jump up to about 1250 1300 single core and the
multi-core score will go up to roughly 3300 maybe thirty five hundred or so
whereas here the i5 is way outperforming it if we go up to the i7 we go up to
4700 on the multi-core that is a really big difference now such on graphics if
you're buying the base models both score of roughly about the same we have 5,600
5,800 over here that is similar now if you get the MacBook Air with the i5 you
step up right away to the best graphics and then that brings you to roughly 8800
about nine thousand or so OpenCL maybe slightly higher with metal whereas with
the XPS if you go step up to the i7 that's when you get the better graphics
and then we're scoring over ten thousand ten thousand six hundred now there is a
difference why we're seeing better performance out of I 7s or I fives on
the XPS first off the chips that are in this laptop they are not why series they
are you series they have more wattage and second the system has a lot better
cooling we have two fans inside we have heat pipes whereas the MacBook Air it
uses a more efficient processor that doesn't use as much watts and the
heatsink is not connected to the fan and this leads it to not be able to run as
fast if we go ahead and open up Cinebench R 20 we can see that the
MacBook Air heats up to a hundred degrees instantly and the Dell XPS also
goes to 100 degrees really really fast but we're running at 34 watts here
compared to 15 now a very interesting thing about the XPS is Dell tune the
fans a little bit differently than before it acts more like a MacBook where
it allows it to get a little bit hotter and the fans to spend lower to minimize
the fans ramping up and down in causing a lot of annoying noise but if you push
it for a little bit right now we already see its drop down to 24
it will allow itself to cool down we're nearing the end of the test here deck
space is running at 2.6 gigahertz compared to 1 point 4 3
as far as fan oiss the MacBook Air is slightly louder than XPS and we just got
a thousand six hundred and eleven points in cinema jar 20 it's been about 2 extra
minutes and we just got done 800 in 90 points so the XPS is about 85% faster
under load because of its cooling and it runs slightly quieter as well whereas in
the simpler tasks we had a difference of about 40% now this is the i-5 model but
in everything that I've seen the results online the i7 performs basically the
same when you're putting it under these loads because they can't run any faster
than the i-5 because of the thermals and of course prices matter as well the
MacBook Air starts out a thousand bucks where the XPS starts at 1200 at the base
we have 8 gigs of ram 256 gig of SSD but if you want to upgrade your SSD on the
XPS is going to cost you only 50 bucks more to go for 512 that is what I have
here whereas with the MacBook Air that upgrade cost you another $200 and then
if you want to upgrade the RAM that cost you 200 bucks as well whereas Dell only
charges you $100 upgraded I would absolutely do that because it is
soldered in so right at the gate if we're comparing the base and I'm gonna
go up to the i5 here we're looking at $1500 versus 1350 now the MacBook Air is
gonna have the better display if you want the 4k display it also costs you
quite a bit more at the base if you just want an entry-level for basic tasks the
MacBook Air is great and there's some good deals right now a B&H 400 bucks off
meaning you get the system for $900 excellent if you just want a simple
system I would just buy that base model and use it don't go for the i-5 but if
you want a great laptop that has really good performance out of the box with a
good SSD that you can upgrade 16 gigs of ram for thirteen hundred and fifty
dollars you're not gonna get that resolution but
you'll get great battery life and overall Dells done an excellent job with
the XPS so if you're somebody that wants to do things like photo editing some
video editing you want to do some light gaming you want it to handle you know
whatever you want to throw at it much better you don't have to worry about
that I think the XPS is a better system the
MacBook Air at the base level it is an incredible value for a brand new 2020
Apple computer with that great keyboard and trackpad good speakers if you want
to have more capabilities you don't mind Windows
I think the XPS is a really really good option with all the upgrades that they
made you guys let me know your thoughts down in the comments section below
I've links to both of these down in the video description there's some good
sales and if you guys want to see more videos click that little circle above if
you want to see our full review of this XPS and we have some other videos right
over there this has been max with max tech and I will see you in the next
video [Music]