Dell XPS 15 VS 15 Apple MacBook Air

 Dell XPS 15 VS 15 Apple MacBook Air

XPS 15 vs 15" MacBook Air who makes the best 15 inch laptop we have Dell's new XPS 15 right here and Apple's M2 15-inch MacBook Air now here are the specs and you see the Dell is will see if that money is worth it because we're comparing everything from the design to Ports the displays speakers and of course the performance Design Differences let's start out with the external design and the Dell looks very similar to what they've been doing for a while I'm gonna stack it on the MacBook right over here if you guys can see that it is actually smaller than the 15 inch air but if we compare the thickness the MacBook is basically the same thickness as just the bottom part of the XPS and if I hold them so side by side like this the MacBook is so much lighter we have 3. 3 pounds compared to 4. 4 but of course Dell is packing a lot in here including a 88 watt hour battery compared to 66. now we'll talk about battery life in just a bit but of course the XPS also has fans built in for that powerful processor and graphics compared to the completely fanless MacBook now.

As far as ports I love that we have the macsafe Comparing Ports connector on the MacBook it will connect here very convenient with Adele you just have USBC for charging but they give you this crazy big built in now both have two USB C's on the side they are both Thunderbolt and on the other side we have headphone Jacks but the XPS also comes with another USB type-c ports and an SD card reader Apple why could you not build one into this I mean maybe because it's so thin I don't know now on the inside I love that the Dell has Windows hello so I can just automatically log you in of course both of these have fingerprint scanners for security and as far as the Keyboards & Trackpads keyboards I've been using this XPS and I have to say that I prefer its keyboard over the MacBook airs it just has a little bit more travel but as far as track pads the XPS cannot compete with the macbook's magnetic trackpad it feels much better than the standard diving board design now the new Air has a six Speaker Comparison speaker system built into it which is pretty impressive whereas the XPS has a quad speaker system so let's go ahead and compare them .

Thank you wow guys you heard that difference for yourself I am impressed this thing sounds so good better than XPS 17s did in the past so Dell listened not only is it much louder a lot louder I thought it's gonna peek it it sounds good overall I would definitely take the XPS Webcam & Mic Comparison speakers now as far as webcams the MacBook Air has a 1080p webcam built in while the Dell still has a 720p webcam let me know which one looks better and which one sounds better down in the comments now as far as the displays we Display Differences have a lot of differences both of them are 16 by 10 and the Dell has these super slim bezels on the side is slimmer than the slim ones on the air already but the resolution on this Dell is really high it's 3. 5 K compared to 2. 8 not only that but it is also an OLED compared to regular LCD now as far as brightness the the OLED hits 400 nits compared to 500 on the LCD so it's a little bit less bright but it has really good anti-reflectivity Coatings to help with bright environments.

Now the huge positive is the contrast levels because HDR Video Playback it is a OLED display and looking at this HDR footage the Dell looks really really good I mean it looks incomparably bright while having great contrast and then when the lights are off the LCD screen on the MacBook is just really great you don't have that Peak brightness the Dell looks incredible as far as detail it looks really good as well the brights just really pop and then with that speaker system I mean this is going to be a killer movie watching experience SSD Speed Test and now let's get into performance I'm going to start out with an SSD speed test we have one terabyte compared to 512 now this one is the upgraded one so you have your your full performance and one interesting thing is with the Dell you can actually go up to eight terabytes compared to maxing out with two on the MacBook Air and look at that oh my goodness we just got the read speed in here 7137 compared to speed 6300 compared to 3400 close to double the performance wow.

 This is actually faster than like a 16 inch MacBook Pro impressive and now opening Geekbench 6 CPU up geekbench 6 here we see that we have the i7 cores compared to eight cores we also have 32 gigs of RAM compared to 16 but I know from previous testing 16 gives you full performance and with the MacBook you can only go up to 24 gigs maximum but of course it is unit unified memory so it's a little bit more efficient and we have our scores here as far as single chord the MacBook does Beat It Out 2600 compared to about 2500 but multi-core the XPS is beating out the M2 Chip by just a little bit as you guys notice though the XPS is unplugged now I did have it in high performance a mode in the window settings and in the Dell settings the extreme or Ultra performance but let's go ahead and plug it in and we'll see what we get and look at that guys that is a nice bump we have 12 265 compared to that's a difference of about 25 that also tells us if you want maximum performance well you need to have it plugged in now what about graphics Geekbench 6 Graphics performance of course.

 we have the M2 Chip this is the 10 core on Bend compared to the RTX 4 40 70 built into the XPS I'm going to go ahead and start this Benchmark here now an interesting thing with this Dell it's a 40 watt version of that so it's a little bit down clocked for this thin and lightweight 15 inch design now the M2 Chip uses roughly half of that power it's very efficient but let's see what we get we have 45 that is what double a little bit more than double very impressive and then unplugged we have 82 000 so at that point it is a little bit less than double but that's still very impressive the drop was basically 10 000 going on to battery power so it's still maintaining a lot of that performance now what about gaming performance I have 3D Marks Wildlife extreme stream unlimited here and it looks like we have 90. 7 FPS compared to running it again on battery power we have this case yes that did drop quite a bit but when it is still much more powerful than a Macbook I'm not going to complain about that because in the past it would be much slower and it's a laptop you're going to use it unplugged.

So I would say when performance is good that is still nice but what about some real world productivity programs I have blender opened up right here with the party tug Blender 3D Rendering project and the speed difference is insane the MacBook took 4 minutes 52 seconds compared to 58. 9 seconds literally 5 times faster the crazy thing is when I unplugged it took a minute 13 and that's because of the RTX graphics and the ray tracing cores that enable it to be incredibly Lightroom Classic Photo Editing fast and now I have Adobe Lightroom opened up with 50 edited high resolution images and shifting between these looks like sometimes the XPS is faster so far it's winning it most of the time we have that great performance of course that super fast SSD and now let's do an AI test of course the MacBook Air has that neural engine built in so this is gonna try to find the background and click it at the same time bam the MacBook there was about twice as fast at this task what about enhancing this image let's open that up we'll run super resolution.

 which I love using wow that was really close the MacBook Beat It Out by about a second but pretty close there and now let's export all 50 of these edited images I got rid of that extra one and let's see what happens wow the MacBook seems to be flying here and it's the one that's on battery of course with XPS if you unplug it you will lose a bit of performance and just to make sure I checked that the Dell is using its Graphics quite a bit of it to help bam the Dell just finish and look at this guys we have two minutes 43 seconds almost two minutes 44 compared to a minute and basically double the performance on the MacBook that is crazy and that shows off the benefits of the unified memory architecture even when you have 16 gigs now I have to point out that the MacBook is fanless so if say you had 500 of these tough images instead of 50 it would start to throttle and slow down but now that case it would still be faster than this xbs and that is impressive so for photo editing the MacBook definitely takes the win now Web Browsing Performance what about your standard day-to-day experience.

 I have speedometer 2. 0 opened up right here and I'm running it it's flashing fast on all of them this tests your web browsing performance for web-based applications like a lot of people use and looking at the scores we have 329 compared to DR18 4K HEVC Video Editing editing and here I have a 4K project with color correction Luts applied film grain and both these laptops are gonna have no issues processing this one thing that surprised me is how much of the graphics performance is needed to do this in real time we have about 32 percent compared to about 34 32 so the RTX Graphics in this well your overhead and the actual performance you have for more effects they line up very similarly and now let's go ahead and Export this five minute project um on the XPS I'm using nvidia's encoders which are very fast and look at that they were so close here but the XPS beat out the MacBook a minute 22 seconds compared to a minute of course that is with it plugged in and the fans going off I'm gonna try this with the unplugged just to see what it says and now it's giving us an estimate of about two minutes 15 seconds so it gets a lot slower on battery power but I figure if you're going to be rendering you'll probably find a plug-in for that overall.

 I have to give the video editing win to the MacBook because I was not expecting the performance to be pretty much identical even though you have half the graphics performance 16 gigs of RAM it's fanless and it's super thin and of course you also have the prores decoding and encoding uh chips that are built in but the XPS has gotten a lot faster compared to previous Battery Life Comparison generations and now let's talk about the battery life our MacBook wasn't even 100 charged when we started and now it's down to 50 after all of these tough tests whereas the XPS even though we only had brief amounts when we had unplugged it's at 93 percent this thing sucks power if you're doing tough things like we were testing you're gonna get two hours of battery life compared to about six to eight on the air this thing just sips power now as far as real world usable battery life we're looking at six hours for the XPS and 12 hours of mixed use for the MacBook Air this thing is super super efficient.

And another reason is the XPS not only does it use a lot more power for the CPU the graphics but the display also takes a lot of juice and if you would go for the cheaper life and you'll save quite a bit of money but of course this display is amazing it is so nice to have and you get six hours compared to a long time ago where you'd get more like three to four with the older processors so to Which Should YOU Buy? answer the original question who makes the best 15-inch MacBook or 15 inch laptop is it the MacBook or the XPS well it is tough because the MacBook Air is fanless it's super thin and light and has incredible battery life while still having really good performance but the XPS really surprised me it is more expensive and of course you can cut down on the ssds the ram you can save some money there but it is such a nice machine the speakers blew me away the display is incredible the performance on on battery power is way better than in previous generations and overall I would have to give the win to the Dell XPS if you want the best 15-inch laptop I would say it is the XPS as long as you don't need Mac OS and a lot of people need Windows so Della's done a fantastic job on this machine but if you're looking for the battery life and the thinness then the MacBook definitely does a killer job.