Jobs had just finished introducing the redesigned MacBook Air to a roomful of reporters when he spied my machine. I’m a Windows user. But I wanted one, bad. It was thin. It was light. It promised great battery life.
And it was quick. Flash memory, rather than a conventional hard drive -- and Apple’s OS X software -- meant Apple’s little machines could wake up from sleep mode in an instant, or reboot in just a few seconds.
I had nursed my chunky Windows laptop -- and my even chunkier corporate machine -- through enough keynote speeches. My next personal laptop would be one of these Macs, I decided.
But rather than buying one, I waited. And waited. Dell, it turns out, was taking its time, too. Earlier this year, Dell introduced the XPS 13. Like the MacBook Air it’s thin. It’s light. It’s quick. It’s not as flashy as the Mac, with its all aluminum body, but given the chance to learn from Apple, Dell’s designers pulled off a number of clever tricks.
That said, neither the MacBook Air or XPS 13 are for everyone. If you do any serious gaming or if you edit photographs or video for a living, you’ll want a machine with a dedicated graphics processor, more ports, and an optical drive. “We are really aiming at the mobile professional, someone on the go who is traveling a lot who really values the mobile form factor,” says Ed Boyd, vice president of design at Dell.
Boyd’s most noticeable trick: cramming a 13.3-inch screen into a ridiculously small package. Apple’s 13.3-inch MacBook Air is slightly thinner. The Mac is 0.68 inches at its thickest point, compared to 0.71 inches for the Dell. The XPS 13, however, is more compact. The 13.3-inch Macbook Air is 12.8-inches wide and 8.94-inches deep. The Dell, by contrast, is just 12.4-inches wide and 8.1-inches deep.
Dell’s other trick is even more impressive: the Dell is $300 cheaper. It’s missing some features you’ll find on the 13-inch MacBook Air. There’s no Secure Digital Card slot, and the screen -- while adequate -- doesn’t boast the same resolution. Yet the Dell, which starts at $999 for a model with a 128GB solid state hard drive, doesn’t feel cheap.
Unlike the Mac, the Dell’s screen is covered with edge-to-edge glass. While the Dell doesn’t have the Mac’s satiny aluminum finish, soft touch plastics, metal highlights, and an aluminum lid give this machine a higher-end feel than much pricier Windows machines. “It’s not hideous,” said one Mac user when I showed him the machine.
While the machine doesn’t do enough to lure many people back from Apple, it will give those -- like me -- who haven’t switched yet pause. My next personal machine won’t necessarily be a MacBook Air -- but it won’t be the XPS 13 I tried out, either. Intel’s latest third-generation core processors are trickling into laptops now. These processors promise better battery life and more responsiveness. So go slow, because quick little machines such as the MacBook Air and XPS 13 should be about to get a good deal quicker.
