Dell’s Best Windows Laptop for MacBook Haters Is $300 Off Right Now

I get it. Apple products are so wildly prominent that it can sometimes unfairly feel that the internet has sorted devices into two categories: Apple and other.

Even though I’m a big fan of the MacBook, iMac, and Mac mini lines because they do so much right, there are loads of Windows machines that can stand toe-to-toe with the MacBook.

Like the Lenovo Thinkpad half-off sale I highlighted not long ago, here’s another extremely popular Windows laptop—the aluminum Dell XPS 13—on sale for $300 off on all three pre-configured sub-models.

What you get for the money

For the entry-level configuration on sale for $1,160 (down from $1,460), you don’t get the touchscreen display. Its 13.4″, 2K-resolution IPS panel features a 500 nit brightness rating, but you’d better keep your greasy mitts confined to the keyboard and trackpad when you’re using it, because all they can do is leave fingerprints on the display.

You have to step up to the mid-level configuration on sale for $1,600 (down from $1,900) to get a touchscreen, which comes in the form of a 13.4″ 3K-resolution OLED panel with 400 nits of brightness, which means it has a bit less maximum brightness than the cheaper sub-model.

Stepping up to the mid-level doubles the DDR5 RAM from 16GB to 32GB and doubles the storage from 512GB to 1TB, but you take a minor step down from Windows 11 Pro to Windows 11 Home. That doesn’t matter much for home users, but if you plan to use your XPS heavily for work and desperately want Pro, you can add it back to your laptop build by choosing the top-level configuration for an additional $60.

Windows laptops have come a long way from the slim, dark-gray-plastic boxes they used to be. The latest Windows hardware is every bit as sleek as the MacBook’s, and the aluminum Dell XPS is one of the main laptops I hold up as an example of that whenever I feel like proving my point.