Dell Tries to Beat the MacBook Neo With Yet Another Cheap(ish) Laptop

The small and colorful MacBook Neo continues to loom large over the entire laptop market. Dell, hot on the heels of its ultra-light, relatively cheap XPS 13 laptop, is once again trying to meet the demands of all those incoming college kids with a Dell 14S that actually comes in a few appealing colors this time around.

The Dell 14S is an everyday laptop that’s more durable than the plastic crap we’re all too used to with more affordable PCs. Like the XPS 13, the 14S makes use of an all-aluminum shell weighing in at around 2.5 pounds (the XPS 13 clocks in at just over 2.2 pounds). Of course, the one thing that will inevitably catch your eye is the prettier tones. There’s an off-white “Linen,” a dull pink “Dusty Rose,” a blue “Washed Denim,” and—my personal favorite—a deep “Velvet Green.”

These laptops are again powered by Intel’s Core 5 320 and Core 7 350 chips, dubbed Wildcat Lake . These are cut-down Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors built for low-end browsing, streaming, and light editing. Their biggest boon is battery life, with the better efficiency promising “all-day” use. The Dell 14S is making use of a 3-cell, 61.2Wh battery. Dell says it’s also making use of a “denser cell battery” that’s built to hold its capacity for longer without overheating the slim, half-inch system.

Dell has yet to offer an exact price, instead promising to reveal that closer to release. Just like every laptop maker, Dell is dealing with RAMageddon by holding off on any price reveals until the last minute. So we may not know how well it stacks up compared to a $700 MacBook Neo or many of the other colorful low-end notebooks coming for a few months. However, the Dell 14S does have an advantage in I/O compared to the XPS 13, with an extra HDMI port on top of the two USB-C for DisplayPort connectivity and power delivery.

Despite that, the Dell 14S’ screen may still make this an appealing machine. The laptop maker promised you can grab the laptop with either a 2.8K (2,880 x 1,800), 120Hz display or a 2K (1,920 x 1,200), 60Hz LCD panel. The higher-resolution display can hit a promised 450 nits of brightness, which should be enough for taking your laptop outdoors to finish your homework.

And here’s the rub: you can get this laptop with either 8GB or 16GB of LPDDR5x, 7467MT/s RAM, and between 256GB and 1TB of storage. Let’s just say it now: with Windows 11 in its current state, you’ll have a way worse time with 8GB laptops than with 16GB machines. Just keep that in mind before we finally discover the final price sometime this fall.