MacBook Neo beats Dell XPS 13 in Cyberpunk 2077 — but neither laptop is a gaming machine

The MacBook Neo and Dell XPS 13 are both priced at $699, and PhoneBuff's head-to-head testing reveals some surprising results — including on the gaming front, where Apple's budget notebook edges out the Dell.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the MacBook Neo loaded the game in just under 41 seconds versus 55 for the XPS 13, and averaged nearly 20 fps in the benchmark compared to the Dell's 16 fps running fullscreen. The XPS 13 can't even attempt ultra settings. The MacBook Neo also opened a 500-page Word document in about 7 seconds, while the XPS 13 needed 12. The Dell does win on cold boot speed — 24 seconds to the desktop versus 40 on the Mac — though the two machines run different operating systems, so that comparison has limits. Both laptops ship with 8 GB of RAM. The MacBook Neo runs on Apple's A18 Pro chip, essentially a repurposed phone processor, while the XPS 13 uses an Intel Core 5 320, a trimmed-down version of Intel's Panther Lake line.

The A18 Pro is a mobile chip by origin, but it performs comparably to older M-series silicon — which explains why it can hold its own here. PC Gamer's own testing earlier this year found the MacBook Neo could hit 30 fps in Cyberpunk 2077, but only by dropping to the Low graphics preset, 720p resolution, and enabling MetalFX upscaling in performance mode. As the reviewer put it, "that's not great, and looks a little soft thanks to all the upscaling going on, but at least it is technically playable." Twenty fps in a benchmark without those concessions is not playable by any reasonable standard.

For anyone willing to dial back expectations, the XPS 13 does bring a 13-inch OLED touchscreen with P3 wide colour gamut and a 120 Hz refresh rate — genuinely solid specs for indie games and visual novels where raw GPU power matters less. Neither machine is a serious gaming laptop, but for lighter titles and everyday use, both have a case to make at their price point.