Dell XPS 13 Review: 8GB RAM Bottleneck — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:02] on. There we go. This is not okay. The problem is this is a really nice laptop. problem is this is a really nice laptop. It is the new Dell XPS 13. It's only 700 bucks. But there is a huge, huge problem. The MacBook Neo is the most

[00:15] problem. The MacBook Neo is the most important laptop of 2026. After years of Apple of all companies in the middle of the RAM crisis is the one who has given us a legitimately great budget laptop. Which brings us to this, the Dell XPS

[00:30] 13. At $699, this is designed to go directly head-to-head with the Neo. I kept seeing ads for it and listening to podcasts, seen a bunch of videos, and I sponsored video. I bought this laptop directly from dell.com where I had to

[00:44] wait a month for it to show up to see how does this stack up with the MacBook Neo. And is 8 gigs of RAM actually enough? Because yes, my friends, the RAM crisis comes for us all. The big compromise here is the same as the Neo.

[00:57] This laptop only has 8 gigs of RAM, and that is a real problem in 2026. Not only for the obvious reason you might think, and yeah, there are minor annoyances. So, my laptop's trackpad has a little rattle to it when you tap.

[01:15] times? The fans do tend to kick on a little bit more than I'd like, and the laptop certainly gets warm on your laptop. certainly gets warm on your laptop. your laptop gets l and battery life is

[01:29] variable, right? I've seen anywhere between 6 to 9 hours of use depending on how hard it's trying to keep all of what I'm doing inside that measly 8 gigs of RAM. But honestly, pretty much everything about this laptop is

[01:42] fantastic for $700. Now, I'm a weirdo who still misses 11in laptops, but the XPS is noticeably smaller than my usual daily driver, the ZenBook A14. It's also smaller and specifically thinner than the MacBook Neo. And while it's not

[01:56] quite as rock solid, the build quality is really fantastic on the XPS in a way laptops at this price point. The screen is also killer. 1600p, 120 Hz, and it's

[02:08] pretty bright at over 500 nits. It's got a really nice matte coating. Of course, it's a touchcreen. The only thing it's missing is OLED, but at $699, I am not complaining at all. The speakers are also legitimately impressive. They are

[02:21] way louder than you expect considering how tiny this laptop is. importantly it's back lit unlike the Neo. The port selection is pretty good.

[02:33] two type-C ports on either side of the laptop so you can charge from either display port [music] out. However, the downside is these are the only ports on the laptop. No other USBAs or even a headphone jack on this guy. [music]

[02:46] But I really want to emphasize that this is a lot of laptop for 700 bucks, even if there wasn't a RAM crisis going on. But by that same token, I'm also pretty happy to not daily drive this laptop anymore because, as I'm sure you can

[03:01] imagine, 8 gigs of RAM is a real bottleneck in 2026. I understand that I can be a little anal about this stuff, but I think this is something that almost anyone will notice. It's actually quick most of the time, [music] but then

[03:14] hangs, these random apps that take 5 seconds, it's not a great experience. I because last year an 8 gig Windows laptop was just a basic budget kind of

[03:28] option. We tried a bunch of sub $500 laptops in a video earlier this year, and well, they weren't exactly great. The world has shifted a lot since January. RAM prices have gone up massively in 2026 and are still

[03:40] continuing to rise. I think there's a real chance that eight gigs of RAM is going to start to become the norm if you're buying a laptop under $1,000, at least for the foreseeable future. For context, Microsoft just brought out an

[03:52] updated version of the Surface Laptop with only 8 gigs of RAM, ostensibly to lower the prices, but it's still $950. This is the same laptop, by the way, that launched last year at $900 with 16 gigs of RAM. You're now getting half as

[04:06] much memory for more money, [music] which I think is a big reason why this XPS matters a lot more than a $700 laptop should. Because the question isn't, is a cheap laptop bad? I mean, look, cheap laptops have always been

[04:19] compromised. This is genuinely a great computer at a honestly like really impressive price, but I still didn't enjoy using it. And I think the reason for that goes a lot deeper than, huh, this is a $700 laptop that's kind of

[04:33] something here which is a lot more meaningful going on. The first spot is well where is all of the memory actually being used anyway? Well, on Mac it's super easy to find out. I've been a huge fan of IstA menus for years to get

[04:47] detailed useful info on network memory CPU and more. But on Windows, well, you're kind of stuck manually opening task manager. This is why I vibe coded a little utility I call Winstat to give me actual data at a glance. So, I've

[05:00] now, but it's super simple. In the taskbar, you've got a basic icon with some info, but there's detailed data behind a single click. Now, this has been especially useful on the XPS to illustrate just how hard Windows is

[05:13] fighting to keep everything in memory. And while keeping an eye on things is something a little bit more in-depth, which is where the sponsor of today's video comes in, Zapier. Zapier's SDK is a code library you drop into a project

[05:26] [music] that gives you easy access to thousands of apps. No need to build a whole authentication flow. Now, Winstat logs to Notion automatically every few minutes so I can see exactly what causes memory pressure and how often. The

[05:38] This is designed for even someone as right out of the [music] box. It doesn't grant itself access to everything. For specifically shared so that I don't accidentally overwrite all our

[05:52] production data or something. But the Zap year SDK is really impressive stuff that massively cuts down the time it takes to connect apps and services. And the best part, it's free while it's in beta. Check out Zapier's SDK at the link

[06:04] much to Zapier for sponsoring this video. So, when it comes to using a comes to mind is the [music] inconsistency. I don't have anything fair few things open like I would with a normal laptop. And for the most part,

[06:20] little stuttery, but it's not too bad. However, if you take a look under the However, if you take a look under the hood, the system is screaming for life. So, right now, the system is sitting about 86% RAM used. This is going to

[06:34] traditionally on the system is close to 100% all the time. I think a really telling numbers if you look down here on the committed side, Windows has offered 22.8 gigs of memory to the various different programs that are open right

[06:47] if you look at the page faults, there's thousands of these things happening a having to reach into the SSD, pull stuff out, put it in memory, it works, but it's inconsistent. Which is part of the reason why if you're say browsing with

[07:02] fine for a little bit, and then you alt tab over to something you haven't used for [music] 5 minutes and the system basically grinds to a halt, modern systems expect way more memory than 8 gigs. I'm not doing anything [music]

[07:14] crazy here, right? Like I'm not doing a gaming demo, which I've tried and it doesn't work really well. I'm not rendering a bunch of 4K video. This is basic laptop stuff. Now, to be very fair, you could chalk up some of this

[07:28] performance to the CPU. So, this is using the Intel Core 5320. It is a specifically for more affordable laptops. It's meant to go headto-head with the Neo. But remember that service laptop with 8 gigs of RAM and the

[07:41] earlier? Well, The Verge actually got their hands on one and they tested it and it had almost the exact same issues. Load a few Chrome tabs up, open Slack, and you can grind it to a halt easily. So, I started thinking about where is

[07:53] all this memory going? Because one of the more taxing parts of my workflow in like a normal context, it's actually uploading captions to our videos, but it the thing I learned while I was actually doing some of the testing here is that

[08:08] just that single tab can take over two gigs of memory, which is crazy. But it's what's actually installed on your computer right now. I got Slack, Discord, Teams, [music] Spotify. A lot of these aren't native apps. They're

[08:23] using Electron, which basically means that they're shipping a private copy of of it. I'm not sure if you noticed, but Chrome is not exactly a lightweight when it comes to memory. Now, sure, this is fine, if not ideal. If you got a ton of

[08:36] RAM, you don't really care. But we live in a world where RAM is not getting cheaper anymore. In 2026, you are spending serious money on systems that only have 8 gigs of RAM. And like, this just doesn't work the way it used to.

[08:48] underpowered. It's just the simple fact of like apps kind of expect you to have don't, things really start to break. Now, that being said, Windows 11 does make this worse than it needs to be. I run Linux Mint on much older and cheaper

[09:03] hardware with only 8 gigs of RAM and it's totally fine. And with the same 8 gigs of RAM, the MacBook Neo is just straight up more usable. It's not a Neo into stuttering, but between Mac OS, Apple Silicon, and a little

[09:16] sprinkling of magic dust, things really [music] do just work. Whereas with Windows, it's a bit of a crapshoot. Now, to be fair, Microsoft is actually seriously. So, the Windows team have committed this year to improving quality

[09:29] on a lot of aspects of Windows, including performance, reliability. There's progress here, but they still got a long way to go to match Linux and Mac. So, is 8 gigs of RAM enough? I mean, honestly, for some people, yes. If

[09:42] you [music] keep lightweight use of your laptop, you know, a couple of tabs, some Netflix, it's actually a phenomenal $700 laptop that punches way above its it with even something like seven or eight tabs and a team's call in the

[09:55] background, you will start to run into that inconsistency and that lag. And to a brand new laptop today in 2026, it does not give me a lot of confidence about the future. But the thing is, this isn't really the XPS's fault. For years,

[10:09] for decades, even tech manufacturers have, from laptops to phones, constantly this is to meet demand. I mean, computers could do a lot more than they used to, but it's also marketing. It's like, "Hey, look, our new thing is 10 to

[10:24] a whole lot of money?" And everyone goes, "Yes, please." No one wants to see that's worse than last year. >> Yeah, the new PS5 is worse. Okay, [laughter] all right. The problem is developers have seen the increased

[10:38] sweet. Look how much we can do with our app now." And that's fine when you know you actually do have more RAM every year. But at a certain point, there's been less of an emphasis on streamlining the code for lower-end systems. So, you

[10:51] can see how this has become a vicious cycle. A snake [music] eating its own word I learned today. >> Is that why you're or boring us right >> Hardware has become more powerful. Software has become more powerful. But

[11:05] it's all gotten less efficient. I remember my first PC browsed the web with 128 megs of RAM just fine. So to think that I need two gigs of RAM for a single tab of Chrome or 200 gigs of space [music] to download a copy of Call

[11:20] of Duty. Now, I don't mean to cast stones at like, oh, developers aren't mean, there's plenty of reasons why a web app makes sense, but I just think it's been a long time since developers have had to really consider the fact

[11:33] dealing with less powerful systems, not more. Oh, does Reddit run like balls on But not everyone can just go do that. I'm not saying that everything needs to run perfectly on 8 gigs of RAM. But considering that most of that 8 gigs of

[11:48] RAM is just used up by Windows 11 existing before you even start doing anything on it, I think it's a real problem. But the hardware isn't the only problem here between web developers, app developers, Windows. I mean honestly,

[12:02] things more efficient. All this kind of makes me appreciate the work that Apple have done with the MacBook [music] Neo because that is a laptop that also has 8 out of the iPhone and yet it works surprisingly well with 8 gigs of RAM.

[12:16] Now sure you can argue that the RAM crisis is temporary and there's no reason for everyone to completely upend the way that things are developed. But I just feel like we're in for a an extended period of time in which there's

[12:29] a lot of people are going to be buying 8 gig laptops or even like 12 or 16 gigs devices aren't going to go anywhere. I would argue they're actually becoming more relevant, not less. We need software to go through what hardware has

[12:41] already started to do because realistically devices like this XPS or the MacBook Neo, [music] these are the new normal. And unless machine, the real competition is going to be on better value for systems that

[12:54] people can actually afford. And if that means that weird choices like the rumors that the next MacBook Neo will only have 12 gigs of RAM instead of 16 gigs, I think that's just a compromise worth making. But what do you think? Would you

[13:06] buy a laptop with only 8 gigs of RAM in 2026? Let me know in the comments below. and ring that dig. If you excuse me, I'm going to go download some more RAM. I think we probably need 1 TB. That's a good deal. Hey, there you go. RAM

[13:19] make this whole video? I could have just downloaded more RAM to begin with. downloaded more RAM to begin with. Perfect.