Best ultrabook: MacBook vs XPS 13

By far the best ultrabook for Windows or Mac shall be the Dell XPS 13 with Infinity Display and the new MacBook with 12" Retina Display. Which one is the best of the best?

From the spec, it may be like this (red means winner):

	DELL XPS 1	Macbook
Processor	Core i7-5500U	Core-M 1.3GHz
Graphics	HD5500	HD5300
Memory	8GB	8GB
Storage	256GB SATA	512GB PCIe
Display	13.3" 3200 x 1800 touch	12" (2304x1400) glossy
Dimensions	11.98" x 7.88" x 0.6"	11" x 7.74" x 0.52"
Weight	2.8 lbs	2 lbs
Battery	52 WHr, 7hr	39.7WH, 9hr
I/O Ports	USB 3.0 (2), mini DisplayPort (1), SD card reader	USB type-C (1)

Form factor design
Macbook looks great, super light and neat. The color choices are great too. However, the edge of the aluminum shell is a little bit sharp.

Display
Both are beautiful. XPS wins marginally simply for its bigger size. Also XPS provides a matte option (but resolution reduced to 1920x1080) which is good for outdoor use.

CPU
The Geekbench 3 benchmark result is surprising -- while Core M is inferior to the powerful i5 or i7 in 32 bit tests (though just by 10% compared to i5), its 64-bit performance is  comparable to i7 U5500!!

	i7 U5500	i5 U5200	Core M 1.3GHz
32 bit single core	2884	2521	2387
32 bit multi core	5960	5071	4673
64 bit single core	2888	2666	2816
64 bit multi core	5993	5280	5596

Disk speed
Currently most Windows laptop still equips the slower SATA-based SSD, while Apple already upgrades all laptops to NVMe enabled PCI-e. Based on a test on similarly equiped MacBook Pro, the read/write is stunning 1.3/1.4GBps -- simply 4x that of XPS. That helps making the MacBook responds to typical works (which largly depends on disk I/O rather than CPU power) like instant.

Keyboard
Both keyboards are comfortable to type. Although MacBook is shallow, it's surprisingly good.

Touchpad
The force-touch on MacBook is simply no competition! There have been several complains about XPS touchpad being slow in respond, sensitive to palm rest, etc. Hope that can be imprved in future firmware update.

Battery
MacBook can easily last > 9h while XPS with touch display only lasts 7h.

I/O port
XPS is the winner. This is likely the only Achilles heel of MacBook. Although USB type-C can be expanded with hub, so far, no hub can allow charging MacBook while connecting to external devices at the same time. If MacBook can provide 2 type-C ports, it will be completely different story.

Price
Somebody said MacBook is expensive. However, if you match same size of SSD, it's not that expensive.
MacBook with 1.3GHz CPU costs USD$1749.
XPS 13 with i7 CPU and 512GB SSD costs USD$1900.

Bottomline
I would say MacBook is the overall winner. When someone is considering ultrabook, portability will be the major concern. In this regard, no one can beat MacBook -- some product may be smaller or lighter but can't match the same battery life. Especially, this doesn't mean sacrifice performance. The daily usage performance will also shine when considering the ultra fast SSD and not-so-slow Core M 1.3GHz CPU -- not to mention the performance gap between Windows and OS X. If you are a Windows user, the best way is to install Windows on MacBook. However, if you need to connect external devices most of the time, then go for XPS 13. It's a good machine after all.