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Don't call it an XPS: Dell unveils new 14-inch laptop to compete with MacBook Neo 2 September 2026 at 14:41

Don't call it an XPS: Dell unveils new 14-inch laptop to compete with MacBook Neo

By: sean.endicott@futurenet.com (Sean Endicott) · Sean Endicott

2 September 2026 at 14:41

Dell just announced a new laptop to take on Apple's MacBook Neo. The Dell 14S is a colorful laptop designed for college students and young adults, which helps the PC compete with the MacBook Neo's colorful range.

The Dell 14S should be a budget-friendly PC, though Dell has not released pricing for the laptop yet. The laptop has an aluminum body and a nice selection of ports, including two USB 3.2 Type-C ports, an HDMI port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The Dell 14S and the Dell XPS 13 released earlier this year both compete with the MacBook Neo, but they do so in different ways. The XPS 13 has a better display, Wi-Fi 7, a backlit keyboard, and is a more premium device.

The Dell 14S promises all-day battery life, is available in several colors, and has a 16:10 display.

People who were intrigued by the low price of the MacBook Neo but want the look of a premium laptop running Windows 11 will likely prefer the newest XPS 13. Those who like the colorful tone of the MacBook Neo but want a lightweight and affordable device running Windows 11 will probably lean toward the Dell 14S.

Dell's confusing naming scheme

Dell is still struggling with naming its products. The company abandoned the XPS lineup and got rid of its entire consumer-focused strategy but has since backtracked and brought back XPS. But the company seems confused on what XPS means to customers.

If you head over to Dell's webpage about the New Dell 14S, you'll see a comparison chart that includes the New Dell 14, New Dell 14S, and Dell 14S. Incredibly, they are quite different from each other.

Listing two laptops side-by-side and having one labeled as "new" is fine. It's somewhat similar to how car companies handle naming, though the automotive industry often just attaches a year within parentheses.

Sticking with that analogy, if you look at a 2025 Honda Civic and a 2026 Honda Civic, they should be somewhat similar vehicles. Barring a complete overhaul, a new version of a model should resemble its predecessor.

If there is an overhaul, it's usually a linear progression, such as when Dell shifted from the old-old XPS to the once-new-but-now-old XPS.

If you did not already know which of the below PCs were XPS laptops, could you easily guess which are in that family of devices?

Dell XPS 13 — Zac Bowden / Windows Central

Close up image of the new Dell XPS 14 for 2026. — Zac Bowden / Windows Central

What is an XPS device in 2026? The new XPS 14 is a premium device featuring an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor or more powerful processor. The not-so-new but still great XPS 14 shares a similar design and also has an Intel Core Ultra 7 chip, albeit an older one.

So, XPS laptops are premium machines with high-end processors and a design resembling the XPS laptops from recent years, correct? Nope. The XPS 13 from this year is a budget-focused PC with options powered by an Intel Core Ultra 3 chip.

Other differences stand out, such as the latest XPS 13 having options with 8GB of RAM compared to the 16GB minimum of the new XPS 14.

Please understand, I think the latest XPS 13 and XPS 14 are excellent laptops. I predict the Dell 14S will also be a solid PC. But I don't understand what Dell is doing with its XPS brand. The company seems to have remembered that consumers value the XPS brand and has chosen to etch the XPS logo onto things willy-nilly.

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Michael Tsai
Omarchy and Omacom Foundation 26 August 2026 at 20:20

Omarchy and Omacom Foundation

Michael Tsai

By: Michael Tsai

26 August 2026 at 20:20

Omarchy:

Omarchy is an omakase Linux distribution based on Arch, the tiling window manager Hyprland, and the desktop construction-kit Quickshell. It ships with everything a modern, savvy computer user needs to be productive immediately. From Neovim (btw) to Chromium, Obsidian to LibreOffice, and Kdenlive to OBS Studio. Hell, even a retro Winamp-style music player is there!

This isn’t just a grab bag of preinstalled packages, though. It’s a complete system designed with both aesthetics and productivity in mind.

[…]

Omarchy isn’t like Windows and it’s not like macOS either. It’s not trying to be as familiar as possible. It’s trying to be beautiful and better.

I do not find this, or Linux on the desktop in general, very appealing. I don’t agree that it’s beautiful, though neither is current macOS. But I do find this effort interesting. The concept—preconfigure a well designed system and try to make it different and better—is good. This is not your average open-source project. It has $10M in backing from the founders of Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Twitter, Cloudflare, Sesame, and 37signals, and now (Hacker News):

Drew Houston, cofounder and co-CEO of Dropbox, and Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw.

[…]

And OpenClaw has essentially provided the roadmap for how Omarchy should tackle its explosive growth. How do you deal with PR backlogs that suddenly go parabolic? What about security around plugins?

Many of these were/are Mac users.

Eduardo:

Run the upstream Omarchy desktop as a native, hardware-accelerated app on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Try Omarchy packages a project-built ARM64 Arch Linux image configured with Omarchy Quattro, a QEMU runtime using Apple Hypervisor Framework, and a small Swift/AppKit launcher into one macOS app.

One Happy Fellow (Hacker News):

Omarchy 4.0 shipped with a collection of security issues which I can only describe as regrettable (because I promised my mum I would swear less). There are bangers like video title bash injection or all notifications being able to run arbitrary bash on your machine.

All projects have security issues but not all projects have such predictable security issues. We know how to deal with untrusted inputs. We know we should not use AI-generated bash scripts for processing untrusted input, particularly with seemingly no review.

And you can’t get to a reasonably secure system by starting with a pile of bash slop and hoping others will catch and fix the issues before they are exploited.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-31): David Heinemeier Hansson:

I don’t think people truly understand just how determined I am at making Linux succeed on the desktop.

0xCC (Hacker News):

A security issue in Omarchy’s default Docker configuration meant that essentially every program running in the user’s desktop session could escalate to root without a password, sudo, or a privilege prompt.

If you use Omarchy, the most important takeaway is simple: update to 4.0.1.

lain:

The exploit has been submitted to CERT/CC, because as it turns out, it affects many other distros as well :)

David Heinemeier Hansson:

Omarchy is blowing up. I’ve never been involved with anything in my career that has grown this fast.

[…]

Now it’s time to build a proper institution. Durable, resilient, and competent. That’s what we’re doing here on Basecamp now. I’m spinning up teams for every facet of responsible distro management, and I’m getting an absolute outpouring of interest for all of them.

[…]

There are many people who’d love to see this rocket blow up before it reaches the moon. Aggrieved Linux users who don’t like the sudden attention their exclusive hobby has received. Competing Linux distributions that are seeing our numbers explode. Mac stans who’ve sunk their identity into an apple. And, of course, any of the haters I’ve picked up in my quarter-century career speaking bluntly on the internet.

[…]

[The Year of Linux on the Desktop] has been a joke for two decades. But by the end of the year, nobody at Apple or Microsoft is going to be laughing. They’re going to be scrambling. Because neither of these proud organizations currently has any method to counter the speed, vision, or ambition with which we’re going to accelerate into the future of personal computing.

[…]

For thirty years, we’ve been subject to one OS overlord or another. Dictating how we compute. Choking off competitors through platform malfeasance. Tollboothing the distribution. That ends now. Because Linux is going to win.

Who knows whether they’re going to be the ones to finally do it or whether this will be an embarrassing flameout, but I respect the energy and ambition. For a long time, it’s felt like Apple is more interested in thwarting than enabling and that they kind of resent even having to continue making a desktop OS. These guys actually like computers. However, there’s a big difference between recognizing that the mantle is falling and being able to pick it up.