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The xps is a plastic laptop with a plastic hinged small trackpad. The mbp trackpad alone is worth the extra money. I keep a laptop for 4-5 years. It’s not worth interacting thousands of times a day with an outdated subpar input device to save $10 a month.

I’ve been watching the xps closely and the internal stats are good but the “plastic laptop with a small hinged trackpad” aspect of it make it a no go for me at the price point.

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Per the specs on the dell website, it's a milled aluminum chassis. Guess that could technically mean there's plastic somewhere, but they seem to be selling the fact it's not plastic.

Through some kind of engineering magic, they've been able to make it out of thin aluminum while still retaining the creaky plastic feeling Dell is known for.

The top shell and the bottom shell are thin aluminum but the rest of the laptop is plastic. The bottom assembly is a plastic body screwed into a thin aluminum shell. Unfortunately I don’t have a link but there are reviews on YouTube where people subject it to the “twist test” and the laptop body creaks and visibly twists under light manual force.

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