Both laptops are fast and neither had any thermal issues - though the M1 MacBook Pro does stay cooler than the XPS 13. I’ve noticed no significant performance gap using the two systems day in and day out. On testing of real-world* workloads, Dell’s with Intel’s 11th Gen Core i7 is no slouch. For me, performance on widely-used applications (like the Chrome browser where I spend a lot of time) is what counts the most. Synthetic benchmarks are useful to a point. (See these Geekbench scores for M1 MacBook Pro and Dell XPS 13 9310.) Geekbench 5 single-core and multi-core also show a significant upside for the M1 MacBook. Cinebench R23 single-core CPU scores are a lot closer for the M1 and i7: 1,514 vs 1,457, respectively.
