The MacBook Air 15 and XPS 15 both start at $1,299. But the base model MacBook Air only has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage vs the XPS 15's 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Apple has been stingy with RAM for years now.
Whilst I can't speak for the storage part, Mac's have often always had lower RAM than their PC counterparts due to the fact that they had often needed less.
That doesn't mean they can't give more, but it's not an 'apples' to apples comparison.
This all depends on your workload. But I will admit I’ve seen happy memory-full Macs in a state where a swapping Windows laptop would be unusable. I do not think that justifies half the memory for the same price.
However, they aren’t using good-old SODIMMs - or anything like them. There is no way they’d ever be able to give you laptops with 400GB/s of memory bandwidth in that slim package while making it user-serviceable. I would love to see them try but it’s not an easy request.
