got used to apple's not-laptop-speakers-in-laptops-anymore paradigm shift. the xps still has laptop speakers, so it's sort of obscene how not-a-comparison it is between the xps and the mbair/mbpro.
when you add an IMAP account to Mail.app on macOS, it connects to some Apple configuration service (presumably leaking your imap server hostnames and/or domains to Apple) before connecting to your server.