back to article Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

Dell has used the annual CES extravaganza in Las Vegas this week to announce a branding shakeup that closely resembles Apple's hardware naming policy. Gone are the XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, and Precision PC brands. All future PCs from Big Mike’s Custom PC Barn will be named a “Dell”, “Dell Pro”, or “Dell Pro Max”. Each of …

  1. PRR Silver badge
    Devil

    So my housemate is among the last dudes to get an Inspiron, the Inspiron 16 Plus, Halloween 2024.

    Not the VERY last, but in this house an Inspiron has been living here more often than not.

    1. AMBxx Silver badge

      Give it 2 years. Marketing can't help themselves.

    2. big_D Silver badge

      We received an XPS 13 yesterday...

  2. simonlb Silver badge
    WTF?

    "To make finding the right AI PC easy for customers..."

    Would that be a PC without Win11 and CoPilot on it? Asking for a friend.

    1. Chloe Cresswell Silver badge

      Re: "To make finding the right AI PC easy for customers..."

      I was thinking the same thing, although I imagined it more as "To make finding the right AI PC easy for customers..." don't buy a dell?

  3. redpawn

    Dude! You're getting bloat!

    I don't know about the the meaning of the the tiers. Unless you are doing high end graphics, gaming or very large data you don't need the latest and greatest. Unless of course you are running the included bloatware on Windows. Most pron requires a tiny fraction of the computing and graphics power but the bosses will want the best and an AI engine on top of that.

    1. blu3b3rry
      Devil

      Re: Dude! You're getting bloat!

      What do you mean I don't need a 14th gen i7 and 32GB of RAM (sorry, Core 7 Ultra) to send emails all day?

      1. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
        Terminator

        Re: Dude! You're getting bloat!

        Email? You're talking to people in 1995? Teams will reduce your 14th gen i7 and 32GB RAM to PC-XT performance levels.

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Dude! You're getting bloat!

      One thing that does matter to those with ageing eyes or those with eye problems at a younger age is screen size. It's not an aspect of the sort of work being done, it's an aspect of being able to use the thing at all. As the biggest is 16" it's not going to be 2nd class to some of us regardless of the tier.

  4. I should coco
    Black Helicopters

    Been here before

    Struggling to shift tin? What you need is a rebrand.

    Talking about HW 40 years ago? Move into the 21 Century and stop living on past glory.

    Innovation is not putting a GPU into a Server.

  5. wolfetone Silver badge

    All irrelevant really - Dell's main problem is product reliabiliity and quality. These won't be fixed with a rebrand.

    Where I work have had 12 Dell laptops, half of them have required a Dell engineer to come out and replace various parts. 3 were DOA. All of them have exhibited weird behaviours. They're a mix of Vostro, Latitudes and Precisions.

    Rebrand them all you want, a turd is still a turd.

    1. Kurgan

      Turd

      A Turd Pro Max Ultimate, you mean.

    2. Zenubi

      Displays are good though

      My Dell Ultra-sharps have been on for many years now and still calibrate inside limits.

    3. big_D Silver badge

      We have over 250 Dell Optipex and Latitude PCs and laptops. We've had 2 callouts in the last 4 years and I have just go a replacement XPS 13 in for one that has a defective fan, after 5 years of service...

      We had more problems with the 7th generation Core ThinkPads, they had a tendency to have dry solder joints on the NVMe interface and they'd keep "losing" the SSD. Lenovo had replaced several SSDs, before we found out where the problem lay... Before that, I'd always considered ThinkPads to be rock solid.

      Back in the 90s, we were fitting out the external sales people for a large organisation. We ordered over 100 Compaq LTEs, the "best" laptops at the time... 30% DOA, 25% died within a month of use and a further 15% developed cracked cases within 3 months. It turned out there was a faulty batch and, because we had ordered so many at the same time, the all came from that faulty batch.

      I wouldn't say Dell are any better or any worse than any other manufacturer I've dealt with over the years. Generally their kit has been very reliable, certainly no worse than any other kit I've used in the last 15 years.

      We just handed out a Dell 22 wide screen display from stores today, it was first used in 2013 and has been in our store room for the last 3 month, otherwise it was in use all that time...

      1. TRT

        The issues I've had with Dells has been that their tendency to use "bespoke" parts rather than off-the-shelf standards. I'm talking about things like slim-line CD drives that instead of fitting into a nice rectangular hole seem to have to have a note cut out of one corner, 12V only PSUs so you can't whack in a standard ATX one if there's been some sort of issue (getting machines back up and running within an hour or two has been kind of a requirement sometimes - I know, spare me the lectures about designing resilience in from the start if it's that critical, but in my environment things don't work like that - HE research if you must know), interface boards that should fit, if the case was built to standards, but don't because it's a Dell, weird arsed one-off cpu socket or connector designs that your average PC tech will only come across the once in their life, and where a peculiar dexterous twist of the wrist makes the difference between success and £1500 of daughter board ruined - the kind of a muscle twitch that only comes with repeated practice where you can write off the components you ruin perfecting the technique, laptop screens panels that always seem to have that extra wire that one can't quite work out what it's for and that you can only get from Dell - I dunno, some kind of demister or something.

        Yes. Your mileage may vary when it comes to Dell.

      2. original_rwg
        Facepalm

        Cracked Case

        Back in the 90's, that cracked case issue cost Compaq millions. The laptops were sent back to local service centres for the countries of origin, dismantled and the faulty plastic with I/O board was shipped to one of two places for replacement. One was in Houston, Texas the other was in Stirling, Scotland. We replaced the poor Japanese plastic with US plastic, refitted the I/O board and repacked them, often with different keyboards depending on the destination country.

      3. daflibble

        Year Dells go wrong and have issues as much as pretty much every teir1 vendor I've dealt with in mass deployments over the years. The Dell support experience while having it's total ID10T moments has mostly been pretty seemless aslong as you subscribe to the pro levels and at one point were pretty much on the only people with a sensible approach to accidental damage cover. No fill in a claim that might be accepted before sending unit off for 6+Months for a repair that gets done wrong. Just Yes \ No send engineer next day to repair, if really bad\no parts available offer like for like or better replacement.

        They maybe a bit rubbish and break a lot but pretty easy to get Dell to send someone to fix or replace it unlike some other vendors I've dealt with large and small over the years.

      4. Sceptic Tank Silver badge

        Bruiser

        Wolfetone and his workmates are possibly a bunch of ruffians. The Dell work laptops I've had over the years weren't bad.

        1. wolfetone Silver badge
          Trollface

          Re: Bruiser

          What do you mean?

          Can't just be us that type emails out using a 9 iron on the keyboard?

    4. StudeJeff

      I can't speak to the laptops, I don't deal with them much, but in our plant I manage over 200 Dell OptiPlex's.

      I've never been a fan of Dell (which is, of course, a four letter word), but this is a manufacturing environment, and in some places there is a lot of dust and oil vapor.

      And the Dell's keep running. I've had a couple with bad USB ports, and one had a damaged Ethernet port, but I've yet to have one actually fail.

      There was even one where the complaint was it kept shutting down. It was... all the vents were TOTALY clogged with oily dust, along with a thick coat of the mess on the fans and heat sink. So, I pulled it, cleaned it up, put it back, and it ran flawlessly before I replaced it with a Windows 10 system.

      I'm no fan of Dell, but I'm very impressed with the reliability of the OptiPlex's.

  6. xenny

    So what is the difference between "work" = Dell and ""professional-grade productivity" = Dell Pro ?

    1. Mishak Silver badge

      "work" -> sales, marketing, manglement

      "professional" -> those that get stuff done.

      However, "work" will get Pro Max "because they need it".

      Edited to fix a typo.

    2. blu3b3rry

      The "Pro" version gets a slightly shinier lid.

    3. Kurgan

      It's the fact that you cannot say that you base line is shit, so you have to say that your base line is fine for the same job as the middle line.

      Also, there is a difference between the PC given to the lower slave worker and the PC given to the middle manager.

      Dell = slaves

      Dell Pro = middle managers

      Dell Pro Max Premium = C-levels

      Apple something for the CEO

    4. doublelayer Silver badge

      What it should mean:

      Dell: Word processing, email, web browsing. You should get this for pretty much everybody.

      Dell Pro: If you're doing something that needs more processing and memory and want something larger.

      What it actually means:

      Dell: Cheapest, probably, check that it actually is.

      Dell Pro: Basically the same stuff but more expensive.

      As with pretty much every manufacturer, the only way to figure out what is in a model is to ignore the brand name and only look at internals and price. Once you've found one that looks to be the cheapest that has what you need, then look at the model number to work out repairability. Sometimes, the brand is related to that, but often, it's pretty random. Often, I've found a model that's theoretically the low-end range with better specs than a more expensive one in the higher range.

  7. theOtherJT Silver badge

    I'll care about anything Dell does...

    ...when they put the keyboards on the XPS or whatever the hell they want to call that line back the way they were. 2022 XPS 15 - best laptop I've ever had. Tried the new 16. Hated it. Absolutely impossible to type on accurately.

    Edit: And give me my damn function keys back!

    1. Robin

      Re: I'll care about anything Dell does...

      Is it the XPS that has the webcam where the hinge is? Sometimes I'm on a call with someone and I can more or less see straight up their nose and when they type, all I see is giant fingers clicking away.

      1. theOtherJT Silver badge

        Re: I'll care about anything Dell does...

        Mine doesn't, it's at the top of the screen where it's belongs, but I think the 2019 model did that IIRC.

      2. daflibble

        Re: I'll care about anything Dell does...

        ah the nose cam days.... I do love to poke fun at the Dell staff at shows about that silliness still.

  8. Dave K

    So you'll soon (maybe) be able to get a Dell Pro Max laptop with an AMD Ryzen Max Pro CPU.

    For Pete's sake...

  9. SundogUK Silver badge

    Meh. Since Dell make it almost impossible to buy a Linux desktop in the UK, my money will be going elsewhere this year.

    1. TRT

      They've had Ubuntu as an option on the shop CTO for ages. Problem is, I didn't want Ubuntu that time.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Been using Dell laptops running Linux at home for a few years. Not had any trouble with Debian, Gentoo, or Arch linux... Although I always buy 2nd hand latitudes nowadays, so I avoid the early teething problems with drivers.

  10. firstnamebunchofnumbers

    XPS

    XPS has been a decent line of laptops for me for over a decade, for both personal and work machines.

    In a few years' time they will probably regard getting rid of the XPS brand as a mistake as it does convey a certain level of assurance that the product is, firstly, a laptop and generally one with a non-entry-level spec, build quality and portability. The opposite I guess to Inspiron which I'd say were always the cheapest Chinesium/plastic chassis of the lot.

    Good luck trying to stand out in a saturated market when their product keywords for SEO (and tech buyers) are now just "Dell" then a combination of the words "Pro", "Max", "Plus, "Premium".

  11. Fonant
    FAIL

    "help organizations futureproof for the AI era"

    Sensible organisations will simply wait a while and completely skip "the AI era".

    Not long now until the "AI" bubble bursts with a big bang. Bullshit works for a while, until people realise that's what it is.

    1. DoctorPaul Bronze badge

      Re: "help organizations futureproof for the AI era"

      Upvoted more in hope than expectation.

  12. Sir Sham Cad

    Dell Pro Max Premium sure is easier to say than XPS. Well done Marketing.

    Also, thanks Dell, just as we're trying to do a multi-organisation hardware convergence by comparing catalogues.

    1. Chloe Cresswell Silver badge

      Employee of mine: I just realised something - the new Dell nomenclature... The top of the shop machines are going to get known as dumps.

      Dell Max Pro - DMP - which is going to get pronounced "Dump"

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Maybe they should have a model called Best One Yet.

  13. Bebu sa Ware
    Thumb Down

    Newspeak?

    The new naming as as the elison of DELL with a subset of the Cartesian product of PRO, PRO MAX with BASE, PLUS, PREMIUM speaks more to the tiny minds of the bean counting fraternity than of any imagination or originality.

    Redolent of the bastardization typified by the Orwellian "double plus ungood."

    Starting with DELL PRO MAX PREMIUM and working down the range DELL'S branding geniuses might have just assigned an integer say 300 or 12 (US version) counting down in decrements of 25 (1) reflecting a physical attribute of the target market. Of course we might have some sympathy for the poor chap purchasing a plain DELL advertising a 100mm (4") endowment.

    Always wondered what the 'P' in XPS meant but X could be excessive and A size I suppose.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Newspeak?

      The 300 model being the Pro Max Trojan edition, presumably?

  14. Roland6 Silver badge

    >” For those after a powerful 13- or 14-inch mobile workstation”

    Personally, I dont regard anything with less than a 15/16 inch screen a mobile workstation. Although those who only need to look at emails and be seen to attend Zoom/Teams meetings, and continually interrupt because they can’t read the screen share, might think differently…

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      I wouldn't regard anything less than 17 1/2 inch screen as a mobile workstation and that's only because I can't find anything bigger.

  15. Kraft

    Simple?

    That's not simple. That's as complex as the old system.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Simple?

      "I'd like to buy a Dell please".

      "Sure, which one?"

      "A Dell 'Dell'. It's official name product name is just 'Dell'."

      "Ah, you mean a Dell Dell non-Pro, non-Max?"

      "Yes please".

      "Do you want a desktop, laptop or server Dell Dell non-Pro non-Max?"

      etc ad infinitum

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Simple?

      Yes it is. Their problem seems to be that they want Apple's branding simplicity. However, Apple makes only a few types of laptops. Understanding the differences between a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 14 inch, and MacBook Pro 16 inch is not hard because there are only three of them (three models and three differences, they're pretty much the same laptop except for the obvious). Dell has hundreds of models, so it isn't easy to know the differences between all the available ones or even which ones are available. That allows them to serve more markets, and there's a reason for them to do it, but it unavoidably requires making the product naming more complex. Changing the first words in the brand isn't going to make any of it simpler.

      1. daflibble

        Re: Simple?

        someone in marketing found a friend in the exec suite who both wanted to work at Apple instead. That coupled with the lets us AI to stream line things and the AI just spat out use Apple naming and they said lets do that. Apple makes loads of money.

  16. TRT

    "A 'Dell' is for low-end computing and browsing"

    Well... I think they might have to work on their marketing a bit. Or fire Gerald Ratner.

  17. Dostoevsky Bronze badge

    My eyes!

    I saw this on Xwitter yesterday, and couldn't believe it. Turns out Dell's marketing team really is that stupid.

  18. Wang Cores

    I really wonder what this play is called. No, not "enshittification" - that implies a deliberate course to extract a profit from it. This appears to be enshittification without an aim.

    "Oh fuck, Ricky from OCP managed to extract more from the serfs by turning up subscription fees, we gotta DO SOMETHING."

    "uhhhh REFRESH PRODUCT"

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      This is called marketing. Marketing specifically calls it rebranding, but you don't have to worry about what they're talking about because what it really means is that they wanted to change something because they hadn't in a while and this is what they picked. They're not trying to make things worse for you to extract more money. In fact, they probably think they're helping by simplifying things a little. After all, was there any clear difference between a randomly chosen Latitude and a randomly chosen Vostro that made the names useful? I don't know of any. Or maybe they thought they were removing an old name so they sound newer, but even then it's a benign change. Companies do this all the time. It wasn't very long since AMD significantly renumbered their processors, which happened because Intel significantly renumbered their processors, which happened because AMD slightly renumbered their processors or because Intel thought that sticking an "Ultra" into the brand name would not look as silly as it actually does, which they probably did because of the "Pro Max Ultra" thing that Apple did, which they did because they wanted to have more expensive tiers of iPhones. It doesn't have to affect our lives very much.

  19. James O'Shea Silver badge

    UFO

    I notice that Alienware is not mentioned in the Great Rebranding. A check indicates that the Alienware website is still available. Whether or not this means anything is unclear.

    1. PRR Silver badge

      Re: UFO

      > I notice that Alienware is not mentioned in the Great Rebranding.

      Third paragraph, dude!

      "This approach will apply to all future Dell ..... – other than the Alienware brand used for gaming hardware."

      1. James O'Shea Silver badge

        Re: UFO

        Ah. i stand corrected.

  20. GBE

    What about non-AI PCs?

    "To make finding the right AI PC easy for customers, we’ve introduced three simple product categories to focus on core customer needs...

    But want a non-AI PC!

    I seriously doubt that "core customers" need an "AI PC."

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