
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
...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!
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".
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.
>” 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…
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.
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"
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.