Dell Admits It Made a Huge Mistake When It Abandoned XPS

Dell has reversed course and resurrected the XPS brand as its "premium consumer" brand of laptops, admitting it was a mistake to kill it in the first place. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from Gizmodo: At last year's CES, Dell made the eyebrow-raising decision to ax all its legacy laptop brand names and instead opt for Apple-like conventions. Instead of XPS, we were forced to comprehend the differences between a "Dell," a "Dell Pro," a "Dell Premium," and a "Dell Pro Max." "This complicated brand we called Dell last year was trying to cover this very large consumer space with lots of similar products," Jeff Clarke, Dell's chief operating officer said. Now those non-XPS products are mostly dedicated to the base consumer and entry-level laptops, "no pluses, minuses, squares, or whatever the hell else we called them."

"We won't chase every competitor down every rabbit hole," he added. What that means is we probably won't see any kind of handheld PC from Alienware, like that age-old UFO design showed off back in 2020. Just as well, Dell isn't remodeling its entire laptop lineup for a second time in two years. The company isn't bringing back brand names like Inspiron (which became mere "Dells) or Latitude (which transformed into "Dell Pro). According to Clarke, Dell Pro "still tests well."

Why

[ZERO1ZERO]

What is the point? The only reason i can see is to create confusion. Now instead of inspiron or latitude we have variants of Dell thingy or dell whatsit? Even apple have got it wrong here and why did apple name their computer a pro and their chip a pro? The number of people that get confused about e.g. M2 macbook pro and m2 pro macbook is too high. . Then you have modifiers like pro max on the iPhone which is not to be confused with pro macs which are computers with keyboards. The same people who came up with Tahoe and liquid glass probably invented the naming schema. I.e they have no clue or they are playing 5d chess.

Re:

[mccalli]

Agreeing with you and pointing out their worse offender - the iPad range. I have absolutely no idea the differences between their products there, it makes very little sense to me. And I've been using Apple products for 40 years.

Feels like the new Amelio era to me - ship what we've got in the parts bin and call it a strategy. Too many products.

Re:

[Teun]

I assume many people will just decided based on the price, more expensive should be better, right?

Re: Why

[tiananmen tank man]

don't worry, apple is now using the year in their naming scheme. ios26/os26, for software released in 2026

Re:

[hdyoung]

You find the ipad line confusing? Seems pretty simple to me - ipad standard, ipad air, and ipad pro. Sure, there’s a spec range in each category, but it’s not rocket science.

I totally agree that their macbook product line naming has gotten muddled up with their processor naming.

Re:

[mccalli]

I do find it confusing, yes. What's the difference between the iPad and the iPad Air? Why is the one with the 'Air' monicker not the lightest and why is the Air not the Mini? What's with the Apple Pencil support being so strange, both in model and functionality? What is a 'Liquid Retina Display' vs an 'Ultra Retina XDR' display?

I believe iPadOS 26 may have sorted this recently, but even within the range when I was looking maybe a year/18 months ago you got different software functionality too, within the

Re:

[hdyoung]

My large ipad pro is something that I use for real work in various ways, almost every day, in addition to the usual web browsing and streaming. You can have my ipad pro when you pry it out of my cold dead fingers. If I was forced to choose between my laptop and my ipad pro, it would genuinely be a hard decision, because sometimes I just hook up my ipad pro up to my large monitor and do actual work.

Re:

[korgitser]

Yo dawg, I heard you like pro, so we put pro on your pro so you can pro while you pro?

Re:

[jhoegl]

Rugpulls of course. Overcharge on something based on the name, when the reality is the hardware doesnt match the named line.

What have they "admitted" to?

[93 Escort Wagon]

They haven't admitted a mistake or apparently learned any lesson at all. Instead, they're just attempting to pivot a small amount and apply some window dressing to rescue their failing rebrand initiative.

Re:

[korgitser]

I never really understood rebranding at all. Take what your customers know about your brand, and throw it in the trash. I mean I understand it if your brand is trash, but if it's actually successful and selling, maybe not fuck with it?

Re:

[sanf780]

I assume Dell corporation wanted to bring new consumers in. After all, capitalism requires companies to grow. An stagnant revenue situation usually follows a declining revenue one.

Re:What have they "admitted" to?

[ShanghaiBill]

I never really understood rebranding at all. Take what your customers know about your brand, and throw it in the trash.

A Dell customer might think about the brand only when considering a new laptop.

But the marketing department sees the brands a dozen times a day, gets tired of them, and lobbies for a refresh.

Rebranding is almost always a mistake.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Why did Apple change from Macintosh Portable to Powerbook to Macbook? Macintosh Portable sold like trash because it was too expensive. Powerbook sold okay, its poor sales figures compared to the PC market were actually just due to it being Apple. Why didn't Apple rebrand the whole company at their low, when they had less than 3% of the market? It was trash then.

Re: What have they "admitted" to?

[kenh]

But, but, it worked so well for Bud Light and Jaguar!

Bud Light - https://nypost.com/2023/04/10/... [nypost.com]

Jaguar - https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]

Re:

[modulo]

I mean I understand it if your brand is trash

It wasn't across the board, but at least for me personally, "Inspiron" meant "laptop with the durability of a soap bubble". Maybe they felt they had to rebrand everything else to make it less obvious?

Re:

[BeepBoopBeep]

Dell stood up at CES and admitted their mistake, and actually apologized to the audience. Move on now.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

If that's the case, it would've been useful for the summary to actually state that.

The issue here (meaning on Slashdot) is - we see far too many instances where the title says one thing but TFS says another, and whatever the title states is completely incorrect. So the titles here are basically useless and can't be considered to convey any information whatsoever.

But it's not really Apple-like

[Ecuador]

It's not really Apple-like. They take the worst part of the Apple naming - the variants of their Phones which everyone agrees is confusing, adding the even sillier "Premium", applying them to laptops instead, but then using "Dell" as the base name!

Apple's laptops are "Macbook Air" and "Macbook Pro". In the past they had plain "Macbook" too.

What Dell is doing is like Apple coming out with laptops named "Apple", "Apple Pro", "Apple Premium", "Apple Pro Max".

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

What Dell is doing is like Apple coming out with laptops named "Apple", "Apple Pro", "Apple Premium", "Apple Pro Max".

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple actually does that at some point in the next couple of years. They seem fairly rudderless at times anymore.

XPS is a document format

[ChunderDownunder]

Just name everything consumer Alienware.
And everything boring business Latitude.

Leave the un-upgradable crapware to HP.

Haven't even looked at a Dell since no buttons

[Air-Op]

I really don't care about the brand name.
Does it lack buttons for the trackpad? -- Not considered
Does it have a TrackPoint -- Winner -- Will pay a premium

I ended up with used latitudes and bought a new precision. Before that it was Toshiba Tecra
There was a generation or two of Thinkpad that unusable (no button) trackpoints and that was crazy...
and I think Lenovo still can't do basic things like hold a key down and move the cursor at the same time (trackpoints are actually just fine for CAD work, just had t

Re:

[Voyager529]

I always thought XPS and Inspirons were the crappy ones, and Latitude and Precision were worth consideration.

Dell's rebrand is terrible because they don't even seem to have distinguishing names between their laptops and their desktops - a "Dell Pro" *could* be either the successor to the Optiplex or the successor to the Latitude...I swear, whenever marketing gets involved in "simplifying" something, it ends up getting more complicated.

In terms of the XPS...the bigger issue is that the XPS line was more of a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none situation. Its earliest iterations were direct competition with Alienware;

Re:

[anoncoward69]

I've always seen XPS as their high end business/engineering workstation line, Alienware as their consumer gaming line. XPS is where you'll probably find something like an Nvidia RTX where as the Alienware will have your general Nvidia gaming card.

What's up with the U.S. and brand names?

[Sique]

Somehow, I don't understand U.S. branding. Why have distinct brands for everything? Especially in the car industry, there were so many brands from the same company, but with separate dealerships, separate supply chains, separate this, separate that. And now the same with computers. Why all the sub-categorizing by a single manufacturer? It just adds confusion, and it never works right because the next trend will throw up all your carefully market researched branding.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

The car brand thing is because there used to be a shitload of car brands and each one was known for a different sort of design, so it made sense. Now that all the other automakers are gone, all that's left is those brands, so it looks weird.

About your last point, you're reasonably correct, which is why some brands have failed even fairly recently, and more might fail relatively soon.

Having all these brands makes sense mostly because people get cultish about brands. More brands, more cultists who identify wi

Re:

[thegarbz]

This has nothing to do with the USA, it's a completely normal global thing to separate your product categories using sub-brands, especially in the car industry.

Re:

[Sique]

European car brands for most of its time had only a single brand in the market, and if they have different brands then because they bought another company and did not want to lose the customers. For most of its time, you only got BMW from BMW (o.k., in the early days, you could not buy a BMW from BMW, because they sold their cars under the Dixi name until World War II). You only got Mercedes-Benz from Mercedes-Benz, until they bought Smart back in the 1990ies. Volkswagen until the mid-1970ies only sold Volk

I still don't get it, and I'm a "Dell head"

[Gavino]

I've used Dell laptops for decades. I have no idea what is going on here. The Dell Australian website has these categories:
Play, School & Work
__Dell XPS & Dell Premium
__Dell Plus
__Dell
__Inspiron

Professional-Grade Productivity
__Dell Pro Premium
__Dell Pro Plus
__Dell Pro
__Latitude
Maximum Performance
__Dell Pro Max
__Precision

Gaming
__Alienware

The linked webpage is telling me that Inspiron became mere “Dells", and Latitude transformed into “Dell Pro." So far, that makes se

Real problem

[SouthSeb]

I feel like the real problem is not the "rebranding" per se, but the complete mess they made on the new name structure by trying to copy other companies with all the "pro, plus, premium..."

I worked for decades with sales and marketing teams in several distinct industries and in most cases it boggled me how incredibly twisted their minds are and how they tend to overcomplicate things.

I usually found their heads so tucked into the supply-chain/distribution holes that they seem to completely forget their main

Garbage?

[SumDog]

I've had three Dell XPSes. Two personal and one for work. The personal ones had terrible thermals, terrible battery life and the batter swelled in one popping up the trackpad. I thought they were overrated garbage. I got an i9 XPS at one job around 2018 and it was the only one that wasn't a total piece of shit. Thermals were shockingly not bad for an i9 and it didn't throttle all the time. Still, I kept it on one of those laptop stands that suspends it in the air so it gets plenty of cooling. My co-worker,

Re:

[anoncoward69]

I would expect an XPS to have horrible battery life unless you throttle it down to the performance of something like an Inspiron. XPS laptops are a desktop workstation replacement. It's pretty much meant to live in a docking station on your desk except for when you REALLY REALLY need to go portable for some reason.

Re:

[anoncoward69]

When I think XPS I think of an engineering grade workstation that you need in laptop form because you take it out in the field sometimes and run it off an inverter or large battery bank in the field.

Dell made itself hard to buy

[Revek]

We have/had a premiere account and it got to the point where we could buy cheaper through third parties or just using the regular website. The account reps knew this and still wouldn't come down on the price. All the ever changing reps have been going straight to voicemail for a few years now.

Use the Mercedes convention

[Brooklynoid]

Dell should adopt a naming convention like M-B has: a letter (or word) to indicate the class of the machine, and a number to indicate the relative power. Anyone who understands how M-B names their vehicles would know that a C250 and a C300 are in the same class, but a C300 is more powerful. Dell could go back to their original names and make this work. If you know that a Latitude is a different (and pricier) class of machine than a Dell, you'll immediately have an inkling of the relative positions in the lineup of say, a Dell 100 and a Latitude 250.

Re:

[anoncoward69]

Basically what Intel did i3, i5, i7 and i9

Not the only bone-headed move Dell has done

[TigerPlish]

Renaming their shit to mimic Apple isn't the only bonehead move Dell has done lately.

Selling VMWare to the Graveyard of IT hurt infrastructure users far more than silly name changes.

Dell Deserves Pain

[SlashbotAgent]

The last year has seen Dell take an anti-partner position and an ant-consumer position.

First they cut off partners and VARs forcing them all to pay a distributor middleman a higher price with even less margins. They also made the quote process MUCH slower and more difficult, with more middlemen in the mix.

Then they rebranded and confused everyone, including consumers. They also increased prices quite significantly. Cuz tariffs. Cuz shortages. Cuz "Fuck You", that's why. Desktops cost 30-40% more than they did a year ago. Servers are costing as much as 400% as much as they did just a few short years earlier.

And for all this Dell got what they deserved. Lower sales volumes in what should have been a boom year mandated by Microsoft's Windows 11 forced upgrades. It should have been a record year for Dell. Instead buyers said, fuck that.

Dell deserves pain. Lots of pain.

Re:

[leonbev]

Yeah, Dell deserves the trouble that they're in now. My last Dell XPS laptop was a piece of plastic trash that started falling apart a few weeks after the 1 year warranty on it ran out. It also had terrible cooling, and it thermal throttled if you actually tried to do PC gaming on it. I ended up getting an Apple laptop after that, which was a much more solidly built device.

I also got my daughter a Dell G series gaming laptop (because you can't really game on a Mac), and it also had a flimsy plastic case tha

Re:

[ole_timer]

i'm still running my dell xps since 2010 albeit the display is now fubar so i use the external, the point is that it's still a workhorse after all these years

Re:

[anoncoward69]

Pretty much any machine made in the last decade is usable for most day to day computing needs as long as you don't upgrade to MS latest AI laden, phone home telemetry laden, ad laden, cloud POS OS. Running MS's latest garbage OS, editing 4k video, playing today's latest graphic intensive games are probably the few use cases for needing a more current machine.

Re:

[Gavino]

Yeah stay away from XPS I reckon. I posted about it above. I am quite happy with the Dell Pro Max line though - thicker with better cooling and more ports, and a better keyboard where the keys aren't touching each other.

Huh

[Gilmoure]

Dell sells laptops?

Thought they just did servers.

dell drove customers to apple

[ole_timer]

que sera

their new XPS sucked, whatever you call it

[muntjac]

I ordered my wife the latest dell premium (assuming it was the same as an old xps) for xmas, sent it back almost immediately. had a mac like power button she couldn't figure out how to turn it on, had capacitive row of ugly light up function keys at the top, separate from the main keyboard. it was an atrocity. Ordered lenovo x1 carbon, and its better anyway, it weighs like 30% less she loves how light it is. XPS is dead to me. fire whatever marketing department came up with this shit.