This week, Dell made a major change, dropping its well-known brands such as XPS, Inspiron, and Latitude. HP did a re-branding a few years ago with the Elitedesk Mini becoming the HP Elite Mini 800 G9 and so forth. Now, Dell is moving to a more base, Pro, and Pro Max lineup, more like Apple, but then with levels within each.
After Decades Dell Drops XPS Inspiron and Latitude Branding
As part of its CES 2025 announcements, the company said that it will be re-branding to the following lines:
To make it slightly more confusing, there can also be Plus and Premium tiers in those main lines. Still, no longer will the lower-end Inspiron or the Latitude names be used. Dell Latitude has been around for over three decades, starting in the mid-1990’s. The XPS and Inspiron brands also had their roots in the 1990’s.
One of the big announcements that also came out of CES around the same time was that Dell would (finally) be opening up to more AMD SKUs, especially in the commercial segment. We have long lamented how in the 1L PC market, HP and Lenovo have had leadership roles with their Intel and AMD offerings, while Dell was absent. Now, Dell is taking on that task. Hopefully, we get to see one of those new systems soon.
Final Words
For some STH readers, this is going to feel like a huge change as we can remember when Dell started selling, and we started seeing these brands many years ago. For STH readers under 26-30 years old or so, these brands have been around for as long as they can remember. We normally do not cover branding changes, but this is a big one. For now, it seems as though Alienware is safe from a re-branding.
When we first heard about this branding change, we thought Dell was going super simple and just using Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, but of course, we need another dimension of having Base, Plus, and Premium.
How ever will I be able to tell these apart from Apple products?
AMD chips are a welcome change (again).
Give me the XPS13 form factor with an AMD chip and I’ll be happy no matter what you call it.
When a tech company starts renaming their products it’s almost always a sign that the focus is no longer on the tech.
The new naming choice is dumb, it will make searching for a specific model on the Internet almost impossible
It gets worse. Because they also include the size in the name, as well as an indicator of which CPU it is.
So you end up with something like the: Dell Pro Max Premium 16 Intel
Really, as long as all the new models support high capacity CAMM2 upgradable RAM, I’m fine with the name change.
The new AMD AI Max+ or whatever they are called with the dynamically allocated pool of RAM for GPU/CPU operations is what I have my eye on.
It’s 2025. Everyone wants to be a pro named Max.
Hmmm perhaps in the 70’s in my dorm room with 3 high-end Pioneer cassette decks (and making tapes for people), I should have been building/selling 8-bit PCs?
…Probably would have enhanced my CompSci training (and future net worth.)
….
In the 90s running the IT Dept for a .com (eventually a .bomb) I spec’d out/purchased a lot of Dell PCs. The specs of which changed so quickly that if I went to lunch mid configuring, the specs may have changed an hour later.
they killed Precision as well I think
I can’t say I’m terribly optimistic; since they’ve already taken what is billed as a simplification down to 3 lines and brought it up to 9 by having three levels within each of the three lines; but it seems like the actual impact will come down to how they use those sub-levels.
If I’m getting a “Dell Pro” will “base”, “plus”, and “premium” be an identical chassis just with i3, i5, i7; or is there going to be a bunch of weird overlap where “Dell Premium” is Dell’s attempt at an actually nice, high production value, thin-and-light, but no vPRO; while “Dell Pro Base” will be plasticky trash but with vPRO enabled?
If ‘base’, ‘plus’, and ‘premium’ are essentially just substitutes for actually listing the CPU and GPU that seems pointless but harmless; but if there are actually 9 distinct combinations across which different build qualities and similar will be confusingly smeared this seems likely to be at least as bad, if not worse, than what they were doing before.
I’ll have to keep an eye out on what they actually release under what brands.