Dell will no longer make XPS computers | Hacker News Reader

Dell will no longer make XPS computers

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77 pointsMRPockets110 comments

I really appreciate when brands just name things like they are.

Nothing is less fun than cross-shopping products and there are a bunch of arbitrary brand differences. "Precisions are their portable workstations. Latitudes are their ultrabooks. Duh! XPS is their premium consumer laptop!".

Marketing departments tend to get addicted to the smell of their own farts. But I don't think consumers care about particular sub-brand names. We already saw this a decade ago in the automotive space where manufacturers ditched their unnecessary marquees (Pontiac, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Saturn). And I think we will see this trend continue into more industries (like hotel chains).

Product names make no sense. Some web sites make a "product selection tool" where you answer a bunch of questions and it tries to direct you to models that will suit your needs.

I was recently buying a Seasonic power supply. What is the difference between Prime, Vertex, Focus, or Core series? Then there is Prime TX, Prime PX, Prime GX. I have no idea what all this is. I ended up just picking something in the 800W range with the modular power outputs that I needed.

I call it the Toothpaste Dilemma: When you go to buy toothpaste, like Colgate or most brands, you're bombarded with so many options. It gets worse when you read the labels—everything seems either identical or has massive overlaps. It's frustrating and unnecessarily complicated.

When you see this, particularly on supermarket shelves, this is a deliberate attempt to crowd out other brands.

You're focusing on the micro ("WTF is each one of these ridiculous micro variations?") and not on the macro (Colgate is absolutely dominating that aisle, and fully 75% of the toothpaste choices are Colgate while Crest and Aquafresh fight over the scraps)

    It's frustrating and unnecessarily complicated.

This is also by design, more or less. If you give up and "just grab one" you're pretty likely to pick a Colgate, since that represents 75% of the options available and it's also one of the oldest and therefore most "trusted" brands. You can't exactly go wrong with a Colgate, right?

Of course some people will rebel, and say "screw Colgate" and pick some other brand, and some people will just literally pick the cheapest option no matter what.

But again, if I'm Colgate or whatever their parent company? I absolutely love the way that toothpaste aisle looks. 75% of it is Colgate Red and I bet the sales figures hew pretty closely to that.

I imagine it works if they are still doing it, but I think is worst. As soon as a brand comes with simpler naming, it can steal your customers.

> I call it the Toothpaste Dilemma

It's called Tyranny of Choice - https://longevity.stanford.edu/the-tyranny-of-choice/

> Too many options can decrease the likelihood of making any decision at all

Good to know, thanks! :)

I legit use the term "Toothpaste Shopping" to describe any miserably complex shopping experience.

(Although ironically, toothpaste shopping is quite easy once you know the correct answer is "the cheapest brand at the store that has fluoride in it")

Unless you're looking for some other feature. Once I learned what novamin was, I started getting a toothpaste with that in it. I think only two such brands exist.

>everything seems either identical or has massive overlaps

Whenever I find marketing copy like this, I use it to filter out the whole company's product lines. This heuristic never fails, because I don't even know what I am missing out on.

This is dependent on your filter.

I try not to buy big brand / mega corporate products. No Colgate or Crest and both own a number of the less known brands, those are out. This leads to only one or two options to choose from.

This is why I look at products manufacture not just their name.

I would really like website like https://isitbigbeer.com/ to help filter out all products and brands that hide behind multi-naming schemas.

Toothpaste shopping is easy. I pick the one brand that has a convenient non tube toothpaste (actually there are two, but I didn't like the taste of one) I thing I didn't understand is there are only about 6 of the non tube options and 1000 of the tubes. Do people really like to roll their toothpaste out of a tube?

Seasonic's product lines are relatively simple to figure out. They haven't changed in years, except with the addition of the Vertex line. At the very least, they're easier to understand than other power supply manufacturers.

Product Lines: Core (Budget) < Focus (Mid) < Vertex (Mid-High) < Prime (High), in terms of quality and features.

80Plus Efficiency: GX (Gold) < PX (Platinum) < TX (Titanium)

This is true across all of their product lines.

> Product names make no sense.

Why should they? Every company has different priorities, and it's on you as a consumer to get familiar with each company's product line before making a purchase.

Would you prefer it if all products were named "<company name> <thing>"? So in your PSU example, "Seasonic PSU"? Of course not, you would like to have more detail than that. So how about "Seasonic PSU 800W modular"? OK, that's better, but what if other consumers are interested in different product criteria? Should we just cram them all in the product name like sellers on Amazon do? That wouldn't be right either. So the best approach then is to segment your product line according to some criteria, and give different segments arbitrary names. This way customers can know what to expect, and which segment to focus on. It's important to keep this consistent, otherwise it leads to confusion, but in general it works fine IMO. I would rather have to choose between Seasonic Prime TX, Prime PX, etc., than Seasonic Pro, Pro Max, etc.

That's the thing though. I don't really want to have to know whether the Seasonic Prime PX is the same tier as the Corsair RM or the RMx or the RMe or the HX. None of those names gives me any indication of what the product actually is, and from a quick glance the letters don't seem to even directly stand for any particular feature.

Its one thing to have say a Seasonic 800M versus just the Seasonic 800 and know the "m" means its modular. What does it even mean for it to be PRIME TX versus a FOCUS GX or GM or then suddenly dropping the noun part and going straight to G12 and B12.

There are 8 different PRIME models with 25 SKUs in the PRIME model family looking at their site right now. And that's just one family of power supplies for one brand! There's another 11 Vertex SKUs, 33 FOCUS SKUs, 15 CORE SKUs. Why on earth would I care to get decoder rings for several different brands to cross shop?

> Why on earth would I care to get decoder rings for several different brands to cross shop?

Because products usually can't be compared spec-to-spec anyway. So even if you had to choose between Seasonic 800M and Corsair 800M, which might coincide on these specific criteria, how one company describes their product doesn't translate to how another company does. None of it would tell you which is the better product for you, which is ultimately what you want to know.

Consider CPU clock speeds, for example. The industry moved on from advertising MHz and GHz since they're not good indicators of performance. Consumers should also be aware of core count and types, cache size, power consumption, etc. Yet even if manufacturers embedded all of this information in their product names, CPUs from different manufacturers still wouldn't be comparable. So companies do their best to identify product lines internally, and give them somewhat consistent names.

I'm not saying that companies do a good job at this—most, in fact, make a mess out of it—, but I find that preferable to having obscure names like "Pro", "Plus", "Max", etc. with claims that it's simpler, when it's actually even more confusing than before.

Why is tx and px better than pro and pro Max? Typically pro Max is going to offer you more or better than what pro does. So pro Max tells me that it is probably better than pro (without designing what "better"is) but TX and PX which one is "better" and you can't always go by the price.

In this particular case TX and PX are referring to PSUs complying with certain third party certifications, and have a specific quantifiable meaning. So in this case Tx is always "better" (or at least not worse) than Px in a very specific sense.

Often it's abstraction leakage. Prime and Core coukd be coming from different outsourced design teams. TX and GX could be different base design within same OEM. Or supplieed through same middlemen hence carrying same brands. Or each of groups meet certain internal criteria. Whatever.

Customers prefer segmentation by end result rather than by implementation details, and so corporate marketing divisions sometimes try that and group products by features it offers, but that often drive-by ruins product quality.

Another variant of this is the washing machine nonsense:

Bosch WGG244ZANL

Which btw is a Series 6 machine (note the missing 6 in the type name)!

That model number is actually super informative.

You have a washing machine, energy efficient, from 2021, model 24, 1200rpm spin speed, from the Netherlands.

https://splaitor.com/bosch-washing-machine-model-number-deco...

That doesn’t help compare it to other manufacturers, but it’s easy to compare to other Bosch washing machines.

Strange, local shops show it as 1400rpm

    Marketing departments tend to get addicted to the 
    smell of their own farts.

That's not necessarily why they do it.

    Pontiac, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Saturn

So part of the reason they do it is simply to flood the market. Imagine a world where GM has Saturn, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Geo, Chevy, GMC, etc. And Ford just has... Ford.

To a casual, who doesn't know or care that six of those brands are just GM nameplates, they just see seven options for a sedan. And if I'm GM, I certainly like the odds that they'll pick a GM even though I'm essentially just designing one or two sedans and then advertising them six different ways.

A simpler example (that somebody else mentioned down below) is toothpaste. There are like, ten different varieties of Colgate on the shelf. The point isn't that they expect me the consumer to know or care about the differences, or that they are so "addicted to the smell of their own farts" that they think there's a meaningful difference between brands of Colgate.

The point is that they want to consume shelf space, crowd other brands out, and send the message that they are the default, safe choice for toothpaste. We can say that's dumb, but I suspect the sales figures would tell us they're having some success with that.

> I really appreciate when brands just name things like they are.

Sure, but I find this branding even more confusing.

"Dude, you're getting a Dell!"

"Oh, neat! Is it a PC or laptop?"

"It's a Dell Pro... laptop."

"..."

At least with XPS, Latitude, etc., consumers were able to easily distinguish between models, after getting familiar with the product line. Naming all products "<company name> [Pro,Pro Max]" will always be clear as mud. Not to mention that "Pro Max Premium Plus Ultra" is dumb, in that Apple way. Apple is notorious for naming all their products the same, so consumers have to use launch years to distinguish them.

If you find this branding more confusing, then you are probably not familiar with laptop shopping in this segment.

Here are all of the 2024 models available: Latitude 9450, Latitude 7350, Latitude 7350 Ultralight, Latitude 7350 Detachable, Latitude 7455, Latitude 7450, Latitude 7450 Ultralight, Latitude 7650, Latitude 5550, Latitude 5455, Latitude 5450, Latitude 5350, Latitude 3450, Latitude 3550.

You have to memorize what you are looking at - the first digit is the model line, the second digit is a reference to the screen size, and the last set of digits a reference to the model year.

So "Dell Latitude 5450" conveys all the same information as "2024 Dell Pro 14" Plus". I'm not sure what's controversial about that change.

I'm not a Dell customer, so I'm not familiar with their product lines, but from what you say "Dell Latitude 5450" is indeed clearer to me than "2024 Dell Pro 14" Plus". I can get familiar with the number scheme and infer that higher numbers indicate better performance, larger screen, etc. "Pro" and "Plus" will always be meaningless and arbitrary.

> infer that higher numbers indicate better performance

But bigger numbers don't always indicate better performance. A Dell Latitude 6420 (a Sandy Bridge) is much slower than a 5420. Same with a 7320 versus a 5440.

Then that's a confusion the manufacturer should address. Consistency and clarity is key. But it's not solved by scrapping all of it in favor of "Plus", "Pro" and "Max".

Here's four potential model numbers/names.

Latitude 6420

Latitude 5540

Inspiron 5555

2011 Dell Pro 14"

2024 Dell Pro 15"

2024 Dell Pro Max 15"

Which ones are the recent bigger laptops? Which is the older smaller laptop? Which is better, Inspiron or Latitude? Which is better, the Dell Pro or the Dell Pro Max? Which naming scheme makes these things way more obvious?

I personally don't care about the year of release. The display size is good to know, but it doesn't tell me whether it's an IPS or OLED, which I care more about. Besides, I'm much more interested about the CPU, RAM, disk size, etc.

So should all of these be part of the product name as well, just to please me? Probably not.

Yet if the manufacturer segmented their product by arbitrary brand names (which could also be "Base", "Pro", "Max", etc. mind you; I just think these are overloaded terms, and custom terms like XPS, Latitude, etc. would be clearer), and then subdivided these with sensible model names that encoded this information, this would make more sense. Given that I as a consumer get familiar with it, which one might want to do before deciding to spend thousands on a product.

Again, I'm not saying that Dell has done a good job at this, but potentially it _can_ be done well. For example, I think MikroTik does a decent job at this[1]. It does lead to product names that are difficult to parse/pronounce like "CSS326-24G-2S+RM", but once you're familiar with the scheme, it's easy to know which product has which specs, and to compare them.

Anyway, it's fine if we disagree. I think we both made our case.

[1]: https://wiki.mikrotik.com/Manual:Product_Naming

I totally get the naming scheme of practically every technical feature being exposed in the model number, but outside of selling to techie people you'll quickly lose people in trying to remember what was recommended. I don't have a problem remembering what model Supermicro board is on my router build, but I totally understand someone not having a clue what an X11SBA-LN4F is or have any clue on how to begin to compare that to some other Supermicro board.

When it comes to selling to the mass market for a single big consumer electronic good like a laptop or phone or game console or whatever, it seems to me to be way simpler to just have a few decent SKUs. Having someone try and remember "Bill said I should get the CSS326-24G-2S+RM, or was that the 3326, wait is this the one with +RM or not, hmm this is complicated I guess I'll just get something else" is a lot more challenging than having someone remember "Bill said I should get at least the Pro version; oh, that's the listing for the 2023 model I want the newer one, there we go."

You'll really burn a customer when they get confused by the naming scheme and think they're getting one thing but then when they get it home it doesn't work like their friend's because their friend is rocking the 7730-G3-M-QQ-7i gizmowidget as opposed to the 7730-G3-N-QQ-7i gizmowidget.

Sure, I agree with that, but surely there's a middle ground between cryptic model names and simple ones to the point of being meaningless. If you have to add the year and display size to your product name, then it's probably not unique enough.

Like I said, this middle ground to me are standard product line names with some meaningful product identifier, so this change by Dell seems like a regression.

> Which is better, the Dell Pro or the Dell Pro Max?

Neither. The precision lines are workstations addressed at a very different audience. So for the average customer the "better" ranking is non-pro, then pro and only in exceptional cases pro max. The actual differentiator is the blank, plus, premium afterwards.

Bonus questions: which models have ECC ram and quadro cards available? Which ones have the best displays? My guess would be pro max premium and non-pro premium, but that is far from obvious.

Bold of you to assume it's not going to be Dell Pro 5540.

> Consistency and clarity is key

For manufacturing, yes, absolutely not for marketing.

"Dell 2024 Super Max Pro Ultra Plus New Premium" is objectively better for confusing customers and tricking them into purchasing products sold at higher price and worse value proposition.

I think those kinds of model numbers are fine, as long as it's prominently explained somewhere and I don't have to chase down some forum post from a few years ago because the company can't be bothered to explain its own products to its customers.

> consumers were able to easily distinguish between models

I don't think I could ever remember which of the Inspiron or Latitude lines were supposed to be higher end without looking at the magazine and seeing the prices. I just kind of assumed "Precision" meant their high-end workstations. And I'm someone who fawned over computers and gadgets my whole life.

Yeah you know it's bad when "Laptop" literally has to be in the proper name, e.g. "Microsoft Surface Laptop Go" because the "Microsoft Surface Go" is a tablet computer line before the successful branding got applied to regular laptops.

The worst I saw was single-use coffee packets for the hotel room coffee machine that comes in regular and decaf (with brown or green color stripes to distinguish them)... except the green is regular and brown is decaf.

Apple has its share of naming problems but not attempting to artificially split their laptop product line between consumer and "enterprise" is something they should get credit for.

One half of their product line literally has "Professional" in the name.

But the quality of components in an Air versus a Pro is presumed to be the same, just the specs are different. So all you are doing is shopping for the screen size, screen type, storage size, RAM, weight, etc that you need/want.

Whereas, with a Dell or HP, I would have to figure out which models are going to be built with cheaper materials that will wear out or have a higher chance of breaking.

naming aside, Dell (and other PC manufacturers) split enterprise from consumer for a number of reasons that make sense to me. the two markets have different requirements. enterprise needs a different OS license for one. Buying a fleet of X hundred or thousand devices vs one PC introduces concerns and requirements that home users just don't have and shouldn't pay for imho.

I mean they do have "Air" and "Pro" monikers for the laptops, as well as a page dedicated to helping you choose which one to get - https://www.apple.com/mac/best-mac/ - so they're not using "consumer" or "enterprise" but it's still there.

With one caveat - Air is very popular in the enterprise world. It's just so much lighter! And powerful enough to handle the vast majority of non-eng tasks.

Right, but Apple's naming does seem to differentiate between real hardware differences vs. artificial software ones (e.g. how much crapware is preloaded).

Well, except it's thinnest and bigger (with probably more ports though probably still not enough).

I kind of like the way Apple does it - when the M1 came out you could get the air or the pro and that was it. And the difference was simple - basically the pro was chunkier with a fan and a bit faster. With Dell I'd have no idea which one to get and what was good.

I think problem is not so much having named product lines but having too many overlapping product lines.

Having loads of random product numbers is really no better than named ranges.

If you only have 3 product lines then people will learn the names and can understand the differences when shopping.

I feel like the headline is burying the lede here: every Dell sub-brand is going away expecting for the new “Pro” and “Pro Max”. Reminds me a lot of how Apple in the late 90s got rid of their Performa/Centris/Quadra/etc. for more obvious, matter-of-fact names.

It's a transparent ripoff of Apple's branding.

Should I get the "Dell Pro Max ", the "Dell Pro Max Plus", "Dell Pro Plus", or the "Dell Premium"?

I understand cleaning up the model lineup, but jeez.

Marketing things as "pro" is nothing new. I'm sure others could go back farther than this.

1980 Koga Miyata Pro https://www.speedbicycles.ch/velo/193/koga_miyata_pro_racer_...

1978 Centurion Pro Tour https://vintagecenturion.com/models/touring/protour.shtml

1969 Brooks Professional Saddle https://www.brooksengland.com/en_us/standard-professional.ht...

As for "rip-offs," the design language of every aluminum Macbook has basically been Leica rangefinder.

https://www.rustmag.com/gear/2020/12/16/4-reasons-to-buy-a-l...

Which is a double "rip-off," as the IBM Thinkpad goes back a lot farther and it was intentionally made black-with-red-accents to pay homage to Nikon while having the form factor of a bento box.

http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/companies/nikon/htmls/m...

If it were just pro that would be one thing, but when I saw “Pro Max” I instantly thought of Apple.

The Taco Bell menu is several permutations of cheese, lettuce, ground beef, sour cream, and guacamole.

The marketing vocabulary includes Pro, Max, Sport, Comp, Light, Elite, XT, GT, Super, and Extra.

SuperMax Pro. Sportmax GT. Sportmax Elite GT. Comp Extra. Etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProMax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promax_Awards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_MaxxPro

> Should I get the "Dell Pro Max ", the "Dell Pro Max Plus", "Dell Pro Plus", or the "Dell Premium"?

I thought you were joking, but these do seem to be options in the new, simpler branding!

It's designed to make the basic option still sound special.

People on a budget don't want to be presented with the option of the Dell Basic, the Dell Standard, and the Dell Premium.

At the other end of the spectrum you have people booking Basic Economy airline fares, and at least in several cases, willfully ignoring the fare conditions (specifically, non-assigned seating), and then showing up at the gate, "My wife and I and our three children all need to be in the same row."

I find it funny how much they've just completely ceded branding standards to Apple in that move.

On branding it seems like everyone starts to copy Apple at this point or makes branding as complex as Intel.

When your competition is Apple you want to make it as easy as possible to compare like-for-like. What laptop are they positioning as an alternative to the MacBook Pro? The Dell Pro.

Because it's just simple and makes sense. Mostly, the only confusing apple product is iPad Air because it doesn't match what Air means in MacBooks.

Personally I find it confusing that all of their iPads since 2010 are simply called "iPad" even though they're completely different. Same with all their products except the iPhone, that get a number in their official name.

You have to dig into hidden "gen number" to find out which iPad is the one you bought 3 years ago.

> You have to dig into hidden "gen number" to find out which iPad is the one you bought 3 years ago.

This was the Apple way for long. I personally always liked that way. They messed it up with iPhone 3G tho.

Isn't the Air the lightest and thinnest?

Yes, people are only confused because they think it means cheapest, which is ultimately a failing of Apple branding but doesn't really make much sense to me.

I don't equate Air line to "cheapest", I think of it where compromises were made in the name of lower weight: lower TDP cpu, less cooling capacity etc.

Agree, I bought an iPad recently and was really confused by pricings between the iPad (10 I think), the iPad Air and iPad Mini

It makes sense but it’s not obvious

The Macbook was thinner and lighter than the Macbook Air.

The MacBook hasn't been made for years though.

> doesn't match what Air means in MacBooks

In the past I'd agree but these days it's better aligned.

I'm not sure if it's just me or a common feeling, but XPS laptops from the last few years (at least 2020 onward) felt really poor quality for "professional" computers. Especially regarding their main competitors (mbp & thinkpads). All the XPS we had at work had issues and particularly bad battery life even before the one year mark.. For those who didn't have their battery swollen.

I wouldn't have thought that such a recognizable brand as the XPS line would fade for "AI PC" BS but heh

XPS was never their professional product line. Latitudes were their workplace fleet devices that mostly went head to head with ThinkPads.

This is probably good evidence that they needed to simplify their branding. Having their halo consumer product compete for market mindshare against their professional products is counterproductive. Especially when everyone wants to cross shop against MacBooks.

In contrast, ThinkPad's X1 shares almost nothing with the rest of the Thinkpad's professional line, but it sits there adding prestige to the brand.

Inspiron is their consumer line, Latitude their business line, Precision their pro line, Alienware their gaming line, so what exactly was XPS meant to be? Their fashion line?

XPS pre-dates them acquiring Alienware, it made more sense at the time. That was their premium consumer/gaming line.

Dell bought Alienware in 2006 though so they took their sweet time before cleaning up the product lines.

Their consumer fashion line.

My Dell Dimension XPS P166s from 1996 sure was fashionable in all that beige

Im generally a fan of the Latitudes I’ve had for the past few years. They don’t do anything special or great but generally just work. The body gets scratched pretty easily and the power button behavior is annoying, but other than that I’ve had no issues.

Even got a lucky BSOD 2 years ago that nuked windows and somehow got me admin access!

My work went from Thinkpads to Latitudes. The Latitudes are pretty sturdy, and I'm told are pretty competitive on price/performance. But nothing beat the ThinkPad on durability/repairability/tactile feel/etc.

When I quit the job, I immediately bought an identical ThinkPad. It's nearly 8 years old but I still use it regularly use it as a pub trivia host as it can take a beating and have beers poured on it and still run like a trooper.

I had a 2021 model. It was pretty poor in all aspects. Slow, laggy on the desktop just clicking around. Loud when doing anything resembling work. Very poor audio. Bad keyboard. 4 hour battery.

I switched to a new M1 MacBook Air and it was like going from a Cessna 150 to an F-15. Everything on the M1 MBA was decades ahead of the XPS.

Everyone and their brother now sells a much better product than XPS, and often for nearly half the cash. I picked up an Asus Vivo last year. Very nice product, half the cost of the XPS they had on offer, but with the same specs and screen.

It feels like it was engineered as a unit, much like the MBA. The XPS in comparison is a parts bin special.

I can agree with that. I still use my XPS from 2022 on a daily basis, but I regret it alot. Battery life and cooling are unbelievably bad, it's a shame when you start thinking about the price.

>Especially regarding their main competitors (mbp & thinkpads)

I dont think XPS is a business / professional line? But I think I have heard similar complains from Thinkpad user as well. The only good PC hardware surprisingly came from Microsoft their Surface line. But most business dont use it.

XPS always felt like an unloved brand. I’ve owned some and they never felt like they fit into either the powerhouse segment or the everyday user segment. And the strange revisions to keyboards and things over time made it less and less attractive to power users. Dell has far too many models and it’s hard for anyone to understand what the reason is to buy any of them. It’s certainly not for the everyday user either - in every single way it is worse than the cheapest Apple laptop.

As for AI PC - unfortunately Microsoft has forced this on everyone. They used their influence and power to force Intel to agree to this branding and the conditions for it to be met (things like having a Microsoft specific “Copilot” button). And all the OEMs have to come along or face repercussions for these partnerships. It’s just another example of big tech having too much market share, capital, etc.

Alternative would be like Apple, with vertical integration.

OEMs have had 30 years to sell Windows alternatives based on GNU/Linux or BSD, after the monopoly lawsuit, they caved in quickly after XP license became grátis, and nowadays rather sell Chromebooks and Android tablets than proper Windows alternatives.

Seems they had good opportunity while renaming XPS to Dell Poor, Dell Poor+ and Dell Poor Premium

I always felt like a lot of these computer sub brand names were rather confusing. Inspiron? Presario? Precision? XPS? ProBook? EliteBook? zBook? Envy? What are the real cross comparisons here?

Personally, I'm OK with these computer manufacturers cleaning up their product line.

It also doesn't change the fact that within each product line there is going to be a billion different configuration options anyway.

Yeah, that's my next hope that they generally reduce the total SKU counts. It can be challenging to find exact replacement parts when there's a dozen different varieties for say a "Latitude 5450" or whatever.

It's a shame they went with Apple because their server naming is so good. It's super easy to compare across models and it feels very Dell.

"They’re replacing all of these old brands with Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, and within each of these, there will be three tiers: Base, Plus, and Premium."

I am a Lenovo guy myself, however I like what they are trying to do. If they actually do a good separation, that would be great. If they only do 9 level of computers, that would be a good change.

Kinda ThinkPad T, X, P. But more clear. And again, I only use ThinkPads T, P, or Xs.

> I am a Lenovo guy myself

Hell yeah, Lenovo ThinkPad for life.

On a tangent, I was never able to acquire XPS with Linux, the online store for various European countries always showed it as non available.

I had one with I think a 7th gen Intel processor, and while it ran Linux pretty well the coil whine was enough to drive me absolutely batty. I made it about a year before I traded it in.

I got an XPS 13 Developer Edition around 2019 I think.

I still have it. It was a good machine.

Most things worked correctly out of the box but occasionally WIFI didn't wake from sleep properly and the battery life was always a bit rubbish compared to any MacBook Pro.

I think that Dell have had too many models forever. Simplifying their line up is a good idea.

I was able to buy it once ~15 years ago (UK).

If it makes easier to describe which are the low end, and which are the high end, that's fine, I guess? I just hate when terms get shoved together like that..."pro max"? What's the next flagship going to be? "Pro Max Ultra"? Then the "Pro Max Ultra+"? Then the "Platinum Pro Max Ultra+ Plus"? Then the ELITE SERIES Platinum Pro-Maximus Ultronic+ Plus Performance"?

It's all just smushing a bunch of words for "really good" together and pretending like it means something different or unique. If something is maximum, it is the maximum - A maximum grade exceeds a "professional grade" the way an "enterprise subscription" is larger than "team subscription".

In an ideal scenario, it would simply be: "Basic, Advanced, and Maximum". I get the issue though. Sales want to be able to move products, and its an issue if people don't want to feel poor by buying the "basic" one, but can't afford the higher models. Fine! If the want to use more market-y terms, why not something like: "Quality, Premium, and Luxury"?

I would also presume that that would be specific to consumer grade. A business-grade line would be much easier. Keep the model names clear and obvious for Purchasing & Logistics people: "Basic, Performance, Executive". Basic is for grunt work who need internet access for a WebApp, but not much else. Performance is for finance, or whoever deals with a lot of wear and tear. Executive is thinner and fancier looking, but about as weak as basic model but can open Excel and PowerPoint.

You need an additional 'Elite' tier for sales people or they are going to start whining about needing Macbooks.

I once heard a repair tech say that XPS stands for “eXpensive Piece of Sh*t” and now that always comes to mind, although it never totally made sense to me as I didn’t think they were particularly expensive. I have an XPS and I did replace the battery at one point, but other than that I think it performed fairly well for my simple needs. I think I paid $499 for it around 2018.

I've had a number of Dell's in the past and IMO their "consumer" and "professional" lines might as well be different brands that happen to share the "Dell" name.

Their consumer laptops are all garbage IMO, mainly cause I find they try to max out specs so it looks good on paper and skimp on really basic things like the hinges, batteries, etc.

Their professional laptops are much better, my parents just got rid of a Dell Latitude that I passed down to them after college, and when I bought it for college it was already 5-6 years old so all in all it had a service life of more than a decade. Specs might be down compared to the consumer line but everything else IMO is much better built (chassis, battery, hinges, etc)

>I think I paid $499 for it around 2018.

The base model XPS laptop was ~$999 at the time (vs $1299 for a 2023 model). Which sadly doesn't feel all that expensive today even though I would absolutely still call a $1000 laptop expensive.

Haha, what an end to an era on the brand. Some 16 years ago, my parents bought me the only XPS laptop I'd own: an XPS M1330 [0]. I've still got in a closet here, but I used it for eight years or so. Six years after purchase, it looks like it was still a pretty good machine[1] and had near perfect Linux compatibility. The real wonder for me was that the bootloaders for the Power button on that laptop and the MediaDirect button were separate, so I actually had it set up so that if I hit the MediaDirect button it would go to Ubuntu and the Power button would send it to Windows!

Pretty neat trick. The only thing is that something about the way the video framebuffer was set up when you hit the MediaDirect button made the GRUB interface laggy. After that, the kernel resets everything and all is well!

This particular laptop was part of the infamous batch of bad G84 series of Nvidia graphics chips. The BGA soldering on the GPUs would crack under thermal stress, but you could reflow it with a heat gun or using the oven (crazy for a semi-plastic device!). In my case, it happened early enough that XPS support replaced my motherboard a few times. They actually met me wherever I was with the part to replace the board and the tech would do it for me at home. Overall, that was the finest customer support experience I ever had. I'm a fickle guy, though. It wasn't enough to keep me with the brand and I eventually ended up with a Macbook.

It's funny. After posting this I googled my name and XPS M1330 and found a post where I was trying to boot off the SD card. I was fascinated by this idea back then that I could just carry my OS on an SD card and then people couldn't see any of my stuff unless they had that specific SD card: https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/laptops-gene... . Sadly the XPS M1330 didn't work for that, but I think I did it with a USB stick (which is unfortunately more noticeable - back then they were bulky!).

0: https://web.archive.org/web/20150811070526/https://arjie.com...

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20150811065240/https://arjie.com...

The first computer I ever owned was the original XPS laptop, circa 2004. It weighed as much as a corgi, was as thick as a Chicago deep dish pizza and gave out first-degree burns if your shorts rode up too high. The top outer panel was a beautifully garish noise pattern of deep green and purple ribbons, and the screen was so heavy that the hinges shattered within a year and the screen was ever after held up by two duct-tape suspenders, which thankfully didn't impede the keyboard much since the thing was as wide as a city block.

So when I buy a Dell laptop now (won't happen), I need to ask for Dell Pro Premium package and make sure that the seller doesn't mistake it for Plus version or Base. Why would you go for "easier" names and go for 3 subcategories with the same name within 3 other categories. Just sell Dell/Dell Pro/Dell Pro Max (even the names are copied from Apple) with different specs, why give them subcategories

Dell as the name of the laptop itself makes no sense. Like Apple replacing ‘MacBook’ with ‘Apple’.

I got a refurb XPS from the Dell store on eBay. Its problems are numerous, but not fatal. I do appreciate that it has a 17" display. I'm not sure anyone(?) does large screens on laptops anymore.

Clickbait, they're just renaming their models.

Well I guess I won't be getting a new XPS with Linux when this 9343 finally dies, then...

To be replaced with "Dell," "Dell Pro", and "Dell Pro Max"... Those tiers seem oddly familiar. They also throw away what I thought, as a proud long-time Dell Precision owner, was decent branding of their different lines for various market segments. But maybe it's a good thing - most major brands seem to offer too many laptop choices.

Shopping for a laptop recently has left me, ironically, running for Mac. The experience on most windows laptop vendor sites is awful:

- Dell's sales page focuses on proprietary names like "ExpressCharge TM", "Stealth Mode", "ComfortView TM", "Cryo-Tech TM", etc, that mean nothing to me [0]. It also gave me a pop-up when I went to a specific laptop's page.

- HP has way too many categories on the landing page [1]. I mistook "Elitebook Ultra" for their top-of-the-line, but then discovered they're $3000 lightweight notebooks with Snapdragon chips and Qualcomm GPUs. The first and second laptops shown appear to have identical specs, but differ in price by $2000 [2]. Trying my luck elsewhere, going to "ProBook" gives me no less than 53 options to read and sort through [3].

- Lenovo is actually decent [4]! The product lines are named well and properly explained. The UI isn't as pretty as HP's, but it's a lot more functional.

- Asus overall [5] isn't great (more proprietary names like "SmartHinge" and aesthetic-focused product descriptions). However, the Asus ProArt site is done fairly well [6].

Almost every windows laptop feels like it's trying to sell me on everything that isn't specs. "SmartHinge". "Stealth Mode". "Youthful" aesthetics. Weird proprietary bloatware and extended warranties.

And, even on the sites that don't give me confusing marketing, I'm left to figure out whether I need Windows "Pro" or "Home", what the hell Copilot+ is (a $20/mo upsell [7] that I'm guessing the laptop will forever beg me to add, like OneDrive used to), and if I a guide to get rid of spyware, bloatware, ads, auto-installed candycrush, and other anti-consumer jabs once I actually buy the thing (like I did with Windows 10 when it first released). And then fight every month or two when it inexplicably can't find the license for Office I pay monthly, for and locks me out of all of my documents.

With a Macbook, contrarily, I know I can actually research the silicon, figure out the specs, and actually get what I ordered / expected. I also know I won't have to fight the OS nearly as much, even if Apple has its own upsell attempts, anti-consumer warranty/repair problems, etc. I never would've expected to feel that way. Especially not 10-15 years ago.

But maybe Dell's rebrand helps them move back in that direction a little.

[0]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops

[1]: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/cat/laptops

[2]: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/mdp/hp-elitebook-ultra-3074457...

[3]: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/vwa/laptops/brand=ProBook

[4]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/

[6]: https://www.asus.com/us/proart/laptops-home/

[7]: https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/what-is-microsoft-copilot

> Lenovo is actually decent

If all you want is a thinkpad maybe. But then you click the thinkpad link and have to figure out whether you want a T, P, L, E, C or X thinkpad (they don't make Ws anymore, right?) Oh and some also have "s" suffix. And they differ from non-s quite a bit

My experience is similar to yours, and I went to a Macbook Pro during the M1 launch and am pretty happy with the decision, though I would prefer Linux. I take myself to be a tech enthusiast, but I did not have the patience to wade through hundreds of opaque product pages to find what it was they were really selling.

For a time Microsoft had a relatively clean Surface lineup, but a quick check reveals that it's significantly more difficult to shop than it was.

Pro and Pro Max? Really? No Ultra?

Sounds like just Dell products will be absolute garbage.

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