CES 2025: Dell retires Inspiron, Latitude and XPS marques after 30 years of loyal service

It takes a brave company to throw its entire brand portfolio under a bus, just ask the folks at Jaguar Land Rover. At least Jaguar had good reason to; but Dell, one of the biggest names in PC manufacturing, has just done something similar to its laptops without the obvious and urgent need that drove JLR to such radical ends.

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Dell has announced  it is scrapping its existing Latitude, Inspiron and XPS lines in favour of a new and allegedly simpler, more streamlined range.

Those names have been knocking around the PC world for decades: Inspiron since 1997, XPS since 1992 and Latitude since 1994. That’s a combined brand lifetime of 90-odd years and a fair amount of brand equity to start messing with.

According to Dell, the Alienware gaming sub-brand that it purchased in 2006 won’t be affected, Dell’s press release noting in italics that “For gamers, Alienware continues as a leading gaming brand that’s been serving PC gamers for nearly 30 years.”

Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max  model names explained

So what does the new lineup look like? Well, henceforth Dell’s laptop lineup — the changes also affect Dell’s monitor and desktop range but let’s not worry about that now — will be divided into Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max lines.

According to Dell, the entry-level “Dell” brand is “designed for play, school and work” while “Dell Pro” is “designed for professional-grade productivity” and “Dell Pro Max” is  “designed for maximum performance”.

Let’s skip over the obvious issue that devices for work should surely be in the Pro category, that the “Dell” brand would surely be better described as for “play, school and home”, and where the G-series gaming laptops land in this new product layout is anyone’s guess.

But that’s not where the fun stops because within each category there will be three sub-brands: Base, Premium and Plus.

• Base models will be vanilla machines with no extras – whether or not these will be customisable at the point of purchase remains to be seen.
• Plus will be a notch above and consist of pre-configured machines that have better screens, more RAM, a more potent CPU, more storage and possibly a discrete graphics card.
• Premium models will be the top-end in each tier with all the bells and whistles and the highest level of spec in every configurable category.

Off the bat, I see a few problems here. To start with, the whole Pro and Pro Max branding sounds very much like the terminology used by Apple who will happily sell you a MacBook in M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max configurations. That’s a bit like Jaguar deciding to rebrand its forthcoming electric cars with names currently used by BMW.

Second, to randomly pick one example of Dell’s new lineup, product names like the Dell Pro 16 Plus sound more than a little clunky and cumbersome and hardly trip off the tongue like Zenbook and MacBook.

Third, the product images that Dell displayed at its presser suggest that the uniquely stylish XPS range with its capacitive function bar and Zero-Lattice keyboard is kaput, too.

Now, granted the latest XPS design was, like Marmite, not to everyone’s taste. We have written some very nice things about it here (the XPS 16) and here (the original XPS 13 Plus) and some less complimentary things here (the new Snapdragon-powered XPS 13) but at least it was distinctive and different.

All the new machines that Dell revealed look rather generic, to say the least. Take the Dell Pro 16 Plus for example. Sure it’s  handsome enough, but place it alongside the likes of the Asus Zenbook 16 or the Apple MacBook and it looks more than a trifle uninspired.

It will take some time for Dell’s new brand hierarchy to take shape with existing models being phased out gradually and replaced with new machines as part of the day-to-day churn of models.

Is this a good idea or has Dell taken leave of its corporate senses? That’s a tough question to answer as Dell isn’t telling anyone why it felt the need to do this. Perhaps, sales of the rather radical XPS laptops are not quite what Dell hoped for.

Either way, the old adage of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” seems applicable here, and I don’t know anyone who thought Dell’s laptop branding was broken. All I know as an ex-marketeer is that I’d have had a more cogent explanation – or indeed any explanation – on hand for these changes and I’d have wanted the new products to pack some serious “surprise and delight” so that people’s attention was focused on the incoming and new rather than the outgoing and old.