This week at CES 2025, Dell announced a rebranding of sorts for its new PC lineup going forward. These are the Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max categories. Then, of course, Dell has the Alienware category for gaming, but that’s not entirely relative to the “Dell” products.
In an earlier post, we said that Dell was basically killing off the XPS category and replacing it. As a consumer and coming from a consumer standpoint, that is how it seems. No matter how you frame it. However, we recently spoke with Dell about these name changes to get a better perspective following our initial report.
Dell isn’t really killing XPS. It’s simply going to be calling it something else from now on. That’s an important distinction to make. Because the bones, and really the essence of Dell XPS products are going to live on as Dell Premium.
So really what you’re doing is taking the “XPS” and instead, just removing that one part of the name and replacing it with the word Premium, but nothing else is really changing. Why do this? Why uproot the very core of how people recognize one of your most premium laptop categories and just decide to call it something else?
From the sounds of it, simplicity and streamlining have a lot to do with Dell’s decision. It would be naive to think that customers don’t like things to be simple. Because they do. And Dell’s new way of framing its different product categories has a central goal of simplifying things for customers.
The rebranding of Dell PC products is intended to simplify things
Let’s start by focusing on one key thing. Dell used to have seven product categories. Seven. According to Dell, it’s separating everything out into these newly renamed categories so customers have an easier time finding the right PC. Dell says “We’ve introduced three simple product categories (down from seven!) to focus on core customer needs.” Each of these categories is targeting a different use case.
The Dell category is targeting play, school, and work. So think of these laptops as PCs you’ll use for studying and researching, casual browsing and watching videos and doing more simple work tasks like spreadsheets. The Dell Pro category is geared more toward professional-grade productivity. Meanwhile, Dell Pro Max is aimed at maximum workstation performance. Depending on what a customer might need, they’ll, according to Dell, more easily be able to tell which product category they should be searching in.
Whether or not customers end up actually finding things to be more simplified remains to be seen. But from our perspective, this does seem simpler to understand.
Additional product separation comes in the form of tiers in each of the three categories
For further simplification, Dell has come up with tiers for each category. For instance, the “Plus” tier is intended to offer significantly more scalable performance compared to the base tier. There’s also the “Premium” tier (where XPS now lives) that Dell says “delivers ultimate mobility and design.”
In the same vein, Dell’s Precision category of laptops will now be in the Dell Pro Max category. You can read more about Dell’s category changes here in the official blog post. But to recap, Dell’s reasoning comes down to simplification for its customers. Its hope is that this will translate to customers having an easier time finding the right PCs. And to be quite honest, these product category names are certainly simpler than some of the others we’ve seen from different brands.
