30 years later, XPS is dead. Here’s why Dell is killing its flagship brand

Over the past 30 years, Dell’s XPS brand has grown into one of the most respected and well-known in the industry — often home to some of the best laptops you could buy. In its latest iteration, it was a name that represented top-of-the-line Windows laptops that could go toe to toe with MacBooks. But now, the XPS brand is gone. Or, at least, it will be very soon.

I attended an event for journalists ahead of CES 2025 to hear Dell announce the grand plans of its rebrand. It was such a big deal, in fact, that Michael Dell himself took the stage to introduce the idea. The company is shooting for a simpler brand across its entire ecosystem of products that leans on the Dell name and unifies every product in its vast lineup under it.

But the question remains: Will the rebrand actually help potential buyers sort through Dell’s catalogue of products? Or is this change just another example chasing the latest trends in attempts to stay relevant?

Dell is the brand

I won’t bury the lede any further. Dell has announced that the XPS brand — and nearly every other sub-brand of Dell — is getting jettisoned. XPS? Out. Latitude? Nope. Inspiron? Precision? Optiplex? G-series? All gone. In name, they’re all being replaced throughout 2025.

Instead, the company’s future product lines will be split into just three buckets: Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max. And yes, that should sound eerily familiar.

It’s hard not to see the Apple of it all, sure. Apple began adopting terms like Pro, Plus, and Max in its iPhones, as well as in its Apple Silicon naming. But it’s not just Apple using those terms, and it certainly wasn’t the first to. They seem to be everywhere these days, and to be fair, Dell is using them in a different way than other companies. “Pro” does not mean premium or extra performance, and “Plus” and “Max” don’t mean physically larger. You’ll need to throw out all those naming conventions to understand what Dell is doing here.

Consumer PCs, which were previously divided into sub-brands like XPS and Inspiron, will now all fall under just the Dell name. Commercial PCs, meanwhile, will be in the Dell Pro category. And finally, the Dell Pro Max is for workstations, with the “Max” referring to performance. In theory, that means that no, the Dell Pro should not be considered a competitor to the MacBook Pro.

That sounds fairly straightforward, but here’s the thing: The company isn’t dialing back the sheer quantity of laptops, desktops, monitors, and other products in its ecosystem. Except that as you might have guessed, fitting every Dell product into one of those three brands isn’t possible without any extra designation.

That’s why under each brand, there are three more tiers of products names: Base, Plus, and Premium. These not only represent a scale up in terms of performance but also high-end features, materials, designs, and price. To put it as simply as I can, it’ll look a bit like this once it’s all rolled out:

Dell hasn’t sketched out how all of these will work yet, nor has it indicated exactly where each brand had previously fit. And, of course, within each of those labels, whether it’s Dell Plus or Dell Pro Max Premium (sigh, I know), there will be multiple size options, configurations, and upgrade options. It’s going to get messy.

We do know, however, that what used to be XPS, will now be Dell Premium. So, the XPS 13, 14, and 16, will be renamed the Dell 13 Premium, Dell 14 Premium, and Dell 16 Premium. To show the direction it was heading, Dell had some very familiar XPS laptops to show with the new Dell logo on the lid, even though these devices won’t actually be refreshed (and renamed) until later in 2025.

Meanwhile, XPS laptops will still be sold over the next few months under its current name until the Dell Premium refresh happens. But soon enough, they will be the Dell 13, 14, and 16 Premium.

I have also received confirmation that the XPS design ethos and the team itself isn’t changing either. This won’t be a year where the XPS laptops get a major redesign, since that happened just last year. So for 2025, it’s really just a new name. The only change is that now, they will all fit somewhere under these three headings.

The change feels drastic, and yes, it strikes me as a bit generic. One thing I do like, however, is that it puts the “XPS” designs more in the enter of the lineup, no longer feeling relegated as a side project under the XPS banner. It’s just the Dell 14 Premium. I also appreciate moving from the Dell Plus to the Dell Premium no longer feels like entirely switching brands — and based on what we saw, some of that XPS DNA might be carrying over further down the stack.

Meet the Dell Plus and Dell Pro Premium

While XPS replacement is still a ways out, Dell is starting its initiative in the consumer space with a replacement of the Inspiron Plus, now known as just Dell Plus. The Dell 14 Plus and Dell 16 2-in-1 Plus are the two new laptops in the lineup, refinements over last year’s models.

The 16-inch Plus model comes with an upgraded screen option — a glossy, 600-nit mini-LED panel with a 90Hz refresh rate and QHD resolution. It also comes in a new darker color option that looked quite sleek. The 14-inch model starts with a more basic 1920 x 1200 IPS panel, but can at least be upgraded to a 2560 x 1600 resolution.

Unfortunately, as of now there’s no longer a discrete GPU option in this line though, which is a bummer, because the previous Inspiron 16 Plus had options for an RTX 4050 and 4060. The biggest change for the positive, however, is in portability. Both the 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, however, are quite a bit thinner than they were before, down to just 0.67 inches from the 0.75 inches of last year’s model. That brings it a little closer to the MacBook Pro in thickness.

Then again, these aren’t the XPS laptops we all point to high-end MacBook Pro alternatives. They exist more in the mid-tier, though they certainly aren’t bad-looking laptops.

We’ll have to wait and see until we get them in for testing when they launch on February 18. Both sizes of the 2-in-1 models start at $999, while the clamshell Dell 14 Plus starts at $1,099 and the 16-inch model starts at $1,150. Both models start with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, however. That means the Dell 14 Plus is $200 cheaper than the M3 MacBook Air when similarly configured.

Dell also had some Dell Pro laptops to show, but remember, Dell isn’t using the “Pro” term in the way the rest of the industry does, as set by products like the MacBook Pro. Here, the “Pro” in the name refers simply to business laptops. In this case, as replacements for the Latitude brand.

That means the base Dell Pro laptops are affordable business laptops, while the Dell Pro Premium ones look to be top-of-the-line commercial laptops for executives, sporting features like an 8-megapixel webcam and an option for a tandem OLED display — and the Dell Pro 14 Plus sits in between. So, although the Premium ones look nice, you’re likely only going to get one of these if they’re issued by your company’s IT department.

Unfortunately, we’re still not seeing any discrete GPUs being offered outside of the Dell Pro Max line. These are the chunky fellas meant to replace the Precision workstations. They push performance above all else, but use commercial parts. It’s not something the average consumer really needs to even concern themselves with. But that means for now, Dell won’t have a compelling option for creators in the business world, perhaps for those who would prefer a MacBook Pro as their work machine anyways.

Does it work?

But the big question is about whether this whole rebrand was a good idea. It might sound simpler to say the Dell 14 Premium instead of the Dell XPS 14, but things quickly get a little absurd the further you get away from these mainline products. One product being announced, for example, is the Dell Pro Max Micro, which is a small, commercial desktop, but man, that is the opposite of clarity.

The “Pro Max” in the name refers to commercial PCs with extra performance, and the “Micro” refers to the size of the tower, but yeah, having the word “Max” and “Micro” next to each other in a product name is… kind of insane. Because remember: Trying to reduce the complexity of buying Dell products is the stated goal of this redesign, and when you end up with product names like that, I think that’s a sign you may have taken things a step too far.

That one is a good example, too, because this rebrand does apply to all of Dell’s products, even to desktop PCs and monitors. Although — one of the only sub-brands that is sticking around is UltraSharp on the monitor side — outside of Alienware, of course.

I’m not saying companies like Apple or Samsung are any less egregious with these nonsensical names, and look, no one owns the words “Pro,” “Plus,” or “Max.” No one gets to define what they mean in a product. But deciding to use those terms and redefine them for Dell’s own purposes may end up confusing buyers more than helping them. I’m just glad they didn’t manage to squeeze “Ultra” into the equation somewhere.

One other thing to mention is that Dell is actually not the first PC brand to do this recently. Last year, HP announced its own rebranding, ditching Spectre, Envy, and Pavilion in favor of the new “Omni” brand. HP didn’t take it as far as Dell, though, keeping around the EliteBook line to distinguish its commercial business.

And let’s not forget Intel’s move away from Core i5 and i7 to Core Ultra. There’s no question that this is the direction the entire industry is moving. I’ll need to wait and see how this affects the actual products in the lineup.

For now, let’s pour one out for XPS — a brand that grew into a beloved commodity through its over 30 years of business. That’ll cause some sadness, no doubt. But here’s the question: Did you even know what the acronym stood for? If not, maybe Dell has a point.