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Dell reviving the XPS brand

Changing the branding from Dell XPS to Dell Premium was like going from Coke to New Coke. Poor judgement. Good to see that they are reversing that decision after just a year.
 
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A for effort & courage, F for the actual choice going away from the XPS branding.

A for effort & courage, A for the actual choice of admitting their mistake and bringing back the XPS branding. 🙂
 
I have a Dell XPS Studio in the basement. Cost me $570 back in 2008 and I used it until around 2020. I used it as a development server at Oracle running Oracle Enterprise Linux. And macOS, Windows, Linux. You could put 48 GB of RAM in it and that was a lot back then. I've been a fan of the XPS line from that computer but I've no idea if the branding means anything anymore.
 
pshufd said:
I have a Dell XPS Studio in the basement
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I've owned a number of dells over the years, and still have an Inspiron in the closet from 2000.

I bought my daughter a Dell laptop two years ago - an Inspiron. The specific make and model that her college recommended for her major. I have to say its a cheap piece of crap. Very disappointed in the fit and finish, and the build quality. She has one USB port not working and the power plug isn't working. Thankfully she can charge it via usb-c.
 
maflynn said:
I've owned a number of dells over the years, and still have an Inspiron in the closet from 2000.

I bought my daughter a Dell laptop two years ago - an Inspiron. The specific make and model that her college recommended for her major. I have to say its a cheap piece of crap. Very disappointed in the fit and finish, and the build quality. She has one USB port not working and the power plug isn't working. Thankfully she can charge it via usb-c.
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yep, My XPS 9370 from 2018 bit the dust in 2022 with the same thing, I could don't charge any ports, 2
as Dell wound not repair that at any cost
they were still horrible help wise and would rather lose a customer than make any repair-replacement efforts.
this was at the end of that pandemic, forgot which one, as they were still suffering, they claimed.

hopefully they righted the ship now and make better expensive notebooks now?
 
This new Dell XPS 14 looks pretty good. Price-wise it is basically the same as a similarly specced M5 MacBook Pro at ~$3000 CAD. Dell saw the light not just with bringing back the XPS branding but also getting rid of that stupid capacitive function row. I know people complained about the Touch Bar but at least the Touch Bar was multi-purpose.

At first glance the positive and negatives for me are:
+ Thunderbolt 4 everywhere
+ user replaceable storage
+ a claimed 27 hours of battery life (higher than the MBP)
+ Panther Lake sounds like a promising Intel release
- display spec doesn't mention miniLED
- copilot button (gross)
- McAfee preinstalled (disgusting)
- only Windows 11 Home for a $3000 laptop

If I was in the market for a new laptop and, for whatever reason, was not getting another MacBook I'd be interested in this one only if I knew that the hardware was Linux compatible. I would install Fedora Workstation and never think about the OS ever again.
 
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DankeBrutus said:
This new Dell XPS 14 looks pretty good. Price-wise it is basically the same as a similarly specced M5 MacBook Pro at ~$3000 CAD. Dell saw the light not just with bringing back the XPS branding but also getting rid of that stupid capacitive function row. I know people complained about the Touch Bar but at least the Touch Bar was multi-purpose.

At first glance the positive and negatives for me are:
+ Thunderbolt 4 everywhere
+ user replaceable storage
+ a claimed 27 hours of battery life (higher than the MBP)
+ Panther Lake sounds like a promising Intel release
- display spec doesn't mention miniLED
- copilot button (gross)
- McAfee preinstalled (disgusting)
- only Windows 11 Home for a $3000 laptop

If I was in the market for a new laptop and, for whatever reason, was not getting another MacBook I'd be interested in this one only if I knew that the hardware was Linux compatible. I would install Fedora Workstation and never think about the OS ever again.
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I haven't heard anything on 18A yields. Only that Panther Lake systems should be orderable from a few vendors.

The power envelope for Panther Lake is higher than it is for Lunar Lake. I think that it's 17 to 35 watts for LL and 25-45 for Panther Lake.

The high-end Geekbench numbers are supposed to be 3K/18K which is near the top-end for AMD.

The real star of Panther Lake will be the GPU.
 
I had a look at the upcoming XPS models and they went whole hog on trying to clone the MacBook Pros.

CNC aluminum, speakers in the same places (though only 10 watts), recessed keys like the MacBook Pro and dimensions very close to the MacBook Pro. I do like the trackpad which I think goes edge-to-edge.

I like it too but not for $3,000.

My Yoga has 13 hours of battery life, probably 7 hours running my main programs. I would not mind a little bit more but 27 hours claimed (which is probably 13 hours running moderate applications) would be more than I need. When I'm on a trip, I assume that I charge in the hotel overnight. Where I could see much more battery life being useful is on a weekend trip where I wouldn't have to bring a charger at all.

These days, though, some hotels have USB-C chargers in the room but all of them have USB-A. I've not measured the power output of USB-C chargers in hotel rooms and they might just be 20 watts or so but even that would be enough to recharge overnight. The USB-A chargers are useless for charging laptops but they at least work for phones.

I deinstalled McAfee. My Yoga has Thunderbolt 4 as well - I think that it should be standard on Intel laptops. Apple does Thunderbolt 5 but one of the main uses of that speed is for external storage which isn't an issue with Windows laptops because they support Gen 4 speeds internally and you can just pop in a larger NVMe if you need more high-speed storage.
 
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pshufd said:
I like it too but not for $3,000.
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I wonder how many people will be saying that with these higher prices - not just dell, but other laptop manufacturers.

I moved away from the MBP because the cost was too high (and this was years before the ram price spikes).
 
I still use a XPS 7390 daily (work laptop) and I love it. The size, the features - its great, hence why I've stuck with it. Some of the keys on the keyboard are a bit loose, but otherwise its great.
Could be tempted to upgrade now though, and I'd consider another XPS 14".......price dependent of course.....
 
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maflynn said:
I wonder how many people will be saying that with these higher prices - not just dell, but other laptop manufacturers.

I moved away from the MBP because the cost was too high (and this was years before the ram price spikes).
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These companies are making lower cost models. They typically have WUXGA displays instead of 2880 OLED displays, NVMe Gen 4 vs Gen 5, diving board trackpad vs haptic. I have not seen any pricing of Panther Lake laptops yet. I could see them keeping the chips cheap to seed them as they're going to be losing money on them anyways with their yields. This would allow them to ramp up to get their yields up while still selling a lot of them. Or they could just charge what they think the market will bear.

What I've heard is that we should expect Panther Lake laptops to start selling in March. If they don't, then look out below for Intel's stock price.
 
I took a quick look on Dell's website and I noticed a lot of the lower tier laptops only give you single channel RAM configurations (which is slower than dual-channel). Something to watch out for if you're shopping this spring.
 
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I still have my inspiron 5406 2 in 1. It's dying a slow death. When it works, it works ok, but trying to get it to start sometimes it's a chore. It keeps giving me black screens, or dell logo with read static and refuses to boot. Every now and then, when I am doing work, it will just freeze.

I cannot recommend dell pcs anymore. I think for laptops, apple is the only way forward. I would give asus a try but they do not have specs I want. for a pc I want 64gb of ram for apple 32 is fine because of how efficent everything is, but on Windows the extra overhead is worth the money. My graphics in my current dell will use 32gb of ram when needed.
 
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