Dell kills its biggest brand in shock move

It's CES 2025, which means that we're getting almost inundated by tech news after the brief lull brought by the holiday period, but few announcements have felt as seismic as the one that Dell just made. It's confirmed that it's completely ripping up the branding it's established over the last decade and more, and moving forward with a new, supposedly simplified naming structure for its devices.

That means, in point of fact, the abrupt death of long-running sub-brands including probably its biggest: XPS. It's long been a shorthand for premium Windows laptops that rival Apple's MacBooks where quality is concerned. That's not the only name being consigned to history, though, with others like Inspiron similarly going the way of the dinosaurs.

Moving forward, Dell says that it'll instead be sticking to three new tiers of device: Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max. Those naming conventions obviously bring Apple's own system to mind immediately, whether you're thinking of the annual iPhone lineup or its own-brand M-series chipsets.

Dell acknowledged that similarity during a briefing T3 attended in December, but doubled down on the idea that customers appreciate the simplicity of "Pro" and "Pro Max" as labels for higher-spec machines. Its spokespeople also pointed out that words like "Inspiron" simply don't have the clarity that helps cut through in marketing.

Whether the new naming situation ends up genuinely being clearer might take some time to work out, though, given that each of those tiers actually holds three more sub-tiers, as the Dell-supplied graphic below clarifies.

In each case, there will be Base machines along with Plus and Premium options that add better specs or extras. During that briefing, I was told that a new XPS 14, for example, would now slot in as a Dell 14 Plus machine, to give a rough sense of where things would fit.

That means that most consumer laptops, even quite premium ones, are likely to sit under Dell branding, with Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max reserved for enterprise machines and those with specs aimed at intensive creative work, for example. It's also worth clarifying that Alienware will continue to sit outside all of this, as Dell's gaming laptop brand.

CES isn't just Dell's excuse to announce this major change – it's also launching a bunch of actual laptops. That new Dell 14 Plus (no longer an XPS) will arrive on 18 February, for example, priced at $1,099 in the US with international pricing not announced. There will also be a Dell 16 Plus, then Dell Pro machines in a range of sizes from 13-inch to 16-inch, and finally Dell Pro Max laptops in 14 and 16-inch variants.

Most of these laptops don't have final pricing yet, and we'll be getting hands-on with many of them in the coming weeks, but it'll be genuinely fascinating to observe how well the new brand structure works. While naming conventions can be a little inside baseball at times, this is an example of a fairly significant public shift, so Dell will doubtless be hoping that its market research proves accurate.