Look, I’ve never been a Dell guy. Even as a kid, I never really gravitated towards their products. Their brand always felt a bit square to me, and even though they clearly play an important role in the computing ecosystem, it is not one that I have felt a need to lean into.
Something about the brand has always screamed “not for me,” even in comparison to other PC brands. (Judging on logos alone, here’s how I would order them in terms of major laptop-makers most in need of a logo modernization and refresh: MSI, Acer, Dell, Asus, Lenovo, HP, Apple. And honestly, it’s a sharp drop-off after Dell.)
It’s possible it may be a “me” thing. I once made a joke about how dull I thought Dell was (in this piece) only to get confused reactions in response.
Maybe I’m just not their target audience, but it just has never been my favorite and I have never been won over by their charms, outside of maybe old server hardware.
So, this week’s news that the company was going to rebrand its entire PC portfolio under different variations of the Dell moniker feels like it should be a step in the right direction. And yet.
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To break down what they did: The company now offers three lines of computers for both desktop and laptop—the Dell, the Dell Pro, and the Dell Pro Max, with the latter two lines targeted at businesses. On top of this, they offer three variations on each line—base, plus, and premium.
As the company put it in a blog post:
We’ve also made it easy to distinguish products within each of the new product categories. We have a consistent approach to tiering that lets customers pinpoint the exact device for their specific needs. Above and beyond the starting point (Base), there’s a Plus tier that offers the most scalable performance and a Premium tier that delivers the ultimate in mobility and design.
It’s like Steve Jobs’ old four-quadrant product matrix made into a tic-tac-toe board.
Dude, you’re getting a dull. (via Dell)
Now, to be clear, other PC brands have fairly confusing product lines—last year, for example, Lenovo released a Yoga laptop without that laptop sub-brand’s defining 2-in-1 feature—and Dell likely needed some clarity. After all, trying to suss out what makes an Inspiron different from a Latitude isn’t easy unless you actually follow the Dell brand.
But while I think Dell is trying to improve product clarity through this move, to me it emphasizes that they simply have too many lines of machines. It’s especially confusing because, since they’re mid-rollout, they have a Dell Pro 16 Plus but not a Dell Pro 16 Premium, and a Dell Pro 13 Premium but not a Dell Pro 13 Plus. If this was trying to clarify things for consumers, it’s not working!
Of course, the one thing that really makes this move a head-scratcher is the decision to drop the high-end XPS brand, long thought of as the closest thing the Windows market has to the MacBook Pro. XPS has essentially represented the show dog brand for Dell, often with its highest-performance specs and best designs. But now it’s being ditched in favor of “Premium,” which feels like a bit of a miss.
Certainly, Dell can do what it wants, but I think that when brandways get killed off like this it creates more consumer confusion, not less. And given that the model Dell is switching to is already in wide use by a prominent competitor makes the decision to simplify all the more confusing.
Last year, HP did a similar move with its PCs, choosing to bring out an OmniBook line of machines, reviving an old brand name from the ’90s to help simplify its consumer offerings. But I would argue that while that change is also confusing, it is much easier to follow because of the way the company chose to position it. Currently, you cannot get an OmniBook that is smaller or larger than 14 inches, and you cannot get a consumer HP PC with a Qualcomm processor that does not have the OmniBook brand name on it. That at least gives consumers a baseline of expectations as to what this brand is, so that once the Spectre and Envy and Pavilion get folded into the Omnibook brand, the change will more or less happen all at once, so it feels a little less haphazard than what Dell is doing.
(And a note to Lenovo: If you’re thinking of pulling a move like this, I’m going to stop you right there. If you touch the ThinkPad, you threaten the wrath of the internet.)
Is Dell making a mistake by making its laptop lines so generic, by favoring the product portfolio over any one individual machine? After all, people don’t buy product portfolios—they buy PCs. It may be a bit soon to tell. But I do think that their decision to roll out only a few models in an inconsistent way was a mistake. If you’re building a tic-tac-toe board, at least make sure you fill out a full line before you start x-ing out other parts of the grid.
Pro Max Premium Links
Over the break, the famed tech journalist Gordon Mah Ung, who was something of a legend in enthusiast PC circles, died at age 58 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer that he often fought while maintaining his PC World presence. His loss will be felt deeply within the enthusiast space.
Longtime SNL standout Bill Hader, who has a reputation for being deeply cultured, apparently asked Amoeba Music to let him do a “What’s In My Bag?” clip. (For those not familiar with the series, it’s essentially the “Hot Ones” of the indie world—a contrived format that exposes something interesting about its subject.) And the result is pretty great.
For Wired, Tim Carmody wrote the kind of take that in some circles might get you killed: “HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me.” Let me just say: The point Carmody is getting at is that the semantics of whether HTML is Turing-complete often are used as a way to exclude, not include, potential programmers. Which is an argument I can absolutely get behind.
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Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal. (And to my friends who use Dell computers: Do you find the branding as dull and forgettable as I do?)
