Dell ‘just tore down 40 years of sub-brands’ with its new line of devices
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‘We just tore down 40 years of sub-brands’, announces Kevin Terwilliger, head of PCs at Dell. Say goodbye to Inspiron, Latitude, and the rest of Dell’s inscrutable laptop sub-brands. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, the company announced it would bulldoze the messy naming conventions of its laptop and desktop ranges in favour of a simplified – and distinctly iPhone-like – naming scheme.
![[The Dell 14 Plus and Dell Pro 16 Plus, the latter with its full-size keyboard and numpad]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/13/15/Dell-14-Plus-and-Dell-Pro-16-Plus.jpg)
Starting this month, a new line of AI-infused Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max devices will begin to take the place of the brand’s existing product categories, which include OptiPlex, XPS and others. The new branding applies across the board – from laptops and desktops to monitors and peripherals – making choosing a new Dell device more like picking a new smartphone.
![[The Dell Pro Premium sits in the new mid-range category, and impressed with its iPad Pro-style tandem OLED screen]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/13/15/Dell-Pro-Premium.jpg)
Within the three new simplified categories, there’ll be three tiers of performance, too: a nameless base model, a Plus model and a Premium model that Dell says will offer “the ultimate in design and mobility”. Speaking to The Independent, Dell’s head of PCs, Kevin Terwilliger, says the goal of the rebrand is to help customers make sense of the company’s dizzyingly vast range of business and consumer laptops, desktops and displays, many of which effectively do the same job. “We looked at our portfolios and what we found was we had multiple overlapping products, and it got confusing for people to understand,” Terwilliger says.
“For example, there’s a Dell XPS 13 and there’s a Dell Latitude 9013 – what the heck is the difference between those two products? So, we took a step back and decided to de-dupe all of it, and, when we did that, what we found was that we could get to a massively simpler structure.”.
![[The UltraSharp branding will remain in place following the shake-up, but the monitors will fit within Dell’s new tiered naming system]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/13/15/Dell-Ultrasharp-Monitor-CES.jpg)
