From the «Apple had nothing to do with it I swear» department:
Title: Dell rebrands its entire product line: XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, etc. are going away
Author: Thom Holwerda
Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2025 20:41:34 +0000
Link: https://www.osnews.com/story/141494/dell-rebrands-its-entire-product-line-xps-inspiron-latitude-etc-are-going-away/
Dell has announced it’s rebranding literally its entire product line, so mainstays like XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron are going away. They’re replacing
all of these old brands with Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, and within each
of these, there will be three tiers: Base, Plus, and Premium. Of course, the reason is “AI”.
The AI PC market is quickly evolving. Silicon innovation is at its strongest and everyone from IT decision makers to professionals and everyday users are looking at on-device AI to help drive productivity and creativity. To make finding the right AI PC easy for customers, we’ve introduced three simple product categories to focus on core customer needs – Dell (designed for play,
school and work), Dell Pro (designed for professional-grade productivity) and Dell Pro Max (designed for maximum performance).
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.
↫ Kevin Terwilliger on Dell’s blog[1]
Setting aside the nonsensical reasoning behind the rebrand, I do actually kind
of dig the simplicity here. This is a simple, straightforward set of brand names and tiers that pretty much anyone can understand. That being said, the issue with Dell in particular is that once you go to their website to actually
buy one of their machines, the clarity abruptly ends and it gets confusing fast. I hope these new brand names and tiers will untangle some of that mess to
make it easier to find what you need, but I’m skeptical.
My XPS 13 from 2017 is really starting to show its age, and considering how happy I’ve been with it over the years its current Dell equivalent would be a
top contender (assuming I had the finances to do so). I wonder if the Linux support on current Dell laptops has improved since my XPS 13 was new?
Links:
[1]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/dell-transforms-ai-pc-portfolio-for-anywhere-productivity/ (link)
Dell has announced it’s rebranding literally its entire product line, so >mainstays like XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron are going away. They’re replacing >all of these old brands with Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, and within each >of these, there will be three tiers: Base, Plus, and Premium. Of course, the >reason is “AI”.
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.
Setting aside the nonsensical reasoning behind the rebrand, I do actually kind >of dig the simplicity here. This is a simple, straightforward set of brand >names and tiers that pretty much anyone can understand. That being said, the >issue with Dell in particular is that once you go to their website to actually >buy one of their machines, the clarity abruptly ends and it gets confusing >fast. I hope these new brand names and tiers will untangle some of that mess to
make it easier to find what you need, but I’m skeptical.
I would be surprised if you would not be able to run linux perfectly fine on the latest and greatest XPS. I think they even sell an XPS variety with Ubuntu from the factory.
Retrograde wrote:
Dell has announced it’s rebranding literally its entire product line, so >> mainstays like XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron are going away. They’re replacingall of these old brands with Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, and within each
of these, there will be three tiers: Base, Plus, and Premium.
This is confusing.
Which is the one made as cheaply as possible so the fans and electrolytic caps fail five years down the road? That used to be the Optiplex, what is
it now?
Which is the rackmount server
It took years to figure out the old names. Now I have to figure them allI'm sure we'll cope
out all over again?
I would be surprised if you would not be able to run linux perfectly fine on the latest and greatest XPS. I think they even sell an XPS variety with Ubuntu from the factory.
I'm using an Optiplex and it's been flawless. It seems to do better
with Ubuntu variants than anything else I threw at it - Elementary,
openSUSE, several BSDs, Kylin - and has no hardware issues at all.
AND, importantly, the keyboard is really truly excellent.
Scott Dorsey wrote:
Retrograde wrote:
Dell has announced it’s rebranding literally its entire product line, so >>> mainstays like XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron are going away. They’rereplacing
all of these old brands with Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, and within >>> each
of these, there will be three tiers: Base, Plus, and Premium.
This is confusing.
Which is the one made as cheaply as possible so the fans and electrolytic
caps fail five years down the road? That used to be the Optiplex, what is >> it now?
At a guess "Dell" & "Base"
Which is the rackmount server
None of XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron are servers
Their website for servers is very confusing now, too split up by industry, what does a server care about that?
Easy to find 1U/1xsocket/4xdrive servers for about £1k
Easy to find £30kto £50k, 1U servers too
Not so easy to find boxes with a bit more expansion (2U, 2xsocket, 8-16 drives) they do exist and reasonable about £3-4k starting price, but they're
almost hidden.
I'm sure they'd love to spend they time sending out horrifically priced quotes, but for customers who haven't gone to the cloud, but don't wnt a poverty spec server, they don't appear to be trying very hard?
It took years to figure out the old names. Now I have to figure them allI'm sure we'll cope
out all over again?
Their website for servers is very confusing now, too split up by
industry, what does a server care about that?
I'm using an Optiplex and it's been flawless. It seems to do better
with Ubuntu variants than anything else I threw at it - Elementary,
openSUSE, several BSDs, Kylin - and has no hardware issues at all.
AND, importantly, the keyboard is really truly excellent.
It is very sad. Cheap 1U servers seem to be going out of fashion. I spoke >with a business partner that deals exclusively in hardware (well, with
some software defined storage on top, and the occasional HPC setup) and he >says that all HW vendors only want to sell huge GPU boxes for AI, and they >no longer want to sell smaller and cheaper boxes. This is very sad.
Ages ago when I was working at Dell, and later Dell EMC, there was an internal linux fan group that tried to get as many laptops as possible to work smoothly with linux. They had a public repository hidden deep, deep inside some dell sub domain with tools and stuff.
I would be surprised if you would not be able to run linux perfectly fine
on the latest and greatest XPS.
I think they even sell an XPS variety with Ubuntu from the factory.
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
It is very sad. Cheap 1U servers seem to be going out of fashion. I spoke
with a business partner that deals exclusively in hardware (well, with
some software defined storage on top, and the occasional HPC setup) and he >> says that all HW vendors only want to sell huge GPU boxes for AI, and they >> no longer want to sell smaller and cheaper boxes. This is very sad.
Have you tried Supermicro? They aren't the cheapest thing around, but they can do an entry level server.
The absolute cheapest ones are from Chinese companies like Chenbro, but
we aren't allowed to buy that stuff unfortunately. You might be.
--scott
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
Ages ago when I was working at Dell, and later Dell EMC, there was an
internal linux fan group that tried to get as many laptops as possible to
work smoothly with linux. They had a public repository hidden deep, deep
inside some dell sub domain with tools and stuff.
http://dell.archive.canonical.com/
for Ubuntu. You need to work out the codename for your laptop and then you can add the repo for eg: http://dell.archive.canonical.com/dists/bionic-dell-bighorn-grizzly-mlk/
(mlk = Meteor Lake, whl = Whisky Lake, and other Intel CPU generations)
I would be surprised if you would not be able to run linux perfectly fine
on the latest and greatest XPS.
I think they even sell an XPS variety with Ubuntu from the factory.
Often the deal is that Ubuntu is often available for purchase with the
latest XPS, but it's not always the latest Ubuntu - Dell are 1+ year behind because of their QA and testing. If you buy a laptop today it might have 22.04 LTS on it, because it shipped around the time of the 24.04 LTS release and 22.04 was the current LTS at the time they did the development work. Their repo contains packages which patch Ubuntu to make it work out of the box on their hardware, plus some Dell management stuff you don't need.
However, you often don't really need their repo. Once the laptop has been out a few months, the patches get upstreamed and a fresh Ubuntu install
works fine. So what I'd do is install the latest interim release of Ubuntu (eg 24.10 currently) and keep on interim releases until you hit the next LTS (now 26.04), at which point you can decide whether to stay on LTS or keep on interims. That way you should have an install that works for the first couple of years - the first six months after release can be bumpy but should settle down after that.
Even then, most new laptops don't introduce anything new that isn't covered by existing releases. This is really only for when something new is
released and Linux/Ubuntu need to catch up. In my case, it was the 'soundwire' audio drivers on an XPS17 shipped spring 2020 - I stuck with Dell's 18.04 until that had landed in mainline (20.10 I think).
Theo
It took years to figure out the old names. Now I have to figure them all
out all over again?
I have very good connections at supermicro, and sadly what was
communicated to me a few months ago was that they are only interested in selling "AI" servers now, so cheap, high:ish density 1U servers are out
and no one gets a lot of commission on it, so it's a pain to get anyone to care about those orders. =(
Chenbro I have not heard about. I will check it out! Another option is Gigabyte, sometimse it seems as if Gigabyte can be a good replacement for supermicro.
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
I have very good connections at supermicro, and sadly what was
communicated to me a few months ago was that they are only interested in
selling "AI" servers now, so cheap, high:ish density 1U servers are out
and no one gets a lot of commission on it, so it's a pain to get anyone to >> care about those orders. =(
Chenbro I have not heard about. I will check it out! Another option is
Gigabyte, sometimse it seems as if Gigabyte can be a good replacement for
supermicro.
We have some Gigabyte. They're fine, they're kind of mid range in price and in creature comforts (BMCs etc) but they're ok. Chenbro is very much at the budget end, would tend not to go there (sharp metal, cheap PSUs, ...)
Put in some Asrock 1Us, there are some with Ryzen desktop CPUs that
have very good price/performance (~£3k for similar spec to a £6-8k Dell) but
they can be a bit hard to buy.
But the most recent batch was Supermicro AS-1015A-MT, Ryzen 7950X3D, 128GB RAM, 4TB NVMe, 1U for about £3k.
Theo
kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:
It took years to figure out the old names. Now I have to figure them all
out all over again?
"Life-long learning" is supposed to be about learning *new* stuff,
not about learning the same stuff over and over again, just with new
names, new icons, new GUI features for the old stuff.
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