A year on from Apple-ifying its branding, Dell has made an U-turn, and gone back to its roots. During a pre-briefing for CES 2026 — happening this week in Las Vegas — Dell Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke apologised for not listening to its customers, before revealing that Dell was bringing back the XPS brand.
It’s rare (and refreshing) to see a high-level executive admit that the company got it wrong. But in hindsight, I wonder if Dell executives were themselves divided over ditching the XPS (and Inspiron and Latitude) laptop branding in the first place. Because if they were serious about it, the execution certainly fell far short.
For one, you would expect Dell to go all out to publicise its new branding. Perhaps this was true for the US and other markets. But in Singapore, my every request for a review unit was met with the same response: The review units weren’t available. So for the first time in years, I didn’t test a single Dell product for the whole of 2025.
Now…
