Dell goes back to XPS roots

What a difference a year makes. At last year’s CES, Dell made a splash when it retired its legacy product names in favor of a cohesive “max” and “pro max” approach (yes, this naming convention is familiar for a reason). Fast forward to this year, and the well-known XPS brand is back with a bang. It’s a striking 180-degree turn after the controversial rebrand: So what happened?

Revenue Brew spoke to Dell head of product, commercial, consumer, and gaming PCs Kevin Terwilliger at CES, who discussed the changes in his part of the business.

I was seeing the strength of the XPS brand and how people have been purchasing it and are so familiar with it.

We progressed and launched what was Dell Premium, the replacement for XPS. When we launched that, we actually saw [in the] search data that customers didn’t stop searching for XPS.

The fact that they kept searching for XPS was a really clear indicator to us that it had a lot of legacy behind it.

2025 was a really interesting year for your division in particular. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

We’re building the infrastructure for AI now, before all the use cases can come. Because of that, within the silicon side of what we do, there are a lot of customers trying to understand what is the right processor.

Dell’s ability to position ourselves into different markets and our focus on getting back to scale in the PC industry actually makes us uniquely positioned to go and weather that storm best.

How are you thinking about nailing your partner network right now? 

The fact that Dell is the leading infrastructure provider for all AI uniquely positions us to partner in a stronger way because our business is much broader. So when it comes to working on long-term strategies and weathering some of these challenges from a commodity perspective, that makes it much easier for us.

How was Dell able to build this cohesive customer experience?

A big part of my role is trying to predict three years out and working with our partners to make sure that we have the right solutions for them. I can’t think of a more important thing to do for AI, because AI can’t just be a hammer looking for a nail. It has to be centered around the use cases of what’s really driving differences in workflows and driving productivity improvements because that’s what our customers are going to invest in.

What is Dell most focused on messaging as it starts 2026?

Dell is here to really demonstrate to the industry, to our customers, to our partner ecosystem, that we’re all in the scale business, and that’s both in consumer and in our commercial business. Really expanding our portfolio and making sure that not only do we have products at every price point, but they are industry-leading products at every price point.