| To be replaced with "Dell," "Dell Pro", and "Dell Pro Max"... Those tiers seem oddly familiar. They also throw away what I thought, as a proud long-time Dell Precision owner, was decent branding of their different lines for various market segments. But maybe it's a good thing - most major brands seem to offer too many laptop choices. Shopping for a laptop recently has left me, ironically, running for Mac. The experience on most windows laptop vendor sites is awful: - Dell's sales page focuses on proprietary names like "ExpressCharge TM", "Stealth Mode", "ComfortView TM", "Cryo-Tech TM", etc, that mean nothing to me [0]. It also gave me a pop-up when I went to a specific laptop's page. - HP has way too many categories on the landing page [1]. I mistook "Elitebook Ultra" for their top-of-the-line, but then discovered they're $3000 lightweight notebooks with Snapdragon chips and Qualcomm GPUs. The first and second laptops shown appear to have identical specs, but differ in price by $2000 [2]. Trying my luck elsewhere, going to "ProBook" gives me no less than 53 options to read and sort through [3]. - Lenovo is actually decent [4]! The product lines are named well and properly explained. The UI isn't as pretty as HP's, but it's a lot more functional. - Asus overall [5] isn't great (more proprietary names like "SmartHinge" and aesthetic-focused product descriptions). However, the Asus ProArt site is done fairly well [6]. Almost every windows laptop feels like it's trying to sell me on everything that isn't specs. "SmartHinge". "Stealth Mode". "Youthful" aesthetics. Weird proprietary bloatware and extended warranties. And, even on the sites that don't give me confusing marketing, I'm left to figure out whether I need Windows "Pro" or "Home", what the hell Copilot+ is (a $20/mo upsell [7] that I'm guessing the laptop will forever beg me to add, like OneDrive used to), and if I a guide to get rid of spyware, bloatware, ads, auto-installed candycrush, and other anti-consumer jabs once I actually buy the thing (like I did with Windows 10 when it first released). And then fight every month or two when it inexplicably can't find the license for Office I pay monthly, for and locks me out of all of my documents. With a Macbook, contrarily, I know I can actually research the silicon, figure out the specs, and actually get what I ordered / expected. I also know I won't have to fight the OS nearly as much, even if Apple has its own upsell attempts, anti-consumer warranty/repair problems, etc. I never would've expected to feel that way. Especially not 10-15 years ago. But maybe Dell's rebrand helps them move back in that direction a little. [0]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops [1]: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/cat/laptops [2]: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/mdp/hp-elitebook-ultra-3074457... [3]: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/vwa/laptops/brand=ProBook [4]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ [6]: https://www.asus.com/us/proart/laptops-home/ [7]: https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/what-is-microsoft-copilot |
If all you want is a thinkpad maybe. But then you click the thinkpad link and have to figure out whether you want a T, P, L, E, C or X thinkpad (they don't make Ws anymore, right?) Oh and some also have "s" suffix. And they differ from non-s quite a bit