In April this year, Dell, currently India’s fourth-largest laptop maker, launched the latest edition of its XPS range of premium Windows laptops in India. While such launches are seemingly common, there’s one very key point that was different about it—about 18 months ago, Dell, like many of its peers, had chosen to do away with the XPS range, a favourite of legendary repute among users for over 30 years.
Standing as a stylized abbreviation of ‘Extreme Performance System’, the very first XPS line was launched in 1993 as desktops, followed by the first XPS laptops in 2004. The 1990s was massive for laptops—the idea of a mobile personal computing system was an imperative for corporate and business leaders. In India, desktop personal computers were only just breaking out as household products through early adopters.
This led to IBM launching its ThinkPad line of laptops in 1992, a line that is owned today by Lenovo. In 1999 HP, another US tech giant, launched a third familiar name that has been a fan favourite for decades—the HP Pavilion.
These laptops went on to become among the world’s most popular and most sold over the decades. Though exact sales figures were never disclosed by these brands, laptops powered by Microsoft’s Windows operating system became synonymous with these names. Over time, others would join the fray, like Dell’s Inspiron for mass-segment laptops, HP’s Spectre for laptops that focused squarely on design and Lenovo’s budget-centric IdeaPad.
Over the past three decades, other companies too have been a part of this list. In 2008, Asus launched its ‘Republic of Gamers’ lineup of laptops with the now-discontinued ROG G70. In 2012, Microsoft introduced its ‘Surface’ line of laptop-tablet hybrids. Each of them, in their own way, have managed to garner loyal users over the years.
Today, though, the laptop world has changed quite a bit. As with every industry, laptops too have faced the perils of industrial standardization, giving up unique identities for standardized nomenclatures. The latter helps from a marketing standpoint, cleaning up the need for separate marketing initiatives and focusing on one uncluttered lineup. What it cannot do, however, is replicate the pull of legacy that tags such as XPS, ThinkPad and Pavilion meant for laptop buyers worldwide at one point.
The return of the XPS
In early 2025, Dell had decided to do away with its long-standing XPS lineup—choosing, instead, innocuous tags such as Dell Premium and Dell Pro. The decision is akin to HP, India’s largest laptop seller, reshuffling legacy brands Pavilion and Spectre into a unified Omnibook portfolio.
Long-term users of these devices, however, have pushed back against this standardization. Bowing to this, Dell decided to bring back the XPS in April this year. Much to the joy of people that have bought and used this series for decades (made famous, in at least some part, by Sheldon Cooper in hit US sitcom Big Bang Theory), the new Dell XPS retained what it was originally known for—a precise, premium design language.
The 2026 Dell XPS 14, on this note, weighs less than 1.4kg, and is less than 1.5cm in thickness. It pairs this with new generation processors, 32GB of fast memory, 1TB of fast storage, and a super-sharp touchscreen OLED display with precisely calibrated colours that the XPS range has always been known for.
For the average user, the Dell XPS 14 revealed itself to be as capable as its older editions were. The user experience was one of its biggest draws when I last used a Dell XPS extensively exactly a decade ago. To this end, the XPS 14 still retains its ‘premium’ bits: Great audio quality, a fantastic display, and palm rests that are smooth and soft-touch to use for long hours of typing.
Quixotically, the new Dell XPS also retained some of its quirks too, including a wobbly trackpad that registered accidental clicks as the laptop aged, and sharp corner edges that can be quite painful if one were not careful.
Overall, though, the 2026 Dell XPS succeeded in achieving what it set out to: retain great multi-tasking and high-intensity, performance-driven tasks, which fit the bill in this AI era as well. While occasional gaming—through a locally-installed Epic Games store or the Xbox Cloud Gaming store through a web browser—led to expected amounts of heating and internal fan noise, the Dell XPS proved itself to be still true to its title in over two weeks of use.
Only a few remain
The Dell XPS is unfortunately an exception from the norm these days. The only other legacy Windows laptop series that still retains a current lineup is Lenovo’s ThinkPad T series; which dates back to 2000 with its first version, the Lenovo ThinkPad T20.
Here too, the Thinkpad T, available as T14 and other models, has retained the core attributes that had made it famous in the first place. These include the two large buttons that mimic a mouse’s left and right clicks, the slanted Thinkpad logo at the bottom right of the laptop’s base, and a red pointer at the centre of its keyboard that is meant to precisely control work presentations.
Lenovo, like Dell, has not scrimped when it comes to including all the the latest internals in its T series. These days, it’s available in a wide range of variants that can suit buyers across different price points and professional requirements.
The other recognizable name that has remained in the world of laptops is, of course, Apple’s MacBook lineup, carrying the torch of longevity in an unbroken line since 2006. For the time being, there is no sign of Apple moving on from its MacBook moniker, even when MacBook design has become much more standardized than before. Apple’s secret sauce is that it has only ever had one line of laptops, subdivided across Pro, Air, and of late, Neo.
What’s in a name?
Would retaining an iconic name still have the same effect without retaining a lineup’s key design elements, such as the ThinkPad’s laser pointer and the XPS’s lightweight pointed body? For many, the answer to this would be a resounding “no”.
Much of the rest of the world of laptops, however, have no such obvious design-differentiation. They are uniformly lightweight, compact and aggressively standardized to minimize the cost of development. Moreover, there is the possibility that the exponential rise in memory chip prices could push more such iconic laptops into oblivion, even as brands seek to find ways to cut costs and prevent passing on the high cost of manufacturing to users.
The other factor is the change in the user demographic itself. With each of these iconic laptops being launched over the past three decades, most users that related with these specific lineups are likely to be nearing the age of retirement. For brands, therefore, it only makes sense to streamline marketing and manufacturing costs if a new buyers do not care for legacy laptop lines with the same passion as their predecessors.
People entering the workforce in this decade, are either buying their first laptop around now, and more generally over the next decade. For them, the allure of an ‘XPS’ and a ‘Pavilion’ may just not be the same. That said, if the latest XPS and ThinkPad laptops are anything to go by, a unique identity can still add heft to a brand’s offerings in a crowded landscape of anonymous designs.