Breaking analysis: An analyst’s take on Dell’s post-VMware future
The recent story of Dell Technologies Inc. is one part spellbinding and other parts fraught with uncertainty. From owning a highly coveted industry prize in VMware Inc. to losing it, and the financial turbulence in between, Dell is weathering past uncertainty to plan a future with the products and services it does control.
“CSG is the Client Solutions Group, and it accounts for nearly 60% of Dell’s revenue and about half of its operating income,” said Dave Vellante (pictured), industry analyst and host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell’s business, and it’s the most profitable from a margin standpoint. It comprises the EMC storage business, as well as the Dell server business and Dell’s networking portfolio.”
As part of his opening analysis of the Dell Technologies Summit event, Vellante analyzed the company’s current performance and product plans for the future, including its Apex cloud services solution and Project Frontier edge platform. (* Disclosure below.)
Leaning on its strengths
Dell still boasts a hardware portfolio that stands as the “broadest in the industry,” according to Vellante. So although it operates in the traditionally low-margin business of hardware, the company still managed more than $26 billion in revenue in addition to an especially stellar 9% growth rate, given its size.
“Dell’s free cash flow over the trailing-12-month period is $3.7 billion, but that’s only 3.5% of trailing-12-month revenue,” Vellante explained. “Dell’s Apex and of course its hardware maintenance business is recurring revenue, and that is only about $5 billion in revenue, and it’s growing at 8% annually.”
But, reality check: Dell Technologies is still only valued at $28 billion, or 26% of its $100 billion revenue. And although this number trails the likes of HPE, at 60%, among others, Dell’s all-around performance relative to its competition remains strong — thanks largely to its adept go-to-market strategies, according to Vellante.
“Despite the fact that Dell doesn’t have a huge software revenue component since spinning out VMware, and it doesn’t own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market,” Vellante pointed out. “And, it can provide infrastructure for pretty much any application in any use case, in pretty much any industry, and in pretty much any geography in the world.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies Summit:
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies Summit. Neither Dell, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
Photo: SiliconANGLE Show your support for our mission by joining our Cube Club and Cube Event Community of experts. Join the community that includes Amazon Web Services and Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and many more luminaries and experts.
02
Drive business transformation with Dell’s smart and sustainable solutions
As the digital economy is growing, data centres have amplified in size, and complexity, and consumes extensive amounts of energy to process the data.
Data is growing faster than ever before from all parts of the world. Organisations want to uncover insights locked in this data to develop their innovations. To capture these insights, businesses are designing systems with powerful processors and accelerators to support dense computation. These servers create tremendous amounts of heat, which needs to be dissipated to run at peak performance. The recently held Dell Technologies Forum 2022 explored solutions to keep server racks and data centers cool, to help improve sustainability.
Dell stops at nothing to help its customers design their breakthroughs for the edge. The Dell Forum highlighted their Smart cooling solutions that address innovation by integrating hardware and software together. We support a broad ecosystem of partners to bring industry-specific solutions to meet customer requirements. Solutions to modernize all the possible use cases, Dell’s Edge solutions address diverse applications.
The edge where data is acted on near its point of creation to generate immediate, essential value. Dell PowerEdge servers with global scale and unmatched expertise from Dell Technologies Services. From configuration to recycling, and everything in between, our experts provide our customers with the assurance that servers will run securely and optimally.
Edge can be categorized into three environments: Industrial and Harsh environments; commercial and office environments; and IT environments.
End-to-end customer transformation journey. We help our customers right from strategizing, implementing, and executing. We conduct a massive study around the business pain point and then design end to end roadmap. PowerEdge servers are designed to use the least possible energy and offer high rack density. It also optimizes to suit your specific operating environments. It automates the process, with 22TB of telemetry data daily and up to 80% less IT admin time on server issue resolution. It unlocks the customer’s full potential to deliver business outcomes.
PowerEdge provides seamless computing and high-performance accelerator support. The solution offers full remote management and edge hardened. Reliable supply chain and global support, we support a broad array of best practices to deliver rapidly, drive efficiencies and lower costs. We protect against any threat with a controlled and more secure supply chain from our factory to your door. We support customers around the world with technical expertise for rapid problem resolution anywhere.
Dell advocates that no electronic device should go to waste. Hence the company made ensured every part of PowerEdge servers could be repaired, replaced, or easily recycled at the end of life.
Software-driven storage innovationDell’s PowerStore is an intelligent and secure storage solution that adapts to any future. Powered by AI, PowerStore has self-optimizing processes that auto-tune efficiency, performance, and availability without manual intervention, even as you make rapid course corrections.
“Complex workloads? Too much data? Tough environment? We solve that.” Dell Edge solutions are architected for unique designs. They have stand-alone applications, hyper-converged and software-defined, cloud agnostic, and customized. The Dell solutions are engineered for intelligent outcomes; it accelerates technology, and provide real-time insights and cyber resiliency. Dell has designed its products for any environment; they are edge-optimized, ruggedized, and industry certified.
03
The Dell XPS 13 Plus Buries its Hardware Upgrades in a Contentious New Design
Dell XPS 13 Plus© Photo: Mark Knapp / Gizmodo Dell XPS 13 Plus
For years, Dell’s XPS line has presented some of the most compelling thin-and-light laptops on the market. While these machines always came at the higher end of the price spectrum for their category, they offered exceptional design and build quality. The new Dell XPS 13 Plus takes design to another level with a largely reimagined aesthetic that makes it one of the more eye-catching laptops out there, if not the most practical. While the Dell XPS 13 Plus goes for performance and style in equal measure, its radical new looks may have a hard time winning over new users.
“Plus” means high-end configurations only
The Dell XPS 13 Plus comes at a premium over the standard Dell XPS 13. That premium accounts for the redesign, where the standard XPS 13 sticks closer to previous designs, and it factors in the higher performance coming from Intel Alder Lake P-series CPUs instead of the U-series chips that are in the standard models.
The unit Dell sent over for our review falls somewhere in the middle of the pack price-wise, landing at $1,799 for an Intel Core i7-1280P (the highest-end processor offered for this model), 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM running at 5,200Mz, 512GB of PCIe 4.0 storage, and a 3,456 x 2,160 OLED touch display with a peak brightness of 400 nits.
Bottom of Dell XPS 13 Plus© Photo: Mark Knapp / Gizmodo Bottom of Dell XPS 13 Plus
Dell offers substantial customization options for this model, though. The base configuration running an Intel Core i5-1240P, 8GB of RAM, a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD, and a 1,920 x 1,200 non-touch display brings the price down to $1,149. Maxing the configuration out with the same processor we’re testing, 2TB of storage, the same display (or a non-oled model with a 500-nit peak brightness and 3840 x 2400 resolution), 32GB of RAM and Windows 11 Pro (as opposed to Windows 11 Home) tops the system out at $2,249. Dell also offers configurations with an Intel Core i7-1260p.
Dell’s standard XPS 13 models feature the more traditional design and drop the price down as low as $849, but both configurations feature lower-powered U-series processors with fewer cores and threads, and there’s no option for a 4K OLED display. This may not be a dealbreaker for those who don’t have as demanding processing needs, though.
A radical redesign without radical new features
When the Dell XPS 13 Plus is shut, there is almost nothing about it that grabs the eye. It’s a very simple slab of pale aluminum (or dark aluminum for the Graphite colored model). “Dell” is printed on the lid and “XPS” is printed on the underside. Even the sides of the laptop aren’t eye-catching, with just a single USB-C (Thunderbolt 4) port on each. That’s it for ports, too—no USB-A to play nice with older peripherals and not even a 3.5mm headphone jack to make do when Windows persists in making Bluetooth devices as unreliable as ever. A shame to see so few ports when the laptop’s 0.6-inch thickness and 2.77-pound weight aren’t breaking any records for ultrabooks and are actually up from the weight and thickness of the standard XPS 13 model.
It’s when you open the laptop up that the design language changes dramatically, though the lack of a lip on the display portion of the laptop makes opening it a bit more tedious.
Inside, Dell has highlighted style at the expense of practicality. The keyboard stretches across the width of the laptop with no gaps at either end. The rectangular keycaps also leave almost no space between one another. It’s visually stunning, until you look closer and can’t unsee the imperfect spacing between keys and uneven heights at the edges of them—those who appreciate meticulous design will struggle here.
Top of Dell XPS 13 Plus© Photo: Mark Knapp / Gizmodo Top of Dell XPS 13 Plus
Below the keyboard, there’s no visual space given to the trackpad, but it’s there, seamlessly blended into the glass surface below the keys. Above the keyboard, Dell has opted for capacitive touch buttons in place of the traditional function row. This provides a neat effect, as holding the function button on the keyboard sees this row switch from displaying various functions to displaying F1-F12. The downside to this is that the row is persistently backlit. The keyboard itself also provides two levels of white backlighting, which is helpful in the dark and counterproductive in the day, given the white keys.
The laptop includes two biometric security features, with a fingerprint reader built into the unlabeled power button at the top-right corner of the keyboard and an IR camera system for Windows Hello above the display.
The display itself has remarkably thin bezels, which are just 0.1 inches at the sides and just a little thicker (about 0.18 inches) at the top and bottom. Dell vents heat through the back of the laptop, sending it out just below the hinge of the display. Audio pipes out through two sets of slots on either side of the bottom of the chassis, which may also serve as air intakes.
In a way, the laptop calls to mind the scene in American Psycho where all the businessmen are comparing business cards, one-upping one another with ever more elaborate designs and details, though the cards all ultimately convey the same information. This design certainly does more to be eye-catching than the original Dell XPS 13 design, but it doesn’t meaningfully upgrade what the laptop offers. And honestly, striking as the design is, there’s no way it stays pleasing for long. The exterior aluminum is blemish prone, and the interior material feels like the sort to discolor easily, though the latter already started out looking like PC cases from the late 1990s.
The keyboard isn’t as bad as it look, and the trackpad isn’t as good as it looks
At first, I was concerned by the keyboard and trackpad design. They don’t seem user friendly. The keys don’t present as much margin for error as your standard design, and the trackpad’s ill-defined boundaries leave me guessing where I’ll actually have my inputs registered.
Dell XPS 13 Plus Keyboard© Photo: Mark Knapp / Gizmodo Dell XPS 13 Plus Keyboard
As baffling as the trackpad is, it seems to have solid palm rejection. Because it’s so wide and has no tangible borders, it’s all but impossible to keep my palms from resting on it somewhere while typing. But my cursor sits perfectly still all the while. It rarely mistakes my intentions between a normal click and a right click, the latter of which is only registered when I click somewhere near the bottom right side of the trackpad. Though it seems like it could be massive, the trackpad isn’t actually all that large. The biggest problem is that I often run off the side of it or try to use it too close to the edge and get no on-screen feedback,
The configuration I’m testing does include a touchscreen, which provides one way around having to use the trackpad for everything. It’s fairly responsive and smooth to the touch.
The keyboard is a novelty that proves surprisingly usable. I say surprisingly because the elimination of virtually all space between the keys makes it look like it would be a nightmare to use. Resting my fingertips on the keyboard, I do feel an odd sense of uncertainty in their placement. But, once I’m typing away, I’m just about as fast and consistent as I am typing on my daily-driver Asus Zenbook laptop. I consistently hit just over 100 words-per-minute typing with a 93-98% accuracy. I can reach over 110 WPM on my usual laptop, but the variance is enough to chalk up to the Dell XPS 13 Plus just being a new and unfamiliar keyboard I need more time to fully adjust to.
That typing experience comes once I’m in typing position with my fingers properly floating over the home row. Once there, it’s easy to keep going. But it takes a second to reset everytime I move away from the home row, such as to add some extra punctuation or pound in some numbers. This does slow down the overall use of the laptop.
Stunningly crisp, if not fast, displayDell XPS 13 Plus Display© Photo: Mark Knapp / Gizmodo Dell XPS 13 Plus Display
Dell packed in an obscenely sharp display here, boasting a resolution of 3,456 x 2,160. This makes for a pixel density just a hair over 300 ppi, as sharp as anyone should need.
As an OLED panel, the display has pitch dark blacks, though Dell’s anti-glare finish doesn’t appear as effective as some others, which leaves those black areas of the display appearing slightly illuminated by external lights reflecting off of it. This would be less of an issue in a dark room. However, with content playing on the display, the minor reflections in the black areas are less of a distraction and the display’s substantial contrast and poppy peak brightness play out better, especially when viewing HDR content, which lets highlights burst out. By default, I measured the display peaking at a satisfactory 385 nits, but HDR let that peak brightness hit up to 621 nits in highlights. That HDR experience includes support for Dolby Vision, making for some truly striking visuals.
Even with big, mostly white windows open, I never noticed any ABL (auto brightness limiting) action kicking in to try to preserve the life of the OLED panel. It’s unclear if Dell doesn’t think the laptop needs this type of protection.
It’s somewhat disappointing to only see a 60 Hz refresh rate available on this laptop. Many high-end and even mid-range notebooks are bringing a touch of extra smoothness to the experience with boosted refresh rates. Take the Microsoft Surface Pro 8 or Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, both of which can bump up to 90 Hz. Granted, the configurations that can do so aren’t 4K, but even the 1080p versions of the XPS 13 Plus top out at 60 Hz.
Pump up the audio, but not the jams
The XPS 13 Plus packs impressive speakers for its size. They can pump out a heavy dose of audio, though once they’re cranking out louder sounds, they begin to trip themselves up. Loud, busy music quickly becomes muddled and unpleasant to listen to at high volumes. There’s a marked absence of bass. On this laptop, Yellow Ostrich’s tune Whale starts off with thumping drums that only have a little life to them even with the speakers maxed out. Once the vocals start layering on top, the upper registers quickly become grating. As the song unravels into chaos toward the end, it’s simply hard to listen to. Dipping to around 50% volume helps cut down on the grating quality, but drains a lot of the energy as well.
Dell XPS 13 Plus Hinge© Photo: Mark Knapp / Gizmodo Dell XPS 13 Plus Hinge
The speakers here do the job for basic entertainment and can deliver a podcast or speech-heavy video compellingly, but separate speakers or headphones are a good idea for deeper entertainment. Dell’s MaxxAudio Pro app provides some sound tuning options, but really can’t create bass. Interestingly, it also offers Waves Nx 3D audio with wireless headphones by using the webcam to determine head position and alter the audio in response, but this seems like a horribly intrusive and ineffective way to offer positional audio.
Speeds within expectations
The Dell XPS 13 Plus is kitted out to perform while in office scenarios, and it does as much. With 16GB of RAM, it never acted like I’d blindsided it by trying to resume using a tab I had left idle for a couple of hours. Multitasking performance in browsing, spreadsheet management, and word processing was a breeze.
In benchmarks, the performance told much the same story. The Intel Core i7-1280p proves capable in single-core workloads and especially potent in multi-core processes. It readily pulls out ahead of its 11th Gen brethren, especially where multi-core workloads are concerned, and it comes out safely ahead of the Ryzen 9 5900HX in the Asus ROG Strix G15 and Razer Blade 14 in our Geekbench 5 results. It landed a 1,714 single-core and 9,947 multi-core score in Geekbench 5, where those two laptops couldn’t break 1,500 on single-core performance and hung around the mid-7,000s for multi-core.
Without some tweaks, the processor may not be carrying as much weight as it could be, though. Next to the weaker Core i7-1260p in the Acer Swift 5 (2022)—which scored 1,690 single-core and 9,585 multi-core in Geekbench 5—the Dell XPS 13 Plus just barely came out ahead. That was true for our Blender benchmark as well, where the XPS took 4:27 to complete the render on its CPU while the Swift 5 took just 4:25. Dell even trailed Acer in our handbrake test, with a 9:35 encoding time next to the Swift 5’s 8:56.
Dell XPS 13 Plus webcam array© Photo: Mark Knapp / Gizmodo Dell XPS 13 Plus webcam array
The Dell XPS 13 Plus runs warm, and can verge on hot if it’s charging. It can see temps as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit on the underside during operation, though that drops to a more comfortable 88 degrees on the keyboard. Dell has a suite of tuning tools in the My Dell app that allow for customization to boost cooling (at the expense of noise) or boost performance (at the expense of battery life). But at its defaults, the XPS 13 Plus may not be making the most of its internals.
Dell also has to contend with Apple, as the XPS line seems almost uniquely positioned to rival the MacBook family. Up against the M1 Max-powered MacBook Pro 14, it’s not a pretty fight. The two are neck-in-neck in single-core performance (Apple leading with 1,777 in Geekbench 5 and 1,530 in Cinebench R23, where the XPS 13 Plus hit 1498), but Apple pulls far ahead in multi-core benchmarks (hitting 12,663 in Geekbench 5 and 12,206 in Cinebench R23, where the XPS 13 Plus only hit 8,129) and gains tons of extra ground when its GPU can come into play, almost tripling the XPS 13 Plus’s score of 21,109. Of course, that model starts at $1100 more than the XPS 13 Plus.
Not your all-day device
Battery life isn’t a huge disappointment, but the Dell XPS 13 Plus isn’t quite keeping up with some of the longhaulers that have recently come to market. Part of the problem is the 4K OLED display, which even Dell notes brings the laptop’s battery life down to 7 hours from the 13 hours offered on the FullHD+ model. My testing saw the laptop get 7 hours in daily use, and it lasted streaming non-stop video at 200 nits for 6 hours and 38 minutes before it tapped out. With some power-saving measures, it could manage to last the full workday, but it doesn’t hold up next to devices like the Asus Zenbook S13 OLED at 11 hours and 21 minutes or M1 MacBook Pro at 18 hours.
Should I buy the Dell XPS 13 Plus?Dell XPS 13 Plus keyboard© Photo: Mark Knapp / Gizmodo Dell XPS 13 Plus keyboard
The Dell XPS 13 Plus has gotten itself in a weird spot. Though its design may speak to those who value aesthetics over or on par with functionality, it doesn’t stick the landing perfectly with its design choices.
Then there’s the matter of how much it actually delivers for the price. It isn’t a weak machine by any measure, but Dell has it out-muscled by its own $979 Inspiron 14 Plus, which packs an Intel Core i7-12700H with 16GB of DDR5 memory. It may be a bit heavier and have a more basic display, but those focused on performance may worry less about those aspects. For those whose concern is the visuals, there’s no shortage of Asus Zenbook models with exceptional OLED displays and capable internals at a fraction what Dell’s charging, not to mention the Acer Swift 5 that traded blows with the XPS 13 Plus on every front while costing less (and packing in more ports). And those who can live with macOS just as well as Windows have almost no reason to pick this laptop over its MacBook counterparts.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
0 Comments