Reinventing the Commercial PC: Inside Dell’s New Pro Portfolio

Enterprise PCs are entering a new era as organizations balance rising performance demands from AI workloads, tighter IT budgets, and growing expectations for premium user experiences at work.

Host Olivier Blanchard sits down with Rob Bruckner, President of Dell’s Commercial Client Solutions Group, Zach Noskey, Commercial Notebooks and Education Lead, and Paul Doczy, Director of Industrial Design Engineering at Dell Technologies, for this installment of our series “The Next Generation of Dell PCs.” 

The group explores how Dell is reinventing its commercial PC portfolio for the next generation of enterprise computing.

Key insights include:

🔹 Why enterprise PCs are reaching a new inflection point
🔹 How Dell accelerated its roadmap and rebuilt the Dell Pro portfolio
🔹 How the Dell Pro lineup aligns systems with different enterprise workloads
🔹 The engineering innovations behind Dell’s largest design refresh in a decade
🔹 How modular architecture enables flexibility and faster innovation
🔹 What these improvements mean for productivity, durability, and IT management

From accelerated product roadmaps to modular architecture and design innovation, Dell’s new Dell Pro portfolio aims to deliver greater flexibility, stronger performance, and better long-term outcomes for both IT teams and end users. As enterprise computing evolves, devices are becoming more adaptable, more powerful, and more aligned with the needs of modern hybrid work.

Explore the Dell Pro portfolio and accessories to see how Dell is redefining enterprise PCs for the AI era and modern hybrid work environments. 
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Rob Bruckner:
The pivotal part about this is it's not just remaking a more beautiful PC per se, it's actually remaking how people are going to do work, how that PC's role in there is evolving and changing because of that.
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Olivier Blanchard: 
Hello, welcome to Six Five on the Road. I'm Olivier Blanchard, and we're here at the CSI Lab in Austin, Texas. Enterprise PCs are in an interesting inflection point right now. IT teams are managing increasingly complex device fleets. Budgets are tight, as we all know, and users expect consumer-grade experiences from their work devices. So today we're exploring how Dell is rethinking its commercial portfolio to meet those expectations, and I'm joined by Rob Bruckner. Zach Nosky and Paul Dosey. So welcome to Six Five and we'll just start with the first question. Rob, why is this such a pivotal moment for enterprise PCs? And how are changing expectations shaping the next generation of commercial devices?
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Rob Bruckner: 
Yes, pivotal is a term that means a lot of things to a lot of people. For sure, with the amount of technology that's coming into PCs, especially in the era of AI, it's really important that we're able to go fast and bring that technology to market quickly for our customers. We're also deeply interested in how customers are remaking their workflows for how they're utilizing these PCs in their environment. And things are changing so quickly in AI, you've got to go spend that time and get with them and go see what kind of problems they're facing as they're reworking that. Take those ideas and concepts of what they're doing, marry that up with the technologies available. patent that into a set of products that have a good scalable portfolio that allow the customers to pick different capabilities, different performance and price points in that commercial lineup. That allows us to take those new usages and go as fast as possible into those lineups. And I think you'll see a lot of that today.
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Olivier Blanchard: 
So why does Dell believe that the market is entering a new innovation cycle for PCs specifically? Is it just AI? Is it something else?
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Rob Bruckner: 
Well, for PCs in the commercial space, it's all about productivity. And so if you think about how we've all been utilizing our PCs over the many last few decades, there's been a couple of big pivot points where things have emerged that have changed the way people do their work. The internet's an easy and obvious one. Before you had the internet, then you have the intranet. I think you also see the rise of all the office environment for office suites that comes out of something like Microsoft as well. as you move into the AI era, one of the things you notice, certainly something I've experienced myself, is if you just try to apply AI to how you work today, you get a little marginal bit of efficiency. So when you look at it as an ITDM, trying to go figure out what kind of PCs you want to really boost productivity, especially as AI adds some cost to the actual products themselves, where's the value return there? And so, if you just apply it to the products as they are today, it's not enough. It just doesn't hit it hard enough. So what everybody's understanding now, including us at Dell as we're reworking the way we do our work, is you've got to rethink the entire flow and get to a more data-centric flow. With a data-centric flow, you can then apply context and AI to add value. So the pivotal part about this is it's not just remaking, let's just say, a more beautiful PC per se. It's actually remaking how people are going to do work, how that PC's role in there is evolving and changing because of that.
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Olivier Blanchard: 
So there seems to be a little bit of an acceleration in the roadmap, right? And a sense of urgency. So tying back to what you just said, what does it signal about the direction of the Dell Pro portfolio specifically?
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Rob Bruckner: 
It signals that we're a lot more aggressive and agile in bringing forward the best products we can imagine as fast as we can. We sit with the team often and there's lots of concepts that we're always thinking about in our product portfolios. I'm kind of the guy who says, hey, if you can imagine that right now, we should go do it. You know, and there's a lot of things that are really important in the portfolio that bring a balance of some of the really impressive technologies that are coming forward with our SOC and software partners, and then packing those into different sizes and price points. And in fact, for our coming portfolio, the amount of performance that's coming in from the SOCs, we're actually making the product thinner and lighter, even though the performance is going up. So the amount of innovation required to bring that up and down the entire portfolio is really an impressive task by the team. I'm really proud of what they're doing. So if we can bring that forward at that pace, new technology, with the emergency needs of those customers, and then also keep the physical mobility of the device down, this is a winning recipe. We're going to keep doing that every year. 
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Olivier Blanchard: 
So what had to change in the way these systems are engineered to pull this off?
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Paul Doczy: 
Great question. I think this is probably our biggest change in at least 10 years since I've been here. So really, I think the biggest challenge was our users and our customers are saying, hey, we need to keep productive. We need to have all-day battery. We need brighter panels. We need all the features, but we want it in a thinner, lighter device. So when we wrapped all those things together, I think the team did an amazing job putting in higher density batteries, brighter panels, so we're able to achieve all these features in the box and a thinner, lighter package. We added over that is a complete aluminum chassis, so now the customers are going to get a much more premium look and feel. As you pick up the device and turn it around and play with it, you're going to see a very clean, modern, sleek design. Without sacrificing any of the features or usabilities our customers are looking for, whether that be a great keyboard experience or touchpad, logically placed I.O. ports so we know if I need to 5G connectivity, or I need an RJ45 for networking, all those features are still there. It is overall 18% thinner and 9% lighter. So really a tremendous job overall from the team. Those numbers don't sound like a lot, but they're actually like huge on a It really is. I think when you're talking about mobility over gen over gen and then saying, hey, we're not getting rid of anything. We're, in fact, increasing power, increasing battery, increasing screen brightness without sacrificing any features to eke out 18% is quite a bit.
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Olivier Blanchard: 
Especially with the kind of battery life gains that you're getting. So Zach, when organizations evaluate new generations of PCs, where will they see the biggest benefits day to day? I know for me, the battery life is definitely up there, top of the list. But what else should they be looking for?
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Zach Noskey: 
Yeah, again, you mentioned battery life. I think that's spot on. Rob touched on some of the silicon that we have coming into the portfolio. You know, our partners are doing a really great job with efficiency and partnering us with those workflows to, again, make these devices last longer for what a typical employee is doing. Again, I think the other thing I'd look at in this year's Dell Pro portfolio is we're providing a lot of scale. So things like different memory options, CPU options, so that IT departments can really tailor that experience and the performance they need for the end user. When you kind of combine that in this entire package of what the product's able to offer, we think more people are going to be able to find that right device for specific users in their portfolio. Again, a balance of all those things, performance, runtime, and then the design, as Paul was touching on.
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Olivier Blanchard: 
So I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I will. So in terms of that scalability, because I think it's an under-appreciated element of this and of this new portfolio, especially in the commercial segments, can you talk a little bit more about that scalability across the portfolio?
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Zach Noskey: 
Yeah, when we talk about scale, it's really about enabling a lot of the features, as kind of Paul was talking about earlier, in specific sections of our portfolio. So, you know, we have some customers who need entry-level productivity. They might not want all of the kind of performance that's coming from new silicon in the portfolio. And so we'll offer things that are maybe a generation that we're shipping today in these new products so that they can kind of balance the, you know, you heard Rob talk about the cost and kind of TCO story with what they're, you know, pursuing with their employees. On the flip side of that, you know, we, for the first time in this generation, something we did in the past, you could scale all the way up in a Dell Pro 5, for example, to, you know, what we would say is kind of an H-class performance offer in that device. pair it with new LPCAM2 memory to really get a device that can power through a lot of those kind of typical commercial workloads. So, you know, Scale to Us is really about offering, you know, whether it's the CPU, memory, storage, panels even, offering our customers a lot of optionality in specific parts of the portfolio so that they can kind of tailor that product to their needs. Very cool.


Olivier Blanchard:
It's one of my favorite things about the redesign portfolio is that scalability specifically. That's why I wanted to focus on that. Alright, so this is the new Dell Pro lineup that we've been talking about. We finally get to see it and get our hands on it. So I see four different models there. So the 3, the 5, the 7, and the Premium, right? Can you talk us through all four of them a little bit and tell us sort of what differentiates them broadly, like who they're for, what they're about, what the general price point might be, and then we'll get into details.
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Zach Noskey: 
The price point's a tough one in today's environment, but this is the new lineup for 2026, and we're really excited about the refresh that's underway, and we'll talk more about that as we go through each of these. Think of the Dell Pro 3 as really that entry enterprise grade device. So historically, we didn't necessarily have all the enterprise features in the portfolio that we had in kind of other places. But this is fully enterprise grade. It's sleeker than ever. So if you have core knowledge workers that you're looking for that sort of minimum spec of kind of features and functionality in an enterprise environment, This does a really great job of delivering that in a great chassis, great form factor. Moving up the stack, this is, I like to refer to it as the workhorse, but it doesn't look like a workhorse anymore, right? Dell Pro 5, we've gotten this thinner than ever. You can see the aluminum coming here in a big way. This is where I think a lot of enterprise environments will start. You start with the Dell Pro 5. We call it kind of the most scalable part of the portfolio. You can configure it to your heart's desire. A lot of CPU options, memory, mobile broadband if you want it, so connectivity as well. A really great place for the majority of the users in your organization. What we're really excited about this year is you kind of move up Dell Pro 7. I like to think of this as really those knowledge workers in a corporate environment that are a little bit more mobile than someone that might be getting a Dell Pro 5. So this is our thinnest. Dell Pro device ever. And what we're really focused on here is mobility, so great battery life. If you're going in between meetings, if you're doing some travel for your role, this becomes a great product for those users. And then finally, you know, ending with the Dell Pro Premium. We really like to call the folks that are usually configuring this product kind of our exec or road warrior class of users. This is people who are on the road a lot and they really care about runtime, they care about weight of the device in their bag, so this is the lightest Dell Pro product in the portfolio. You can kind of throw it in your bag, take it wherever you're going. Connectivity is not going to be an issue. Again, kind of full-class mobile broadband, et cetera, in here to kind of, you know, go wherever you are and be able to connect in a lot of different environments on the road.
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Olivier Blanchard:
All right, so if you don't mind, I have a couple of questions about this one. So on the three, what kind of configurations can people expect in terms of silicon, in terms of screens, sizes, et cetera?
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Zach Noskey: 
Yeah, so again, in the Dell Pro 3, we're really going to be focused on that entry-level performance. You heard Rob talking about it earlier, so we'll have options in here for things like Wildcat Lake, which is a really great part from a performance and kind of runtime perspective. you'll be able to configure a lot of FHD entry screen performance as well. And then from a memory perspective, we'll really be focused on a traditional SO-DIMM configuration here with those products. So easily replaceable, upgradable if you need to. Really, again, thinking about that base feature set for an enterprise customer in Dell Pro 3.
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Olivier Blanchard: 
Okay, so this is the workhorse.


Zach Noskey:
I'm assuming a lot more options on this one. A lot more options. So, you know, we talked about kind of the Wildcat Lake parts here. We'll also have configurations with AMD over here in the DelPro 3. DelPro 5, really think of it as kind of that full stack of Intel and AMD options. So we'll have kind of entry parts, we'll kind of scale all the way up to those Panther-like parts that we were talking about from a performance perspective. And not just some of those entry SKUs, but you can also configure this with the Panther-like H-class parts as well. Not only are we focused on the CPU, but from a memory perspective, in Dell Pro 5 we'll have SO-DIMM configurations like we talked about, but we'll also have the new LPCAM2 technology that gives you really fast, low-power memory. in a upgradable, configurable manner. So really excited about bringing that here as well. Again, this is, if you look at kind of our Dell Pro Plus product, which is sort of the spiritual predecessor to this guy here, about 10% thinner, gen over gen. So again, when I mentioned kind of, it's the workforce, it can be configured with all those different options. It really doesn't look like it, and it's gonna be great in the hands of a lot of folks in the portfolio here. I'm really excited about the 7 here. Here again, we'll focus more on kind of the latest generation offers from AMD and Intel. So really kind of focused on those employees that still need a lot of productivity, but again, we'll be taking this device on the go. So you heard us talk a lot about mobility. in Pro 7 previously, and this is where we kind of have a lot of those claims for up to 18% thinner gen on gen when you look at some of the predecessor products. Big focus for us here was getting that Z height as thin as possible. So you think about some of the panel technology that we used here, some of the higher energy density batteries. Again, all of that to kind of shrink the components inside so that we could still give folks the best performance. Again, still focused on kind of thermal acoustics. You're not going to worry about this getting hot in your lap or the fan spinning up and getting super loud, but in a much smaller package. So again, all of those little levers that we pulled to get it as small as possible, while maintaining some of the performance and functionality there.


Olivier Blanchard: 
It is very thin. And this one's special, right? Like, I noticed that there's a slight difference from the other ones. Can you tell us about that?

Zach Noskey: 
Yeah, this one happens, this kind of pre-prod that we have here happens to be one of our mobile broadband configurations. So, being able to configure this with 5G mobile broadband, and really for the best performance when you have those mobile broadband configurations, we like to kind of mount our antennas up here on top of what we'd call this A-cover here behind the panel. giving ourselves a window here so that you can get that great connectivity, great performance, without interfering with the kind of full aluminum chassis on the device here. Right. Also some security advantages to using the 5G network, right? Yes, definitely. Which we like. Really when we think about security, manageability, those aren't just tenants of the Dell Pro notebook portfolio, but really the broader Dell Pro portfolio, including, you know, desktops, workstations, etc. You know, specific to some of the notebook products in the portfolio, you'll see us continue to invest in our Control Vault silicon. Again, a dedicated piece of silicon for all of your credential authentication storage, whether you're using a smart card reader, fingerprint reader, etc. Really kind of raising the bar there. You'll also see us this year continue to make investments in some of the Zero Trust solutions that we've rolled out in years past. as well as new solutions for ransomware and other threat vectors that we see continuing to show themselves in commercial environments. So it's not a one-off feature or something that happens in the side. It's really the foundation for all these products. It continues to be the number one thing on the top of mind for a lot of IT departments. And so we're really focused there with all these products as well.


Olivier Blanchard: 
And so, okay, the Premium. The Premium looks a little bit different from the other ones, too. It has, I'm going to ask about the keyboard, because it's nice and flush and there's probably a branded name for that. So tell me about the Superlite Premium.
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Zach Noskey: 
Yeah, again, as we think about DelPro Premium, Like we said, this is really that kind of exact sales road warrior product. And one of the things that a lot of our users have told us to prioritize in this class of product is a really kind of clean, minimal interior. So you see us using our Zero Lens keyboard here, something that you've probably seen on some of the XPS devices as well, to really get kind of that seamless look on the palm rest. And at the same time, investing in things like the cover glass for the panel. So this is where we have our options for a tandem OLED panel. It's something that we have today in Dell Pro Premium. We're carrying that forward. A ton of customers love that screen for this type of device. And so again, really focusing on this kind of clean interior, but pairing it with a magnesium chassis to really deliver the lightest weight product in the portfolio. One of the things that we did this year, I mentioned that Tandem OLED screen, it's a really thin panel. And so we were able to leverage a lot of what we had started last year, but really thin out this product and reduce the Z height by thinning out this hinge up, cleaning up kind of a lot of what we had in the structure behind there, and really getting a system that feels even better in the hand than prior generations of DelPro Premium there.
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Olivier Blanchard: 
It looks good too, like it's got sophisticated lines, which I also appreciate. It's nice to have a machine that doesn't just work the way you want it to, but also looks sharp and expensive. And this one comes in at about, what, about a kilo? Kilogram? Yeah, yeah, just over a kilogram, yeah. Thanks for the deep dive into the whole line. So on the Dell Pro5 Micro desktop, I'm particularly interested in this because I have a lot of peripherals, I have a lot of Dell displays in my office, and I've seen how small this thing is going to be. So can you help me figure out exactly what kind of setup and what kind of advantages I would have using the desktop as opposed to just plug in my peripherals and my displays into my typical desktop?


Zach Noskey: 
One of the real values that we have at Dell is that we have a whole lineup of displays, peripherals, et cetera, that are designed to work with all these devices that we've talked about today. I think specifically in the Dell Pro 5 Micro instance, being able to power that off of one of our hub monitors that we have in the portfolio allows you to save a lot of clutter from an additional adapter that you might need on a desk. You can kind of use one of our stands to neatly tuck that behind the display as well, so that it's out of sight, out of mind. And you're able to kind of connect and wire all your peripherals behind the display for kind of a clean desk setup as well. I mentioned Copilot Plus and Copilot Plus coming to the desktop side of the house. We actually had to do a lot of work there with our peripherals team to get Copilot Plus compliant peripherals. As you might have heard, for certain features, you do need Windows Hello, which it's hard to do fingerprint reader and facial recognition in a desktop form factor. So we had to move a lot of those requirements in a very secure, safe way to the peripherals. So those will be coming into the portfolio as well this year.

Olivier Blanchard: 
That's extremely good news. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the Hello features? Is it a camera-based intelligence on the device?


Zach Noskey:
It's actually a fingerprint reader on the mouse. So you'll be able to do Windows Hello fingerprint sign-in from the mouse itself without needing to get a hold of the device. So if you do want to sneak it behind the panel, get that kind of clean workspace. You're not trying to, you know, get access to it or, you know, hit a fingerprint reader somewhere else. It's right there on your mouse in your workspace setup. Paul, follow up for you.

Olivier Blanchard: 
What's the new design feature that you're most proud of?


Paul Doczy: 
So, and this, what I say, is a collaboration with the team, the engineering team. This is actually last year we introduced this. As we know, our IT budget, you pointed out this earlier, are getting tighter. People need to make these devices last longer. One of the number one access ports that we have on our systems today is the Type-C. It does everything. It does docking, it does power, connects every type of port, whether it be your keyboard or mouse or display. So as the frequently accessed device, how do we make that more sustainable? So Dell basically invented the idea of what we call a modular Type-C port. So this device allows IT departments or service to come in very quickly and replace those ports if they become damaged without having to replace the entire motherboard. So it really reduces downtime and great innovation there.


Olivier Blanchard: 
Yeah, I like that a lot, actually. I haven't had to use it yet.
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Paul Doczy: 
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No, hopefully you never will. Hopefully I never will.

Olivier Blanchard:
But if I do, yeah, it's good to have it. Rob, any last thoughts before we close this out? Anything that you want to share that you're also particularly proud of or excited about with this new lineup?
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Rob Bruckner: 
Yes, for me personally, this is a really incredible moment. If you didn't know, I was previously at Intel. And some of the products that we're going to ship this year with some of the silicon I worked on three years ago. So this is a, I can't imagine a better closure to a journey on some of the things that I was involved in architecting. Panther Lake as an example for bringing next level performance, graphics, multi-threading, so it allows us to scale that portfolio. And Wildcat Lake, which is another product that we integrated in that has incredible all day battery life, even at the lower cost points. So these type of products I think I can go see in the actual portfolio and then I get to also have an opportunity to partner with AMD and other silicon partners to bring a more robust and full portfolio into this. So just being now in that the place we can bring the products I can see these kind of living and just have this wonderful set of products that we can't wait to get in the hands of ATMs.
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Olivier Blanchard:
Thank you for spending time with us today and answering my questions. For everybody else, thanks for tuning in to Six Five on the Road here in Austin. Don't forget to hit subscribe, follow us on the social, and check out all of our coverage at sixfivemedia.com. I'm Olivier Blanchard, signing off. Have a good one.

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