The Dell PC Download at CES

How is Dell advancing its PC portfolio to meet evolving user needs and emerging technology trends in 2026?

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Host Ryan Shrout is joined by Dell Technologies' Kevin Terwilliger, VP, CSG Product Management, for a conversation on Dell’s strategy and innovations at CES 2026. The discussion covers Dell’s approach to expanding its portfolio across consumer, commercial, gaming, education, and global markets, highlighting the latest offerings in XPS, Alienware, and UltraSharp displays, with a special focus on beautifully designed, AI PC’s and AI-ready devices built for modern users.

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Key Takeaways Include:

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🔹 Expanding Portfolio and Evolving Strategy: Dell’s approach spans consumer, commercial, gaming, and educational segments worldwide, setting a foundation for its CES 2026 announcements.

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🔹 XPS 14 and XPS 16 Innovations: The new XPS models focus on innovation, craftsmanship, performance, and enhanced branding, incorporating updated processors and built-in AI capabilities.

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🔹 Broader Gaming Reach: Alienware introduces AMD-powered Area-51, new anti-glare OLED displays, and upcoming Innersphere and Firebat systems to appeal to a wider range of gamers and price points.

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🔹 Next-Gen UltraSharp Monitors: The UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor and 32 4K QD-OLED display deliver advanced workflows for creators and professionals, reflecting Dell’s continued focus on performance and design.

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Learn more at Dell.

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Listen to the audio here:

‍Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

Ryan Shrout:

Hey everybody, welcome to Six Five On The Road. We are here talking with Dell about their CES 2026 announcements. I'm joined by Kevin, VP in the client group at Dell. Thanks for joining me, really appreciate it. Great to be here. Pretty exciting announcements today. Great discussions and great demos happening. I am curious, as we look through kind of the lens of all the different announcements that have come out at CES this week, and also knowing that Dell is no stranger to innovation in the consumer space, whether that be across gaming or laptops and PCs and everything in between. What kind of strategy is that painting for Dell and how are you kind of shifting in today's landscape?

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Kevin Terwilliger:

Yeah, we'll talk about many of these announcements, but if you take it up a level from there, really what we're showing off is an evolution of our strategy, focusing more on scale, more on breadth of our portfolio, and with that, really meeting customers where they are with a great product at every price point. We've been more focused in premium, but you're going to see us bring products into more accessible price points and really bring great value across the portfolio. So a lot of the announcements that we're talking about are really anchored around that while still having a focus around absolutely leading the industry with the most innovative, cutting-edge products, and we'll talk about how that ties to our branding strategy, too.

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Ryan Shrout:

Yeah, it's been interesting. One of the flagship kind of premium products that we saw this week while we were here is the new XPS 14 and XPS 16, right? Kind of the return of this brand of product that is, I think, in my opinion, been one of the most coveted kind of laptops from a brand perspective and a consumer perspective for a while. Tell me about what is new there. what's staying the same, what's new, kind of what new technologies are integrating there.

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Kevin Terwilliger:

Yeah, so the comeback story of XPS, the focus around the XPS 14, XPS 16 packed full of industry first, right? And you think about what these products are really designed to do. They're there to deliver ultra portability, but in this way that it's balanced with just right performance. And we do that through all these different innovation that we're bringing in. So a couple of those, right? the first to bring a variable refresh rate from one hertz to 120 hertz in the display, first to bring a 900 energy density battery, so significantly reducing the size and the weight of the battery while still delivering the same watt hours, a brand new camera that's the smallest in the industry. So all of that with the XPS 14 enables us to deliver over 40 hours of local video playback, just a huge leap forward. And the other, the root of this is also our partnership with Intel, their new Core Ultra Series 3 processor, what they're even doing with integrated graphics all the way up to 12 XE, all of that also enhances that battery life for these creator workloads that we're bringing within XPS. So the other thing I love is XPS has always stood for the best front of screen experience. These products do not disappoint. We brought in new tandem OLED displays as well. This is like the perfect combination of color, resolution, everything you expect with those deep blacks, the brightness of OLED, but tandem enables, because of the two layers, much better battery life at the same time. So you're not trading off battery life to get that phenomenal display. And one of the things I'm most proud about is between the density of the battery, the new camera, some of the things we did around the thermal design, the infinity edge of the borders, we actually enabled the XPS 14 to be a smaller footprint than the MacBook Air 13. Think of that, more display for less footprint. Really excited about the XPS products that we're bringing.

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Ryan Shrout:

It was pretty impressive, and we got to see a lot of the subcomponent demos on display here as well. Things like the thinness of the display itself being measured, showing with real tangible demos of 1Hz to 120Hz refresh rate on that LCD panel, seeing the breakdown of all the componentry in the systems. It was really cool to kind of see all the pieces that add up to the XPS 14 and 16 package that you guys have been able to put together.

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Kevin Terwilliger:

And that brand is very trusted because of the consistency of that experience. So even when we bring our new form factor of just 14.6 millimeters and the thinness of that product, not trading off on the thermals, not trading off on the battery life, that's really hard to do to deliver that balance with that product.

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Ryan Shrout:

Plus, not a small feat, back of the panel now, XPS logo on the back there. It's pretty cool.

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Kevin Terwilliger:

So we talked about a comeback story, if I can just expand, right? So XPS on the front and center on the product, but also expanding into additional areas, right? So XPS is not just about the 14 and 16, but we're just getting started this year. So we also teased the new XPS 13, gonna come later in the year, be an even more accessible price point, not trading off what XPS stands for, but we're gonna drive it to be sub 13 millimeters and a brand new price point within the XPS portfolio. So bringing back the XPS 13 as well.

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Ryan Shrout:

And that's part of that strategy you mentioned at the beginning, right, of trying to be, have a little bit more scale to all the kind of the Dell consumer portfolio. It's been pretty interesting. to see. The other parts I wanted to talk about were, well actually I want to talk about the Alienware side of this too. I think gaming has been a pivotal part of Dell, even before Alienware was a part of the company, but definitely now. And there were two key things that stood out there. One of them is on the display technology, one of them is new partner in your Area 51 side, if you can tell us more about that.

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Kevin Terwilliger:

Some big announcements with Alienware as well, like you're noting there. So we're bringing OLED into our notebook portfolio. So we actually led the industry with QD OLED in our monitors for Alienware this past year. Got a ton of really good feedback from the industry. So really building off of that and bringing OLED into our notebooks as well. So deeper blacks. The thing that I think is most exciting about those OLEDs coming into Alienware notebooks is they're actually 15X more responsive. So you compare that to the LCDs that are there and the refresh rates and how important that is when you're playing a game, that split second is a difference of continuing to compete or starting over, right? So, 15x more responsive. And then we also brought a brand new anti-glare technology so that when you're gaming in different environments, you're not doing it seeing the whole room on your screen, but you can really enjoy the depth of that screen. So that's OLED coming in our notebook portfolio along with the new Core Ultra 200 Series HX processors in our Alienware notebooks. And then you alluded to, we're also enhancing our Area 51 desktop as well. So actually, just before the holiday, we brought in the dual cache, the X3D from AMD, into our portfolio and then expanding that with their latest generation here at CES as well. So that's something when we introduced that awesome industry-leading 80 liter chassis at CES a year ago, got a ton of phenomenal feedback on it, having upgraded components. Everybody loved it, but there was one thing missing. They really wanted the AMD chipset there with X3D. So excited to offer that in our Alienware portfolio, but we're not done yet. Similar to the XPS story, we're teasing some things here as well. So actually, our Alienware portfolio is going to double this year. And beyond those announcements that we have here at CES, we're teasing some products that are going to come later this year, expanding Alienware in kind of the different cross sections of the market that we're going after, still delivering full gameplay, but bringing it both to additional use cases like ultra mobile gaming. So these are gamers that are hybrid gamers, right? They're probably creators and maybe going to school or doing some productivity work, but they want to be able to game in addition to that. But they also want the system to look a little bit different, right? They don't want it to stand out like they're a gamer all the time. So bringing a new ultra slim gaming in both a 14 and a 16 inch in the Alienware portfolio, and a new entry gaming box, still offering full gameplay, discrete graphics, all the capabilities you would expect, not to the level of Area 51, but full gameplay performance. That durable, high-quality build, iconic design from Alienware, but doing it hundreds of dollars below where we are currently with Alienware, making it much more accessible. We know customers want to get into Alienware at a lower price point, and we're going to deliver that this year.

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Ryan Shrout:

And I got to see those systems in the preview mode. And they look very enticing. They look great. And I also got to see a demo of the OLED panel you were talking about, where the overhead lights, they turn on, and where you would normally get a lot of reflections or glare off of it. And it looked fantastic. So I'm looking forward to seeing those out in the real world, too. The last product category that we got to see here was the display side. Dell and displays have been synonymous for a very long time. I go back to my history. I was talking with the team about the WFP 3007 and 3008 displays, the first 2560 by 1600s, and now we got to see this massive new monitor in addition to a really super high quality one. Tell me about those announcements here. I'm eager for both.

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Kevin Terwilliger:

Two awesome panels that I think our display leader was sharing on stage earlier. Once you see them, you're going to have display envy. You can't go back after you see these displays. So two big announcements. The first one is the ultra-sharp 52-inch Thunderbolt hub monitor. This is a 6K 52-inch display. We're the first in the industry to deliver this. And the story behind it's also awesome, right? Really what we learned as we were going out and engaging with our customers, there were a couple of specific use cases around engineering, trading, where they were just trying to engage with so much data. They were doing it with multiple different displays. Some of them turned into vertical orientation and trying to kind of compile those together. It takes up a bunch of desk space. And what they were doing is they were actually challenged trying to align them and find data on different screens. That really inspired us to go bring this first 52-inch ultra-wide curve monitor for these use cases where they really value having full access to all that data and the crispness of that data at 6K. So that's one of the announcements that we have here. And then the other one really zeroing in on creators and learning from what I said before about Alienware and Quantum Dot OLED. We're actually bringing QD OLED into the creator space with a 4K display there as well. And this product is really about color accuracy and the ability to just know that what you're working on is exactly how it's gonna be consumed in the real world. So it's actually less than one on the Delta E. So pretty amazing color accuracy from one pixel to the next. And the clarity when you look at it with that 4K with QD OLED, it's really the perfect solution for creators.

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Ryan Shrout:

They're both amazing displays. I sat in front of the 52 inch and kind of just, you know, you kind of stare at it a little while, right? And I remember, it wasn't that long ago where people would put TVs on their desks and trying to get, but now you can get that same kind of size, but with massively improved resolution and image quality out of it. I can, you know, the price points and everything are, in my opinion, very, very positive, very aggressive. I'm looking forward to having one of those on my desk as well. So it's been pretty great. So, you know, to wrap up, maybe I'll ask you, as you step away from all the different announcements that you've had and the consumer category at CES, kind of what your view of the rest of 26 will look like and kind of what the vision is. I think the key is probably something around scale. It's been one of those ones that's been thrown around. Jeff talked about it when he met with us earlier as well. But I'd love to get your kind of point of view on it.

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Kevin Terwilliger:

That's our focus, right? And that's what customers should expect from Dell is a great value product at every price point, a product that they can trust with really good quality, with just the right optimal feature set, right? And delivering that, meeting them where they are at the price point that they're looking at. And so I'm super excited. These are these announcements. We're really just getting started for 2026. This is a commitment that we're making that you're going to continue to see over the course of the year with lots of exciting announcements coming in our portfolio.

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Ryan Shrout:

Kevin, thanks so much for joining me, really appreciate it. Now it's going to do it for 6.5 on the road here at Dell CES 2026 announcements and stay tuned for more coverage coming soon.

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