The memory crisis made Dell innovate on XPS 13’s entry-level price point… here is the story
The shortage of memory chips, dubbed “RAMageddon,” is also forcing companies like Dell back to the drawing board to design notebooks that, while not necessarily high-end, are practical for everyday use and cost only slightly more than the typical budget laptop on the market.“I think this is one of the first time when the innovation was focused on how to deliver a great premium device at less than half the entry price we typically have,” Chris Cowger, Senior Vice President, Global Consumer and eCommerce at Dell Technologies, told indianexpress.com in an interview on the sidelines of the company’s launch of its new consumer notebook portfolio in Delhi on Tuesday. Its new XPS 13 looks and feels like a flagship laptop and is just as nice to use as the premium models that came before it, yet it costs Rs 79,990, a price point that makes the XPS brand more accessible to a broader range of consumers.“We did focus on cost out while also still trying to maintain premium and not ultimately delivering a device that you would consider cheap was probably the biggest focus with the XPS 13,” he added. Despite the shortage of RAM caused by growing demand from data centers, fuelled by the AI boom, the industry is facing a memory crunch that has sent laptop and smartphone prices soaring, especially in a tough economy. Yet, as Cowger pointed out, products like the XPS 13 feel like a mainstream notebook while remaining interesting to be considered experimental in nature in the midst of an ongoing memory crisis.
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