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The 17-inch MacBook Pro was discontinued in June 2012, and outside of gaming laptops, much of the industry followed Apple’s lead. There wasn’t room in the world for a 6.6-pound laptop that couldn’t fit in a standard backpack or briefcase.
But Dell is attempting a revival, and to do so, the company is relying on lessons learned from its svelte Dell XPS 13. Want proof of their success? The new XPS 17 is smaller than the majority of 15-inch laptops currently sold.
I visited Dell’s labs and spoke with its design team to see how the XPS hopes to make 17-inch laptops relevant again.
The XPS team has led laptop design for years. Its push toward thinner bezels started in 2015, and Dell’s competitors have been playing catch-up ever since.
The XPS 17 is about more than just bezels. The dream behind the creation of the XPS 17 has always been one of power. Yes, Dell has the XPS 15, a popular choice for workstation-like performance in a sleek build. But the XPS team wanted more.
Donnie Oliphant has guided the XPS team over the past decade. He spoke candidly about the wild experiments, missteps, and successes of XPS over the years, and seems confident the XPS 17 is a bold new direction for the industry.
According to Oliphant, the true origin for an all-powerful XPS 17 came from another innovator at the company, Frank Azor. The longtime head of both XPS and Alienware departed Dell last year for an executive role at AMD; the XPS 17 is his last conceptual contribution to Dell.
“This is a little tongue-in-cheek, but 17 exists because Frank Azor wanted a much larger, more powerful, and capable XPS notebook. That’s the short answer,” said Oliphant with a laugh. “We also looked at that space, and knowing what we could do putting a 17 in a 15-inch form factor — 17-inch was this missing guardrail that we didn’t have.”
A few competitors do offer 17-inch laptops today. Examples include the HP Envy 17, the LG Gram 17, and niche workstation laptops like the HP ZBook 17 G5. But when Oliphant speaks about “missing guardrails,” he’s talking about more than just an empty slot in the product portfolio.
“We look for opportunities to lead in existing categories, but we also look for ways to create new categories,” Oliphant told me. “Seventeen-inch is an uber, uber small market. Well, 17-inch today are big, 8-pound gargantuan products. What if we did a sexy, sleek, slim 17-inch that is about the same size as most 15-inches? That’s kind of a new product category from my perspective. We put a twist on 17-inch that nobody else has.”
What’s the big twist? It goes back to Azor’s initial concept for the XPS 17. He wanted to build the most powerful XPS laptop ever — and a meaningful step up from the already powerful XPS 15 — without losing the sleek profile Dell’s XPS laptops are now known for.
Unprecedented power
There’s a problem inherent in trying to sell the XPS 17 on more power. The XPS 15 already exists, and it’s incredible. Its most recent update offers the best Intel mobile processors available to consumers. A Dell XPS 15 with the 8-core, 16-thread Intel Core i9 can tear through 4K video edits. Since Intel doesn’t have anything new up its sleeve, Dell was left to its own devices to crank up the performance.
The XPS engineering team turned to the next logical bottleneck: graphics. The XPS 17 can be configured with the Nvidia RTX 2060 with 6GB of VRAM. It’s a first for XPS, and it’s one of the few laptops under 5 pounds to offer it.
“We’re giving the RTX 2060 all 60 watts that it needs. We’ll play games with power share between CPU and GPU,” said Oliphant. “We’re not a gaming device, so we typically don’t run both components 100% concurrently. On this particular product, though, we felt like we had the ability to give the graphics all that we could and still not shortchange the CPU too much.”

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