How Dell designs its master class laptops

Dell has shoved off its tarnished reputation for faulty PCs and its cheesy "Dude, you're getting a Dell" ads from the '90s to become a true juggernaut in the computing world. In its XPS profile alone, Dell produces some of the industry's best designed laptops.

As we've previously seen, the Round Rock, Texas firm takes a great deal of time and care into designing the impressive Dell XPS 13. But what exactly is the process of taking a device from concept to prototyping to a final product?

"We do an incredible amount of research," Frank Azor, Dell GM of XPS and Alienware, answers with a grin. We are sitting in the very board room where the company spent two long years deliberating over its latest iteration, the magnificent Dell XPS 15.

Azor continues to explain that the XPS team looks at everything from market data, customer research, customer reviews, new trends in the industry as well as media outlets' reactions.

"We put all of that input together – that's the hardest part of the job, really – to create a hypothesis to what kind of a product do we think is going to be a winner for us," he continues. "We have guiding principles at the same time. With XPS, it has to be better by every measure, so every component has to be the best that's available at that given time."

The Dell XPS 13 in one of its earliest renderings

Better by every measure

These guiding principles help Dell carry a device from the hypothesis stage to working concepts. All too often the final product will look nothing like the original idea.

Case and point, Azor explains this as he picks up the Dell XPS 15 and says, "the hypothesis notebook had thin border bezels on it, but it was maybe a different color, different dimensions, didn't taper off like this in terms of its industrial design [or] this carbon fiber weave might have been darker or lighter."

Motioning to the rest of Dell's Parmer campus in Texas, Azor says this is where it goes through all those iterations of the XPS 15. It all starts with deciding on the internal components and creating industrial design models.