Dell’s new Pro Max lineup offers top-tier laptops for sky-high prices

Dell

Dell launched its new Pro Max laptops Thursday, unveiling three tiers of its top-performing laptops with a combination of high-end hardware: AMD Ryzen AI and Intel Core Ultra processors, and the new Nvidia RTX Pro Blackwell GPUs. 

Nvidia announced the Blackwell-generation GPUs on its RTX Pro platform earlier this year — first for desktop workstations and servers, then for laptops. The Nvidia RTX PRO Blackwell GPUs use fifth-generation Tensor cores for up to an impressive 4,000 TOPS performance — designed for the pro-user engaged in the most demanding workloads. 

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Dell’s Pro Max laptops are among the first consumer laptops with this new hardware, focused on the enterprise power-user demographic, and designed to bring raw power to accelerated AI and graphics capabilities onto sleek devices. 

The three tiers of laptops in Dell’s Pro Max lineup include the base Dell Pro Max, the Dell Pro Max Plus (in 16- and 18-inch versions), and the high-end Dell Pro Max Premium. Dell outfitted the base models with either the AMD Ryzen AI 5, 7, or 9 series processors or Intel Core 5 or 7, and the second and third tier models with Intel Core Ultra 7 or 9 chips. 

The highest-tier laptop, the Dell Pro Max Premium (say that five times fast) comes in a 14- and 16-inch model, and is absolutely stacked with hardware: up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H vPro Enterprise CPU, 64GB of memory, and Nvidia’s RTX Pro 2000 GPU. 

Additionally, both the 14- and 16-inch models can be outfitted with OLED displays, with the 16-inch offering some particularly impressive UHD+, 500nit, 120Hz tandem OLED touch screen with 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. 

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Physically, the base Pro Max and Pro Max Plus look rather nondescript, with sleek, black clamshells, full-sized keyboards, and the usual selection of I/O. The high-end Pro Max Premium, however, retains more physical DNA from the XPS series, with the signature zero-lattice keyboard and upward-firing speakers on either side of the keyboard. 

All that hardware isn’t exactly feather-light, however, as the Pro Max Premium weighs in at 4.82 pounds and measures almost an inch thick. Similarly, the Dell Pro Max 18 Plus weighs a hefty 7.17 pounds, and features a minimalist, center-aligned trackpad and recessed keyboard that looks a lot like a MacBook M3 Pro Max. 

These new laptops position Dell favorably in the never-ending AI race, securing market share of a use case the company is already well-established in: enterprise-ready, reliable machines with powerful hardware. 

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As expected, all of these laptops come with substantial price tags. The lowest-tier model, the 14-inch Dell Pro Max with the AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 340 starts at $2,472, and it goes up from there. 

There are a great deal of configuration options available for all of these laptops, including support for Linux Ubuntu out of the box. Kitting out the Dell Pro Max, however, brings the price sky-high, upwards of $6,000 for 64GB, an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, 4TB of storage, and the UHD+ tandem OLED display. 

Needless to say, this is an exclusive product reserved for the upper tiers of pro creators, engineers, programmers, and designers who leverage on-device AI for complex, demanding tasks and want to go all-in on performance. 

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