Dell SVP details the ‘renaissance of the PC’ for sustainability, gaming

Rahul Tikoo, SVP of client solutions portfolio at Dell Technologies, speaks with Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley about new product concepts unveiled at CES 2022 designed with sustainability, gamers, and creators in mind.

Video transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- Welcome back to Yahoo Finance. Well, PC giant Dell is bringing some big changes to its line up at CES 2022 with new initiatives that touch on everything from sustainability to gaming. And for more let's send it over right now to Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley, who is joined by Rahul Tikoo, Senior Vice President of Dell Technologies Client Product Portfolio. Take it away.

DAN HOWLEY: That's right. Rahul, thank you so much for joining us. I want to jump right away into Dell's announcements at CES. You had a bunch whether it's related to sustainability efforts from the company, recycling, reusing products, all the way to gaming in your new flagship product, your XPS 13 Plus.

But I want to start with that reusable kind of idea for products. You call it a Concept Luna. What exactly is that? And how exactly would you reuse a laptop?

RAHUL TIKOO: Yeah. Hello, Dan. And I wanted to also say Hello to all your viewers. Thank you for having us on Yahoo Finance.

I wanted to take a step back and really start by talking about what an exciting time it is to be in the PC business. You know, we're really living through a renaissance of the PC where PC has become central to how we live, how we work, how we learn, how we play. And it's reflected in our results as an industry where we shipped almost 87 million PCs in Q3 of last year.

So having said that, the time to reinvent is when you're at the top of your game. And that's what we're doing. We're bringing a lot of great new announcements and products to CES this year-- our Consumer Electronics Show. And one of those is Concept Luna.

And as you rightly said, you know, we've been thinking about sustainability for many years now. We announced our 2030 sustainability goals where we wanted to reuse and recycle a product for everyone we ship out there. We want it 50% of our product content to be made out of recycled, renewable materials and 100% of our packaging to be made out of recycled or renewable materials. And that's where the concept Luna comes in where we're really accelerating what's achievable in our product lines by really reimagining laptop design for repair, reuse, and recycling.

Concept Luna really moves the needle forward in reducing the carbon footprint of laptops by almost 50%. We are changing the size of the motherboard reducing it by almost 75%. That's the we're also moving the motherboard to the lid of the laptop so that it has much better airflow so it reduces the thermal requirements of the laptop, reduces the battery needs of the laptop. And so again we're really rethinking design.

Concept Luna is also bringing in how to easily disassemble and reassemble the laptop of the future. We're reducing the number of screws needed in the laptop disassembly by over 15x to only four screws needed to disassemble your laptop. And you know, we're driving modular design moving from use to recycle and instead going from use to reuse multiple times before you need to recycle your laptop. That's really the future. And that's what Luna is bringing into the laptop market.

DAN HOWLEY: And I guess as far as, you know, from the reusability to gaming you guys also are showing off this new concept Nyx. And this is essentially kind of at-home cloud computing kind of platform where you have a centralized server in your house. You know, I'm a big gamer.

My wife's a big gamer. Is this going to be our answer to who gets the TV, who doesn't kind of woes? Or how is that going to work?

RAHUL TIKOO: Yeah. So you know, we're really proud of our Alienware brand. We are celebrating 25 years of pushing the boundaries with iconic Alienware products. And concept Nyx is a huge step forward in the direction of cloud gaming.

It's solving one of the most common and frustrating problems with cloud gaming where you can have multiple gamers under one roof competing to access their favorite titles all while destroying their Wi-Fi bandwidth in the house. We've all run through that for the past few years as we have lived and played and worked from home. And so concept Nyx like you said, is a home server that allows you to simultaneously play games at a single household through a common game library. And you're able to really move from the bedroom to the living room and continue your game play anywhere in the house.

DAN HOWLEY: And then finally, just while we have I want to ask about the XPS 13 Plus. That's your newest version of the XPS 13. This is easily one of the best laptops that's out there, the XPS 13.

You know, back a few years ago we ended up getting one from my mom just because we liked so much. So what is this new XPS 13? And you know, I guess how do you expect the chip shortage to really kind of play a role into the ability for you to get these into consumers' hands?

RAHUL TIKOO: Yeah, so you know we're really proud of our XPS brand. This is the brand that we have developed for creators. And these days everyone is a creator. I mean, I look at my own household. And my 11-year-old is creating TikTok videos and YouTube videos on a daily basis and XPS is the device of choice for her.

And so we've really reinvented our most popular XPS 13 laptop by keeping the creators in mind. You know, there's really three big things that we're doing in the laptop. First we're bringing in high performance into the laptop going from what used to be 15 Watt processors to 28 Watt processors standard in the laptop while keeping the laptop the thinnest and lightest that it has been known for.

We're also continuing to invest in simple and intentional and premium designs, which is what our XPS has been known for in the industry. You know, we are introducing new capacitive touch roe. We have a seamless glass touchpad with haptics built in.

And we have a lettersless keyboard with bigger keys, more curved and comfy edges throughout. So it's a beautiful piece of machinery, very simplistic, but really targeting the needs of our creators. So we're really, really proud of what we're introducing in the XPS 13 Plus.

Then you asked me a second question around supply chain. And I would answer it this way, look, we've been maneuvering supply chain shortages as an industry for nearly three years now. We have demonstrated a clear resiliency and responsiveness through our supply chain in working to meet our customers' needs. I mean, that's reflected in our results that you can go back and look at the Dell financial results for the past few quarters. So we're really confident in our continuity of supply processes, our scale, and our relationships with our suppliers to really put us in advantaged position and take care of our customers.

All right, Rahul. Rahul Tikoo, thank you so much for speaking to us about Dell's innovations at CES 2022. Karina, back to you.