Two years on, Dell shows going private was a smart move

In 2012 Lenovo released the Thinkpad X1 Carbon as part of Intel's Ultrabook initiative. It was thin, it was light, and it boasted Levovo's excellent build quality and reliability. Windows users jealous of the MacBook Air finally had a thin-and-light to call their own. Around about the same time Dell updated to its own business line of notebooks, the best of which was the Dell Latitude E6430s. While it managed to cram a 14-inch screen into a 13-inch chassis, it was hardly a desirable laptop. At 2.68cm thick (it still had an optical drive) and around 2kg when kitted out with a much-needed 6-cell battery, it wasn't exactly a particularly portable one either.

A year later, in September 2013, Dell founder Michael Dell and a group of investors from Silver Lake succeeded in taking the company private in one of the largest corporate privatisations in history. While there's no doubt that a slowing PC market had plenty to do with its falling share prices at the time, it was clear Dell's product range had fallen behind the times, despite some success in the consumer market with the XPS 13. It was a pretty bold move, considering Dell had been a public company for 25 years.

"We find ourselves in a world increasingly afflicted with myopia—governments that can't see beyond the next election, an education system that can't see beyond the next round of standardised tests, and public financial markets that can't see beyond the next trade," wrote Michael Dell in the Wall Street Journal in 2014. "This was what Dell faced as a public company. Shareholders increasingly demanded short-term results to drive returns; innovation and investment too often suffered as a result. Shareholder and customer interests decoupled."

Going private, Dell claimed, would help the company plough more money into R&D, and create better products for consumer and business alike. Three years on, and Dell's strategy may finally be coming to fruition. At this year's CES it unveiled a new line of business notebooks and tablets under its Latitude brand. They sport premium materials like carbon fibre tops and magnesium alloy chassis, and much thinner and lighter designs. Crucially, they continue to feature the strong encryption, wireless tech, and remote management services demanded by IT managers. Finally, Dell has a desirable set of business notebooks.

That's not to say these are the most exciting of devices. They are, after all, intentionally utilitarian. But they represent a huge shift in how Dell approaches notebook design. Last year, it released the XPS 13, a much-loved laptop with a gorgeously thin bezel around its "InfinityEdge" display—a first real glimpse at what to expect from the re-privatised Dell. With that one notebook, not only did the company catch up with the likes of Apple, Asus, and Lenovo—all of which had been making desirable consumer notebooks for some time—it arguably one-upped them thanks to that brilliant display.

More importantly, the company finally realised that—thanks to businesses and consumers alike buying the XPS 13, as well as the rise of bring-your-own-device (BYOD)—product design is just as important to the office worker as it is to the home user.

"We launched XPS as a premium type of device, one that was more focused on the consumer environment than it was the business environment," explained Dell's Adam Griffin told Ars. "And I think it took us a bit by surprise when we got a lot of business customers requesting that type of solution. There was pressure from the market. They wanted business class notebooks, but they wanted them thinner and lighter, and Dell has learned from that. We put our hands up in that we're a little bit late to the party, but what we've unveiled today puts us ahead of everybody."

The flagship 13-inch Latitude 7000 is effectively an XPS 13 in business garb, the sleek aluminium lid replaced with carbon fibre and a matte black finish. It's stark and business-like, yet maintains the elegance of the XPS 13 design, right down its slender profile and InfinityEdge display. Consumers might even be enticed, if left slightly puzzled as to what the smartcard slot on the side is for.

That's not say it's perfect. The move to a slower Core M chip is a strange one, particularly as the XPS 13 works just fine with a Core i5 or i7. There's also the Latitude's two-in-one cousin, the Latitude 12 7000, which apes the Microsoft Surface, yet does so with an oddly flimsy case design to house its kickstand.

But these devices are leaps and bounds ahead of what came before. And—while Dell will continue to face challenges from a stagnant PC market and its controversial buyout of cloud computing experts EMC—they bode well for the future of the company in its newly privatised state. At the very least, if, as a suit-wielding exec, you had to choose between a Dell and a Lenovo, for the first time in a long time, you might actually pick the Dell.