Dell Quashes U.S. Game PCs, Launches New Models in India

A little deceptively gloomy news this morning about Dell discontinuing four of its high-end XPS game PCs. Travis Hudson has a note in Today @ PC World about Dell's latest seemingly retrograde move, pointing out I think rightly that it was probably in some sense inevitable given redundancy in the company's high-end lineup with the acquisition of boutique PC manufacturer Alienware two years ago. Alienware, by contrast, recently debuted its Area-51 m17x 17" widescreen gaming notebook packing an Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU, 4GB DDR2 memory, dual SLI GeForce 8800M GTX GPUs, and up to a 1.5 terabyte (yes, terabyte) hard drive.

But wait a minute, did you know Dell literally just launched the XPS 730 H2C Edition gaming desktop and XPS M1730 notebook (AGEIA PhysX plus Logitech GamePanel LCD) in India? While the U.S. PC sales market has cooled in recent years, sales are actually up sharply in developing markets like India and the Asia-Pacific region. India's PC shipments alone shot up 20% in 2007 to 6.5 million, and sales of notebook PCs specifically were up by 81%, according to market researcher IDC. IDC in fact predicts a compounded annual growth rate in India PC sales of 20% over the next five years.

With all the negative speculation about consumer spending in the U.S. driven by flagging consumer confidence indices, it's only logical that Dell would clean house, so I wouldn't read too terribly much into the high-end model nixing. And watch what happens with Alienware next (at least on this side of the pond) for the rest of the story. If Alienware starts slashing and burning, then it's maybe time to get nervous. (Or, you know, move to India.)

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