So you’re telling me Dell’s new laptop rebrand isn’t a joke?

Dell has taken pot shots at Apple in its ads before, and the brand is often seen as one of the Cupertino company’s biggest rivals on the PC side of things. So it comes as a something of a surprise that Dell’s rebranded laptop line up sounds quite so, well, Apple-esque.

The company is killing off some of its most famous PC branding, including the XPS and Inspirion names (some of which are among our best laptops for CAD). At CES this week, Dell revealed, in perhaps the greatest compliment it could pay to Apple’s marketing team, that the new names for its PCs will include the Dell, Dell Plus, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max. No, it isn’t April 1st.

Yes, tell appears to be taking on the exact same naming conventions as Apple’s iPhone line up. And as Oscar Wilde famously said, to borrow one Apple product name may be regarded as a misfortune. To borrow two looks like carelessness. And to borrow three is just downright wild.

“Customers really prefer names that are easy to remember and easy to pronounce,” Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke announced at CES. Buyers shouldn’t have to spend time “figuring out our nomenclature, which at times has been a bit confusing,” he said. Sure, the names are simpler. But weren’t there any other words for “powerful” and “bigger” that Dell could have found in the thesaurus? Like me, many thought the names could be a joke at first.

Pre-empting the comparisons, Dell argued that Apple “doesn’t own” words like “Pro” and “Max”. According to Bloomberg, the company’s COO Jeff Clarke said that the naming decision was based on research Dell did with “tens of thousands of customers.” Indeed, those two words are often used by other tech brands like Samsung. But “Pro Max” together? It’s just such a recognisable piece of Apple branding, and a touch bizarre to see adopted by a rival. Time will tell how the new laptop line up will fare, but it’s surely going to take a while for Dell to shake of those Apple comparisons.