Dell Adamo

» see dell.com/adamo as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Adamo was Dell's attempt at a luxury object. Dell announced it in 2008 as the world's thinnest laptop at 16.5 mm, showed a prototype at CES on 9 January 2009, and put the Adamo 13 on sale in the United States on 17 March that year. The name was glossed for the press as Italian for to fall in love with, which tells you precisely which competitor the whole program was pointed at.

The money bought a 13.4-inch screen at 1366 by 768, a low-voltage Core 2 Duo, a 128 GB solid state drive, and four pounds of machine that shipped with 64-bit Windows Vista and an optional external DVD drive. Two finishes were offered, Pearl and Onyx, and the two configurations were named Admire and Desire, which is the most 2009 detail in this grave. Later that year Dell upgraded the faster model and cut prices across the line by $500.

That price cut was the first signal and it kept going. By January 2011 a laptop introduced at roughly two thousand dollars was listed at $799, and the discounting never moved the volume. On 9 February 2011 CNET reported that Dell was ending the line and shelving the brand, with future thin machines to be sold as Inspiron or XPS instead. Dell did not argue with the report.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what two thousand dollars bought ~

The specification is the problem, read back now. For the Adamo 13's asking price in March 2009 you received a 1.2 or 1.4 GHz ultra-low-voltage processor and a screen resolution that budget machines already carried. The weight was four pounds, which is not light for something sold on thinness. Dell had engineered the case and left the inside of it to the same parts bin everyone else was shopping from, so the premium bought appearance and nothing underneath it.

Apple's advantage in that fight was not manufacturing, it was that people already trusted Apple to charge too much. Dell in 2009 was the company your IT department bought from, and a nicer case does not shift a reflex like that inside one product cycle.

Two thousand dollars is the entire reason this one stayed abstract to me. In 2009 I was twenty-five and at the tail end of the university years, and that figure for a four-pound laptop running a low-voltage chip was not a sum anybody in that orbit was weighing. What got bought around me was whatever gave the most specification per lira. The Adamo was engineered to lose that comparison, and it did, for twenty-three months.

~ the xps and the heat strip ~

The Adamo XPS, previewed on 9 September 2009 and sold from 5 November at $1,799, is the one worth remembering. It was 9.99 mm thick, which is a number chosen by a marketing department. Its lid half was larger than its base half, and the screen was slightly concave so that the keyboard nested into the display when you shut it. To open it you touched a heat-sensing strip on the lid's edge and the machine let itself go.

It was also, by every account, awkward to actually use. The open machine rested on the bottom edge of its own screen, and inside there was a 1.4 GHz low-voltage processor and a battery good for four or five hours. Dell pulled the XPS in March 2010 and then told CrunchGear that it had not been discontinued as such, but had been meant as a proof point for Dell's design and engineering capability. It had been on sale for four months.

~ where the thin ones went ~

Nothing about the Adamo was wasted, exactly. Dell kept building thin laptops and got good at them, and the XPS 13 that showed up a year later did what the Adamo was supposed to do at a price people paid. The lesson absorbed was that the engineering should go into an existing badge rather than a new one, and the Adamo name has not been used since February 2011.

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