VentureBeat: The jewelry thing is interesting. It could surprise people.
Darrel Ward: Dell, as you probably know, has a long history of sustainability leadership. 10 years ago we were the first to put post-consumer recycled plastic in Optiplex desktops. We’ve been doing plastics for about 10 years. 50 million pounds of recycled plastic have gone into about 80 of our products over the last 10 years. We’re also the first, recently, to do recycled carbon fiber resin. The bottom of that Latitude notebook is recycled carbon fiber. We started that two years ago. Last year we started using ocean plastics for packing on the XPS products. That was another first.
This year is a big first for us because we’re moving out of plastic and carbon fiber into metal. At CES we’ll announce the Latitude 5285, which will be using closed-loop recycled gold that we’re pulling out of PCs Dell has in its recycling program. We’re putting it back into the supply chain and on to the motherboard of this two-in-one detachable. It’s the first ever closed-loop metal in our industry, another first for Dell.
Because we’re pulling so much metal, so much gold out of the recycling program, more than we can put back into the supply chain – at least at this point – we have excess gold. We’ve struck a relationship with Nikki Reed, an actress and a jewelry designer, and we’re giving her all of our excess gold. She’s creating a line of jewelry out of upcycled gold from Dell recycled PCs. It’s called the Circular Collection. It’s designed to represent a circular economy, the value of upcycling. She really wanted to create pieces that are timeless, because even passing jewelry down generations is a way of recycling. She has a history of designing sustainable bags out of recycled materials, so this is something—we saw a lot of synergy between her brand and ours. She’s also a small business customer, using Dell business technologies. It’s a cool story and partnership.
Innovation isn’t necessarily just about better and smaller devices. It’s about how you make them. That’s important to us.
VentureBeat: What do you think about the various tech transitions that are going on? USB C is a big thing at the show. Will we see wireless charging?
Azor: Darrel had a product last year with wireless charging.
Ward: It’s another two-in-one that we had. We had wireless charging and wireless docking in that platform. We’ll do it again, in a clamshell this time. Probably next year, with Ice Lake, we’ll do a whole new refresh. We’ll go to Qi charging, and we’ll also create a new solution for wireless docking. WiGig, with Intel, which was the original solution, is not going to perpetuate.
We’re still committed to what we call a world without wires. Commercial products with wireless charging and wireless docking are still a big investment area for us. But we have a bit of a reset coming. We’ll do a new solution in our 7000 series products next year. Until then we’ll keep selling the one we have. It’s popular for customers who value that.
VentureBeat: What is the status of WiGig? Intel showed a VR demo with WiGig that looked interesting.
Ward: They’re not continuing to invest further in WiGig. It’s still there. We still sell it. But they’re not carrying it forward long term.
VentureBeat: It seemed like a good solution for VR. You could use WiGig to connect the headset to your PC and use the bigger processor to power the display.
Azor: TP-Link is using a technology like that for TV Cast, which they’re using on the HTC. We were using 60-gig before WiGig was even a standard for wireless video on Alienware. We had it integrated into every Alienware laptop seven or eight years ago. It’s not a bad solution at all. But it’s a matter of, what do you want to spend? Not just in dollars, but what else do you want to spend to be able to pull it off? How much are people going to actually use it?
For example, in a notebook, it doesn’t come free. It takes up space. Are you going to grow the notebook? Are you going to take away from the battery? What do you take away to deliver that wireless charging experience? We could put it in every product, but if customers don’t value it 100 percent then we’re wasting that cost. We’re tiptoeing into little by little, seeing what people value.
On the two-in-ones and on the clamshells that we’ll do in the future, we’ll have an alternative base. You wouldn’t burden every single device with two millimeters and some number of dollars. But for customers who value it and are deploying it, an alternative base that has that value in it and is a little thicker, that’s the tradeoff. Putting it on every unit when the usage rate is not prolific is probably not a great investment.
VentureBeat: Do you think there’s something else coming, like a 5G framework? Just for giving you some flexibility as far as using your desktop processor to wirelessly connect to other screens.
Ward: There’s potential, yeah.
Azor: I think the first iterations of 5G that we’ll see won’t be able to accomplish that, but as they decrease the latency and stuff in future versions, we’ll probably be able to leverage the technology to get there, yeah. Latency is the biggest issue that makes it hard for these solutions to be easily possible.
Ward: Our innovation strategy for a world without wires has a lot of elements in it – best frontal screen experience, most intuitive user interfaces – that are some of our strategic pillars around innovation. Wireless charging, wireless docking, at least in the commercial side, are going to be important for us. But innovation is a long journey. Technology has to be there. Customer value has to be there. Sometimes that takes generations.
VentureBeat: How are you feeling about some of the experimental things that have happened this year? There’s VR, and also Threadripper?
Azor: Threadripper has been a huge success for us, certainly. It’s put Intel on their heels a bit. That’s been good, because Intel has answered with Skylake X and 18-core. Since Threadripper and Skylake X have come into our Area 51 platform, we’ve seen growth in that space that we haven’t seen in a very long time. People are excited.
It’s good timing, because alternative use cases for PCs are on the horizon, are emerging. Streaming is becoming extremely popular. I try to explain to folks that those of us that grew up at any time before now—we had this ideas of becoming actors or rock stars. A lot of the folks growing up now want to be streamers. They’re the new generation of rock stars out there. It’s hard to pull that off on a quad-core system, especially if you’re streaming high-performance games, the latest games, which is usually what your audience wants to see. Or VR, for that matter.
You’ll need a high core count and decent graphics to be able to run all that on a single machine, or you’ll have to invest in multiple systems, which creates a bunch of issues. Two computers working together don’t always work that well with these streaming solutions. A lot of our streamers run into issues when they’re trying to use multiple machines. They crash, or the applications aren’t transitioning correctly. When they can unify that onto one system it works a lot smoother.
It’s good timing for these types of solutions to come out, because that use case continues to emerge. Overall, we’re in a very exciting time. We’re seeing some aggression coming out of Intel with regard to their parts and their road map that’s very exciting, and a level of innovation that we haven’t seen in a bit. Look at what they’re doing, even, with Kaby Lake G. That’s a really compelling effort. For them to reach out and work with their competitor to build something like that speaks volumes about how the industry is involving and innovating at an incredible rate, doing things we’ve never seen before.
VentureBeat: Do you think A.I. has some impact on desktop computing yet?
Azor: Not my area of expertise. At a very basic level there’s a certain amount of machine learning and AI that we do in precision workstations. We have an application called Dell Precision Optimizer that can look at the behavior, the professional application being used, the configuration of the system, the demand on the application, and then make performance adjustments. In a very simple way that’s machine learning.