At CES 2019, Dell amazed the PC world by announcing the Alienware Area-51m, the company’s first gaming laptop that allowed users to upgrade most of their components, including the processor and graphics card. This game-changing (pun intended) series was Dell’s attempt at combining the upgradability of a desktop with the portability of a laptop.

Unfortunately, the Alienware Area-51m laptops never managed to hit their full potential, with Dell ditching the series following the release of the second-generation R2 laptops. Where did Dell go wrong?

What made the Alienware Area-51m unique

Dell’s Alienware laptops are known for their premium hardware and performance that can rival the processing power of a high-end desktop. However, the Achilles' heel of almost every gaming laptop is that it's impossible to upgrade the internals, which is a shame for a $2,000+ device. This means your hardware will become outdated once CPU and GPU manufacturers release their newer chips.

Of course, laptop manufacturers have attempted to create upgradable laptops in the past, and until 2020, there were even a few laptops that featured replaceable MXM GPUs. However, there wasn’t any industry standard for the upgrade procedure, and its complexity varied from one laptop to another. Sometimes, slotting in a new GPU could be a breeze, but other times, you had to drill holes in the chassis and cut the heatsink.

This made MXM graphics cards more suited to DIY enthusiasts rather than the average consumer. MXM technology never managed to go mainstream either, and the high power requirements of modern-day graphics cards forced most laptop manufacturers to ditch MXM GPUs after Nvidia's Pascal series.

Dell attempted to capitalize on this situation by working on its own version called the Dell Graphics Form Factor (DGFF). While the procedure to upgrade the graphics card was a bit cumbersome, Dell provided extensive documentation, on top of ensuring that you wouldn't run into compatibility issues as long as you used the official upgrade modules. The Alienware Area-51m laptops also supported the LGA 1151 socket, so you could theoretically replace the CPUs as well.

Dell began marketing these laptops as the "first true desktop replacement," capturing the interest of gamers all across the globe. Except, well, there were too many glaring issues with Dell’s new lineup that became evident following its release.

The Alienware Area-51m R1 wasn't truly upgradable

When the first-generation Alienware Area-51m R1 laptops were released in early 2019, they were powered by Intel’s ninth-generation processors. With the launch of the 10th generation right around the corner, most users who bought the 51m laptops couldn’t wait to upgrade their processors. Sadly, Intel put a damper on the Area-51m’s “upgradable CPUs” shtick by mandating the LGA 1200 socket for their 10th-generation processors. So, the only CPU upgrade that you could perform was to replace an i5 or i7 with an i9 belonging to Intel's 9th-gen CPU family.

Things weren’t any different on the GPU front either. While Dell managed to release upgrade kits for its Nvidia DGFF graphics cards, you could switch to only an RTX 2070 or RTX 2080 from the previous generation. This meant the only viable upgrade path involved swapping out your graphics card for another higher-end model belonging to Nvidia's 2000 series, and even then, Dell refused to support the Super variants. Besides, the high-end GPU modules were extremely overpriced, especially when the base model of the laptop cost $2,549 at the time of its release.

Second-gen Area-51m laptops didn't fare any better

Undaunted by the negative reception of the first gen 51m laptops, Dell decided to release the second refresh of the 51m series in May 2020. Unfortunately, the Alienware Area-51m R2 family was plagued by the very same issues that affected its predecessor. While it got an internal overhaul with Intel's Comet Lake processors and new Nvidia GPUs, the base model only featured a GTX 1660 Ti instead of an RTX GPU.

As with the Area-51m R1, the CPU upgrade path was restricted to the higher end models of the same generation. Likewise, the R2 allowed you to slot in an RTX 2070 Super or RTX 2080 Super DGFF GPU, though the laptops offered no support for the RTX 3000 graphics cards that were released later in 2020.

It’s interesting to note that Dell also launched another model of the Area-51m R2 that shipped with the AMD Radeon RX 5700M GPU. But users couldn’t even replace it with a more powerful Radeon GPU as Dell never released the DGFF modules for higher-end AMD graphics cards. So, the Area-51m R2 variants that came with AMD GPUs lacked the very feature that made the laptops unique.

Dell slowly phased out the laptops before facing lawsuits from users

By 2021, Dell had removed most of the upgrade modules for the Alienware Area-51m laptops from its website, with other e-commerce platforms following suit. At CES 2021, Dell unveiled its newest set of laptops, ranging from the business-oriented Latitude 9420 to the powerful Alienware m15 R4 and m17 R4 laptops. Since the company never announced an R3 refresh of the Alienware Area-51m, it was clear that Dell had moved on.

Sadly, the Alienware 51m laptops were subject to one final controversy before they faded from existence. Around June 2021, the company faced a class action lawsuit from a California resident over the false claims of the Alienware Area-51m R1’s “unprecedented upgradability.” Dell also faced similar lawsuits from other users, though the case was dismissed in 2022. In the official court document, he highlighted clients had agreed to the arbitration provision in Dell’s Terms of Service when they pressed "Accept" on the startup screen of their 51m laptops, thus rendering their claims moot.

Are there other players in the upgradable laptops market?

Though most manufacturers stopped releasing upgradable laptops after the Pascal lineup of GPUs, Framework remains one of the few firms to release modular laptops in recent years. In fact, its very selling point of is that you can upgrade most of the components. And yes, this includes replacing an older processor by slotting in a new mainboard with an updated CPU. It even has a Chromebook version.

That said, these laptops aren't designed for gaming or heavy-duty computing. Sure, the latest Framework 16 allows you to slot in the AMD Radeon RX 7700S, but there's no support for more powerful graphics cards. So, it's safe to say that the upgradable gaming laptop market will remain in limbo for a while unless other laptop manufacturers bring back MXM graphics cards or embrace a similar technology.