25 ms·

Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

580 points by mossTechnician 9mo ago

alexb_ 9mo ago
Unfortunately, their common sense has been rewarded by the stock tanking 15% in the past month including 4% just today alone. Dell shows why companies don't dare talk poorly of AI, or even talk about AI in a negative way at all. It doesn't matter that it's correct, investors hate this and that's what a ton of companies are mainly focusing on.
- bilbo0s 9mo ago
  To be fair, Dell has bigger, more fundamental threats out on the horizon right now than consumers not wanting AI. Making consumers want things is fixable in any number of ways. Tariffs?.. Supply chain issues in a fracturing global order?.. .. not so much. Only a couple ways to fix those things, and they all involve nontrivial investments. Even longer term threats are starting to look more plausible these days. Lot of unpredictability out there at the moment.
- vitaflo 9mo ago
  Should have stayed private. Then they wouldn’t have to care what investors think.
  - rchaud 9mo ago
    The whole point of going private is to make the private equity partners a boatload of money by going public again in the future.
weird_trousers 9mo ago
Finally companies understand that consumers do not want AI products, but just better, stronger, and cheaper products. Unfortunately investors are not ready to hear that yet...
- neilsimp1 9mo ago
  I agree with you, and I don't want anything related to the current AI craze in my life, at all. But when I come on HN and see people posting about AI IDEs and vibe coding and everything, I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing. I cannot explain this.
  - CamperBob2 9mo ago
    I cannot explain this. That usually means you're missing something, not that everyone else is.
    - kevinh 9mo ago
      Sometimes, but I didn't get sucked into the crypto/blockchain/NFT hype and feel like that was the right call in hindsight.
      - yeasku 9mo ago
        HN had many phases, crypto, js frameworks, the cloud... The guy coding in C++ still has a great job, he didnt miss anything, is all fucking FOMO.
  - walterbell 9mo ago
    https://www.alphanome.ai/post/talking-your-book-the-controversial-practice-in-the-investment-world https://www.alphanome.ai/post/talking-your-book-the-controve...
  - add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
    Partly it's these people all trying to make money selling AI tools to each other, and partly there's a lot of people who want to take shortcuts to learning and productivity without thinking or caring about long term consequences, and AI offers that.
  - afavour 9mo ago
    I see using AI for coding as a little different. I'm producing something that is designed for a machine to consume and react to. Code is the means by which I express my aims to the machine. With AI there's an extra layer of machine that transforms my written aims into a language any machine can understand. I'm still ambivalent about it, I'm proud of my code. I like to know it inside out. Surrendering all that feels alien to me. But it's also undeniable that AI has sped up a bunch of the boring grunt work I have to do in projects. You can write, say, an OpenAPI spec, some tests and tell the AI to do the rest. It's very, very far from perfect but it remains very useful. But the fact remains that I'm producing something for a machine to consume. When I see people using AI to e.g. write e-mails for them that's where I object: that's communication intended for humans. When you fob that off onto a machine something important is lost.
walterbell 9mo ago
> What we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI .. In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome. Do consumers understand that OEM device price increases are due to AI-induced memory price spike over 100%?
whalesalad 9mo ago
I'm kind of excited about the revival of XPS. The new hardware sounds pretty compelling. I have been longing for a macbook-quality device that I can run Linux on... so eagerly awaiting this.
- thesh4d0w 9mo ago
  I owned a couple XPS 13 laptops in a row and liked them a lot, until I got one with a touch bar. I returned it after a couple weeks and swapped over the to X1 Carbon. The return back to physical buttons makes the XPS look pretty appealing again.
  - xcjs 9mo ago
    This is exactly what I was hoping to see. I also returned one I ordered with the feedback that I needed physical function keys and the touchbar just wasn't cutting it for me.
- rationalist 9mo ago
  Sweet, TIL! I love my 2020 XPS. The keyboard keys on mine do not rattle, but I have seen newer XPS keyboard keys that do rattle. I hope they fixed that.
m348e912 9mo ago
Protip, if you are considering a dell xps laptop, consider the dell precision laptop workstation instead which is the business version of the consumer level xps. It also looks like names are being changed, and the business laptops are going with a dell pro (essential/premium/plus/max) naming convention.
- ishtanbul 9mo ago
  I have the precision 5690 (the 16inch model) with a ultra 7 processor and 4k touchscreen (2025 model). It is very heavy, but its very powerful. My main gripe is that the battery life is very bad, and it has a 165 watt charger, which wont work on most planes. So if you fly a lot for work, this laptop will die on you unless you bring a lower wattage charger. It also doesn't sleep properly. I often find it in my bag hours after closing it and the fans are going at full blast. It should have a 4th usb port (like the smaller version!). Otherwise I have no complaints (other than about windows 11!).
  - microflash 9mo ago
    After using several Precisions at work, I now firmly believe that Dell does not know how to cool their workstations properly. They are all heavy, pretty bad at energy efficiency and run extremely hot (I use my work machine laid belly up in summer since fans are always on). I’d take a ThinkPad or Mac any day over any Dell.
    - hallmason17 9mo ago
      Power hungry intel chips and graphics cards are inconvenient in laptops when it comes to battery life and cooling. It is especially noticeable if you spend any time using an M-series macbook pro, where performance is the same or better, but you get 16 hours of battery life. I prefer to use thinkpads, but apple just has a big technological advantage here that stands out in the UX department. I really hope advances are made quickly by competitors to get similar UX in a more affordable package.
      - deleted 9mo ago
FfejL 9mo ago
> It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't. I wish every consumer product leader would figure this out.
- notatoad 9mo ago
  I think they will eventually. It’s always been a very incoherent sales pitch that your expensive PCs are packed full of expensive hardware that’s supposed to do AI things, but your cheap PCs that have none of that are still capable of doing 100% of the AI tasks that customers actually care about: accessing chatGPT.
  - voidfunc 9mo ago
    Also, what kind of AI tasks is the average person doing? The people thinking about this stuff are detached from reality. For most people a computer is a gateway to talking to friends and family, sharing pictures, browsing social media, and looking up recipes and how-to guides. Maybe they do some tracking of things as well in something like Excel or Google Sheets. Consumer AI has never really made any sense. It's going to end up in the same category of things as 3D TV's, smart appliances, etc.
    - ryandrake 9mo ago
      I don't remember any other time in the tech industry's history when "what companies and CEOs want to push" was less connected to "what customers want." Nobody transformed their business around 3D TVs like current companies are transforming themselves to deliver "AI-everything".
      - walterbell 9mo ago
        If memory shortages make existing products non-viable (e.g. 50% price increases on mini PCs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514794), will consumers flock to new/AI products like OpenAI "pen" or reject those outright?
tpurves 9mo ago
Dell is cooked this year for reasons entirely outside their control. DRAM and storage/drive shortages are causing costs of those to go to the moon. And Dell's 'inventory' light supply chain and narrow margins puts them in a perfect storm of trouble.
- dude250711 9mo ago
  Anything but admitting that AI king is naked, here on HN...
  - cogman10 9mo ago
    What? No, this is a pretty relevant comment that is being directly caused by AI. Consumer PCs and hardware are going to be expensive in 2026 and AI is primarily to blame. You can find examples of CEOs talking about buying up hardware for AI without having a datacenter to run it in. This run on hardware will ultimately drive hardware prices up everywhere. The knock on effect is that hardware manufacturers are likely going to spend less money doing R&D for consumer level hardware. Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars making a 700 core beast for AI workloads in a datacenter? And you can get a nice premium for that product because every AI company is fighting to get any hardware right now.
    - bluGill 9mo ago
      > Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars You might be right, but I suspect not. While the hardware company are willing to do without laptop sales, data centers need the power efficiency as well. Facebook has (well had - this was ~10 years ago when I heard it) a team of engineers making their core code faster because in some places a 0.1% speed improvement across all their servers results in saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per month (sources won't give real numbers but reading between the lines this seems about right) on the power bill. Hardware that can do more with less power thus pays for itself very fast in the data center. Also cooling chips internally is often a limit of speed, so if you can make your chip just a little more efficient it can do more. Many CPUs will disable parts of the CPU not in use just to save that heat, if you can use more of the CPU that translates to more work done and in turn makes you better than the competition. Of course the work must be done, so data centers will sometimes have to settle for whatever they can get. Still they are always looking for faster chips that use less power because that will show up on the bottom line very fast.
yalogin 9mo ago
They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time. The current froth is all about AI infrastructure not consumer devices.
- bluGill 9mo ago
  Even customers who care about AI (or perhaps should...) have other concerns. With the RAM shortage coming up many customers may choose to do without AI features to save money even though they want it at a lower price.
- jorvi 9mo ago
  The only thing Apple is behind on in the AI race is LLMs. They've been vastly ahead of everyone else with things like text OCR, image element recognition / extraction, microphone noise suppression, etc. iPhones have had these features 2-5 years before Android did.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    Kind of a big "only" though. Siri is still shit and it's been 15 years since initial release.
    - 0x38B 9mo ago
      When I'm driving and tell Siri, "Call <family member name>", sometimes instead of calling, it says, "To who?", and I can't get it to call no matter what I do.
    - asdff 9mo ago
      Amazing how its been 15 years and it still can't discern 15 from 50 when you talk to it.
  - 9mo ago
beloch 9mo ago
"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome." -------------- What we're seeing here is that "AI" lacks appeal as a marketing buzzword. This probably shouldn't be surprising. It's a term that's been in the public consciousness for a very long time thanks to fiction, but more frequently with negative connotations. To most, AI is Skynet, not the thing that helps you write a cover letter. If a buzzword carries no weight, then drop it. People don't care if a computer has a NPU for AI any more than they care if a microwave has a low-loss waveguide. They just care that it will do the things they want it to do. For typical users, AI is just another algorithm under the hood and out of mind. What Dell is doing is focusing on what their computers can do for people rather than the latest "under the hood" thing that lets them do it. This is probably going to work out well for them.
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  > People don't care if a computer has a NPU I actually do care, on a narrow point. I have no use for an NPU and if I see that a machine includes one, I immediately think that machine is overpriced for my needs.
  - Tsiklon 9mo ago
    Alas NPUs are in essentially all modern CPUs by Intel and AMD. It’s not a separate bit of silicon, it’s on the same package as the CPU
    - JohnFen 9mo ago
      True. But if a company is specifically calling out that their machine has an NPU, I assume they're also adding an surcharge for it above what they would charge if they didn't mention it. I'm not claiming that this is a rational stance, only that I take "NPU" as a signal for "overpriced".
pier25 9mo ago
Consumers are not idiots. We know all this AI PC crap is it's mostly a useless gimmick. One day it will be very cool to run something like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini locally in our phones but we're still very, very far away from that.
- MBCook 9mo ago
  It’s today’s 3D TVs. It’s something investors got all hyped up about that everybody “has to have“. There is useful functionality there. Apple has had it for years, so have others. But at the time they weren’t calling it “AI“ because that wasn’t the cool word. I also think most people associate AI with ChatGPT or other conversational things. And I’m not entirely sure I want that on my computer. But some of the things Apple and others have done that aren’t conversational are very useful. Pervasive OCR on Windows and Mac is fantastic, for example. You could brand that as AI. But you don’t really need to no one cares if you do or not.
  - pier25 9mo ago
    > Pervasive OCR on Windows and Mac is fantastic, for example. I agree. Definitely useful features but still a far cry from LLMs which is what the average consumer identifies as AI.
- cco 9mo ago
  Not that far away, you can run a useful model on flagship phones today, something around GPT 3.5's level. So we're probably only a few years out from today's SOTA models on our phones.
  - trympet 9mo ago
    > you can run a useful model on flagship phones today How?
    - cco 9mo ago
      Cactus Chat is probably the easiest. Just download the app and it has a few built-in model options. The best of those is probably Gemma-3 1B Q4 but on my Pixel 10 Pro I find the best performing model it can reasonably run is Qwen3 8B Q4_K_M. You can download and run any GGUF compatible model with that app.
helsinkiandrew 9mo ago
They’ve just realised that AI won’t be in the PC, but on a server. Where Dell are heavily selling into - “AI datacenter” counted for about 40% of there infrastructure revenue
kingstnap 9mo ago
NPUs are just kind of weird and difficult to develop for and integration is usually done poorly. Some useful applications do exist. Particularly grammar checkers and I think windows recall could be useful. But we don't currently have these designed well such that it makes sense.
- criddell 9mo ago
  A while ago I tried to figure out which APIs use the NPU and it was confusing to say the least. They have something called the Windows Copilot Runtime but that seems to be a blanket label and from their announcement I couldn't really figure out how the NPU ties into it. It seems like the NPU is used if it's there but isn't necessary for most things.
scblock 9mo ago
This should have been obvious to anyone paying any attention whatsoever, long before any one of these computers launched as a product. But we can't make decisions on product or marketing based on reality or market fit. No, we have to make decisions on the investor buzzword faith market. Hence the large percentage of Youtube ads I saw being "with a Dell AI PC, powered by Intel..." here are some lies.
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GeekyBear 9mo ago
There is one feature that I do care about. Local speech recognition is genuinely useful and much more private than server based options.
- delaminator 9mo ago
  Whisper works great, even the medium model is pretty good. But I use the 3Gb all day every day. I built a personal voice agent https://github.com/lawless-m/TheHand https://github.com/lawless-m/TheHand
Traster 9mo ago
Fundamentally when you think about it, what people know today as AI are things like ChatGPT and all of those products run on cloud infrastructure mainly via the browser or an app. So it makes perfect sense that customers just get confused when you say "This is an AI PC". Like, what a weird thing to say - my smartphone can do ChatGPT why would I buy a PC to do that. It's just a totally confusing selling point. So you ask the question why is it an AI PC and then you have to talk about NPUs, which apart from anything else are confusing (Neural what?) but bring you back to this conversation: What is an NPU? Oh it's a special bit of hardware to do AI. Oh ok, does it run ChatGPT? Well no, that still happens in the cloud. Ok, so why would I buy this?
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xnx 9mo ago
> It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't. This seems like a cop out for saving cost by putting Intel GPUs in laptops instead of Nvidia.
- recursive 9mo ago
  How is saving costs a cop out? That's a genuine goal of most businesses.
- rchaud 9mo ago
  Discrete GPU + laptop means 2 hours of battery life. The average customer isn't buying those.
tedmcory77 9mo ago
People dont want feature x (AI). They want problem(s) solved.
mjbale116 9mo ago
On the same note, whats going on with Dell's marketing lately? Dell, Dell Pro, Dell Premium, Dell _Pro_ Premium Dell Max, Dell _Pro_ max... They went and added capacitive keys on the XPS? Why would you do this... A lot of decisions that do not make sense to me.
- rationalist 9mo ago
  It's a lot easier for people to spend more money when they are confused about their choices.
- Tajnymag 9mo ago
  I thought they actually dumbed down the model names. Basically the more adjactives the laptop has, the higher the model is. Now the machines can have pronounciable names and just add generation number every year or so. Sure, the original numbering system did make sense, but you had to Google what the system meant. Now, it's kind of intuitive, even though the it's just a different permutation of the same words?
- seabrookmx 9mo ago
  The new XPS's that they just teased at CES bring back the real function keys and have a newly designed aluminum unibody. I've shied away from Dell for a bit because I had two XPS 15's that had swelling batteries. But the new machines look pretty sweet!
almosthere 9mo ago
The typical consumer doesn't care about any checkbox feature. They just care if they can play the games they care about and word/email/netflix. That being said, netflix would be an impossible app without gfx acceleration APIs that are enabled by specific CPU and/or GPU instruction sets. The typical consumer doesn't care about those CPU/GPU instruction sets. At least they don't care to know about them. However they would care if they didn't exist and Netflix took 1 second per frame to render. Similar to AI - they don't care about AI until some killer app that they DO care about needs local AI. There is no such killer app. But they're coming. However as we turn the corner into 2026 it's becoming extremely clear that local AI is never going to be enough for the coming wave of AI requirements. AI is going to require 10-15 simultaneous LLM calls or GenAI requests. These are things that won't do well on local AI ever.
- rasz 9mo ago
  Even i3 cpu is perfectly fine software decoding 2160p H264, the only consequence is about 2x higher power draw compared to NVidia decoder.
- AkelaA 9mo ago
  Most regular people use AI to get restaurant recommendations or cheat on homework. I think you massively overestimate just how many people actually care about the more advanced features of AI services.
  - poopooracoocoo 9mo ago
    That's not done on an NPU though, even if it could be. That's all done on companies' servers and won't be changing.
metalman 9mo ago
I already have experience with intermitent wipers, they are impossible to use reliably, a newer car I have made the intermitent wipers fully automatic, and impossible to dissable.Now they have figured out how to make intermitent wipers talk, and want to put them in everything. I forsee a future where humanity has total power and fine controll over reality, where finaly after hundreds of years, there is weather controll good enough to make it rain exactly the right amount for intermitent wipers to work properly, but we are not there yet.
4d4m 9mo ago
Happy Dell takes user feedback to heart
disfictional 9mo ago
As someone who spent a year writing an SDK specifically for AI PCs, it always felt like a solution in search of a problem. Like watching dancers in bunny suits sell CPUs, if the consumer doesn't know the pain point you're fixing, they won't buy your product.
- martinald 9mo ago
  Tbh it's been the same in Windows PCs since forever. Like MMX in the Pentium 1 days - was marketed as basically essential for anything "multimedia" but provided somewhat between no and minimal speedup (v little software was compiled for it). It's quite similar with Apple's neural engine, which afiak is used very little for LLMs, even for coreML. I know I don't think I ever saw it being used in asitop. And I'm sure whatever was using it (facial recognition?) could have easily ran on GPU with no real efficiency loss.
  - Maxatar 9mo ago
    I have to disagree with you about MMX. It's possible a lot of software didn't target it explicitly but on Windows MMX was very widely used as it was integrated into DirectX, ffmpeg, GDI, the initial MP3 libraries (l3codeca which was used by Winamp and other popular MP3 players) and the popular DIVX video codec.
    - bombcar 9mo ago
      MMX had a chicken/egg problem; it did take awhile to "take off" so early adopters really didn't see much from it, but by the time it was commonplace it was doing some work.
    - martinald 9mo ago
      ffmpeg didn't come out for 4 years after the MMX brand was introduced! Of course MMX was widely used later but at the time it was complete marketing.
    - conductr 9mo ago
      Similar to AI PC's right now, very few consumers cared in late 90s. Majority weren't power users creating/editing videos/audio/graphics. Majority of consumers were just consuming and they never had a need to seek out MMX for that, their main consumption bottleneck was likely bandwidth. If they used MMX indirectly in Winamp or DirectX, they probably had no clue. Today, typical consumers aren't even using a ton of AI or enough to even make them think to buy specialized hardware for it. Maybe that changes but it's the current state.
pseudosavant 9mo ago
I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.
- kenjackson 9mo ago
  I'd love to see a thorough breakdown of what these local NPUs can really do. I've had friends ask me about this (as the resident computer expert) and I really have no idea. Everything I see advertised for (blurring, speech to text, etc...) are all things that I never felt like my non-NPU machine struggled with. Is there a single remotely killer application for local client NPUs?
  - martinald 9mo ago
    The problem is essentially memory bandiwdth afiak. Simplifying a lot in my reply, but most NPUs (all?) do not have faster memory bandwidth than the GPU. They were originally designed when ML models were megabytes not gigabytes. They have a small amount of very fast SRAM (4MB I want to say?). LLM models _do not_ fit into 4MB of SRAM :). And LLM inference is heavily memory bandwidth bound (reading input tokens isn't though - so it _could_ be useful for this in theory, but usually on device prompts are very short). So if you are memory bandwidth bound anyway and the NPU doesn't provide any speedup on that front, it's going to be no faster. But has loads of other gotchas so no real "SDK" format for them. Note the idea isn't bad per se, it has real efficiencies when you do start getting compute bound (eg doing multiple parallel batches of inference at once), this is basically what TPUs do (but with far higher memory bandwidth).
    - zozbot234 9mo ago
      NPUs are still useful for LLM pre-processing and other compute-bound tasks. They will waste memory bandwidth during LLM generation phase (even in the best-case scenario where they aren't physically bottlenecked on bandwidth to begin with, compared to the iGPU) since they generally have to read padded/dequantized data from main memory as they compute directly on that, as opposed to being able to unpack it in local registers like iGPUs can. > usually on device prompts are very short Sure, but that might change with better NPU support, making time-to-first-token quicker with larger prompts.
GuB-42 9mo ago
WTF is an "AI PC"? Most of "AI" happens on the internet, in big datacenters, your PC has nothing to do with that. It will more likely confuse users who don't understand why they need a special PC when any PC can access chatgpt.com. Now, for some who actually want to do AI locally, they are not going to look for "AI PCs". They are going to look for specific hardware, lots of RAM, big GPUs, etc... And it is not a very common use case anyways. I have an "AI laptop", and even I, who run a local model from time to time and bought that PC with my own money don't know what it means, probably some matrix multiplication hardware that I have not idea how to take advantage of. It was a good deal for the specs it had, that's the only thing I cared for, the "AI" part was just noise. At least a "gaming PC" means something. I expect high power, a good GPU, a CPU with good single-core performance, usually 16 to 32 GB of RAM, high refresh rate monitor, RGB lighting. But "AI PC", no idea.
- zokier 9mo ago
  AI PC in MS parlance is a computer with 40+ TOPS NPU built-in. Yes, they are intended for local AI applications.
Galanwe 9mo ago
I have a "Copilot" button on my new ThinkPad. I have yet to understand what it does that necessitates a dedicated button. On Linux it does nothing, on Windows it tells me I need an Office 365 plan to use it. Like... What the hell... They literally placed a paywalled Windows only physical button on my laptop. What next, an always-on screen for ads next to the trackpad?
- rzzzt 9mo ago
  It's equivalent to Win + Shift + F23 so you can map it to some useful action if you have a suitable utility at hand.
- hacker_homie 9mo ago
  I used https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd with ``` [ids] * [main] f23 = oneshot(control) [control] toggle(control) ``` To turn it back into a ctrl key
- immibis 9mo ago
  Good news: Office 365 has been renamed to Microsoft 365 Copilot. I'm serious. They dropped the Office branding and their office suite is now called Copilot. This is good news because it means the Copilot button opens Copilot, which is exactly what you'd expect it to do.
d--b 9mo ago
People don't want AI PC, cause they don't want to spend 5000 bucks for something that's half as good as the free version of ChatGPT. But we've been there before. Computers are going to get faster for cheaper, and LLMs are going to be more optimized, cause right now, they do a ton of useless calculations for sure. There's a market, just not right now.
mirekrusin 9mo ago
Isn't the only AI PC a Mac Studio?
- fhd2 9mo ago
  According to ancient Apple ads, a "Mac" is not a "PC".
  - mghackerlady 9mo ago
    Macs fundamentally can't be personal computers since they're entirely controlled by apple. Any computer running nonfree software can't be a personal one
    - kube-system 9mo ago
      lol so the IBM PC isn't a PC?
      - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
        There are free BIOSes.
        kube-system 9mo ago
        IBM didn't ship any on their PC
        wizzwizz4 9mo ago
        So? You can replace the ROM chip (or flash it, if it's an EEPROM). The whole point of free software is that you don't have to limit yourself to what the manufacturer says you can do.
        kube-system 9mo ago
        I was responding to: > Any computer running nonfree software can't be a personal one
rsynnott 9mo ago
Well, yes, Dell, everyone knows that, but it is _most_ improper to actually _say_ it. What would the basilisk think?!
- tantalor 9mo ago
  Yes, everybody should buy an AI PC. Buy two! For all we know, that's exactly what we need for AGI... why would you be against that?
- tliltocatl 9mo ago
  Why would the basilisk care about people spending money on what is clearly a dead end?
  - rsynnott 9mo ago
    The basilisk, clearly, will need somewhere discreet to run. Why _not_ TPUs in Dell laptops? It’s not like they’re going to be used for anything else. (I mean, obviously there is no sinister robot god, but if there were you’d expect it to be keen on the production of wasteful/unlikely-to-be-used AI substrate.)
jimt1234 9mo ago
It seems many products (PCs, TVs, cars, kitchen appliances, etc.) have transitioned from "solve for the customer" to "solve for ourselves (product manufacturers) and tell the customer it's for them, even though it's 99% value to us and 1% value to them".
znpy 9mo ago
I saw the latest xps laptops and I’m really intrigued… finally a high end laptop without an nvidia gpu!
davidmurdoch 9mo ago
We do care. We REALLY don't want AI on by default on our PCs.
yndoendo 9mo ago
They still ship their laptops with the Copilot key. Once that is removed then their statement will follow their actions.
- pmontra 9mo ago
  I'd be surprised if Microsoft would sell them Windows licenses or would work with them on drivers if they don't put the Copilot key on the keyboard.
  - bombcar 9mo ago
    What is with Microsoft and demanding a key for every new thing they come up with?
    - ethmarks 9mo ago
      When had Microsoft done this before? For Cortana maybe? I can't recall them ever mandating dedicated physical keys for anything other than the Windows key, but that was over 30 years ago and I assume that's not what you're talking about.
      - bombcar 9mo ago
        Ah, my memory was off - it was PC manufacturers who kept adding more and weird keys (media keys, for example). All I remember is having all sorts of fun trying to get those keys to work at all in Linux; they often were insanely setup and dependent on windows drivers (some would send a combination keystroke, some wouldn't work unless polled, etc).
mrinterweb 9mo ago
Most consumers aren't running LLMs locally. Most people's on-device AI is likely whatever Windows 11 is doing, and Windows 11 AI functionality is going over like a lead balloon. The only open-weight models that can come close to major frontier models require hundreds of gigabytes of high bandwidth RAM/VRAM. Still, your average PC buyer isn't interested in running their own local LLM. The AMD AI Max and Apple M chips are good for that audience. Consumer dedicated GPUs just don't have enough VRAM to load most modern open-weight LLMs. I remember when LLMs were taking off, and open-weight were nipping at the heels of frontier models, people would say there's no moat. The new moat is high bandwidth RAM as we can see from the recent RAM pricing madness.
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
  > your average PC buyer isn't interested in running their own local LLM. This does not fit my observation. It's rather that running one's local LLM is currently far too complicated for the average PC user.
  - AkelaA 9mo ago
    Your average PC buyer doesn’t know what an LLM is, let alone why they should run one locally. They just want a good PC that runs Word and Excel and likely find the fact that Copilot keeps popping up in Word every time they open a new document to be annoying rather than helpful.
havblue 9mo ago
I think the moral of the story is just don't buy any electronics until you absolutely have to now: your laptop, your desktop, your car, your phone, your tv's. Go third party for maintenance when you can. Install Linux when you can. Only buy things that can be maintained and enjoy what you have.
- ericmcer 9mo ago
  I got a new Subaru and the touchscreen is making me insane. I will avoid electronics in cars as much as possible going forward. It literally has a warning that displays every time you start the car: "Watching this screen and making selections while driving can lead to serious accidents". Then you have to press agree before you can use the A/C or stereo. Like oh attempting to turn the air conditioner on in your car can lead to serious accidents? Maybe you should rethink your dashboard instead of pasting a warning absolving you of its negative effects?
  - yeyeyeyeyeyeyee 9mo ago
    It's a liability transfer. Thank corp legal.
    - mjevans 9mo ago
      How about a recall and replacement for that defective dashboard with one that doesn't cause distractions and accidents since it has buttons that can be felt even by someone wearing winter gloves?
  - cmckn 9mo ago
    Usually that legalese goes away after ~30 seconds or when you put it in drive, you rarely have to actually hit “OK”. But I haven’t been in a recent Subaru!
  - mixmastamyk 9mo ago
    Unless you return it and explain why, then you've supported them with your wallet, the most powerful method of support.
lifetimerubyist 9mo ago
> "One thing you'll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first," Dell head of product, Kevin Terwilliger says with a smile. "So, a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC." > "We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome." He's talking about marketing. They're still gonna shove it into anything and everything they can. They just aren't gonna tell you about it.
cheema33 9mo ago
I did use whisper last night to get the captions out of a video file. The standard whisper tool from OpenAI uses CPU. It took more than 20 minutes to fully process a video file that was a little more than an hour long. During that time my 20-Core CPU was pegged at 100% utilization and the fan got very loud. I then downloaded an Intel version that used the NPU. CPUs stayed close to 0% and fans remained quiet. Total task was completed in about 6 minutes. NPUs can be useful for some cases. The AI PC crap is ill thought out however.
- BeetleB 9mo ago
  I suggest trying whisper-cpp if you haven't. It's probably the fastest CPU only version. But yeah, NPUs likely will be faster.
  - Neywiny 9mo ago
    Depending on the part, it's likely the iGPU will be even faster. The new panther lake has iGPUs with either 80% or 250% the performance of the NPU when at the higher end. But on lower end models, it's lower but still within the same performance class
  - satvikpendem 9mo ago
    faster-whisper can be faster in many cases, even on CPU.
    - BeetleB 9mo ago
      Looking at that page, it doesn't seem particularly faster than whisper-cpp, except when using batches - but I'm not clear on what that means. Does it have a command line utility I can embed into my scripts?
      - satvikpendem 9mo ago
        Batching is essentially running multiple instances at once, ie bundling 8 segments and running them simultaneously on the processing unit, but which obviously takes more RAM to do. Notice, however, that if you drop the precision to int8 from fp16, you use basically the same amount of RAM as whisper.cpp yet it completes in a fraction of the time using batching [0]. Yes, if you check their community integrations section on faster-whisper [1], you can see a lot of different CLIs, GUIs, and libraries. I recommend WhisperX [2], it's the most complete CLI so far and has features like diarization which whisper.cpp does not have in a production-ready capacity. [0] https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper#benchmark https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper#benchmark [1] https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper#community-integrations https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper#community-integrat... [2] https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX
mrandish 9mo ago
Seems savvy of Dell. With empty AI hype now the default, saying the quiet part out loud is a way to stand out. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean Dell will stop taking MSFT's marketing money to pre-sell the Right-Ctrl key on my keyboard as the "CoPilot" key. I wouldn't hate this so much if it was just a labeling thing. Unfortunately, MSFT changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil. More technical detail: The CoPilot key is really sending: Shift+Alt+Win+Ctrl+F23 which Windows now uses as the shortcut to run the CoPilot application. When you remap the CoPilot key to right-Ctrl only the F23 is being remapped to right-Ctrl. Due to the way Windows works and because MSFT is now sending F23 DOWN and then F23 UP when the CoPilot key has only been pressed Down but not yet released, those other modifiers remain pressed down when our remapped key is sent. I don't know if this was intentional on MSFT's part to break full remapping or if it's a bug. Either way, it's certainly non-standard and completely unnecessary. It would still work for calling the CoPilot app to wait for the CoPilot key to be released to send the F23 KEY UP event. That's the standard method and would allow full remapping of the key. But instead, when you press CoPilot after remapping it to Right-Ctrl... the keys actually being sent are: Shift+Alt+Win+Right-Ctrl (there are also some other keypresses in there that are masked). If your use case doesn't care that Shift, Alt and Win are also pressed with Right-Ctrl then it'll seem fine - but it isn't. Your CoPilot key remapped to Right-Ctrl no longer works like it did before or like Left-Ctrl still works (sending no other modifiers). Unfortunately, a lot of shortcuts (including several common Windows desktop shortcuts) involve Ctrl in combination with other modifiers. Those shortcuts still work with Left-Ctrl but not CoPilot remapped to Right-Ctrl. And there's no way to fix it with remapping (whether AutoHotKey, PowerToys, Registry Key, etc). It might be possible to fix it with a service running below the level of Windows with full admin control which intercepts the generated keys before Windows ever sees them - but as far as I know, no one has succeeded in creating that.
mazone 9mo ago
I wonder if Dell will ever understand why consumers don't care.
benrazdev 9mo ago
I'll never forget walking through a tech store and seeing a HP printer that advertised itself as being "AI-powered". I don't know how you advertise a printer to make it exciting to customers but this is just ridiculous. I'm glad that tech companies are finally finding out people won't magically buy their product if they call it AI-powered.
bane 9mo ago
Something I learned on HN years ago was the principle that often something that is riding to the top of the hyper curve is usually not a good product, but a good feature in another product. At CES this year, one of the things that was noted was that "AI" was not being pushed so much as the product, but "things with AI" or "things powered by AI". This change in messaging seems to be aligning with other macro movements around AI in the public zeitgeist (as AI continues to later phases of the hyper curve) that the companies' who've gone all-in on AI are struggling to adapt to. The end-state is to be seen, but it's clear that the present technology around AI has utility, but doesn't seem to have enough utility to lift off the hype curve on an continuously upward slope. Dell is figuring this out, Microsoft is seeing it in their own metrics, Apple and AWS has more or less dipped toes in the pool...I'd wager that we'll see some wild things in the next few years as these big bets unravel into more prosaic approaches that are more realistically aligned with the utility AI is actually providing.
bfrog 9mo ago
NPU is space that would've probably been better put into something like a low power programmable DSP core, which they more or less are depending on which one you are looking at but with some preconceived ideas on how to feed the DSP its data and get the hardware working. You don't get to simply write programs on them usually from what I've seen.
_carbyau_ 9mo ago
Why would "consumers" as a whole care about an AI specific pc? Consumers consciously choosing to play games - or serious CAD/image/video editing - usually note they will want a better GPU. Consumers consciously choosing to use AI/llm? That's a subscription to the main players. I personally would like to run local llm. But this is far from a mainstream view and what counts as an AI PC now isn't going to cut it.
throwaway2037 9mo ago
I'm not a game programmer, but is there a use case for NPUs in gaming? One idea: If you had some kind of open world game, like a modern role playing game, where the NPCs could have non-deterministic conversations (1990s-style: "talk with the villagers") that could be pretty cool. Are NPUs are a good fit for this use case? Does anyone know: How do these vendors (like Dell) think normie retail buyers would use their NPUs?
gaowanlu 9mo ago
Everyone just wants a laptop with the latest NVIDIA graphics card, but also good cooling and a slim design. That's all. People don't care what AI features are built in; that's for Windows and applications.
- gaowanlu 9mo ago
  Consumers will prioritize products with the latest hardware, good performance, and low price.
  - gaowanlu 9mo ago
    In today's economic environment, cost-effectiveness is a primary consideration for consumers.
kittikitti 9mo ago
Consumers could be using AI upwards of 10 hours a day and still say they don't care about it.
idontwantthis 9mo ago
I just don’t know what an AI PC is. Does that mean it does shit I don’t tell it to do?
freakynit 9mo ago
https://hn-discussions.top/ai-pc-skepticism-dell-ces-2026/ https://hn-discussions.top/ai-pc-skepticism-dell-ces-2026/
hamilyon2 9mo ago
When NPU will become available in most systems, we will see learned indexes like in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01208v1 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01208v1 on client side. If file search indexes and such will be replaced by neural networks, this will be small but measurable improvement in battery life, speed and memory usage.

580 points by mossTechnician 9mo ago

Unfortunately, their common sense has been rewarded by the stock tanking 15% in the past month including 4% just today alone. Dell shows why companies don't dare talk poorly of AI, or even talk about AI in a negative way at all. It doesn't matter that it's correct, investors hate this and that's what a ton of companies are mainly focusing on.

bilbo0s 9mo ago
To be fair, Dell has bigger, more fundamental threats out on the horizon right now than consumers not wanting AI. Making consumers want things is fixable in any number of ways. Tariffs?.. Supply chain issues in a fracturing global order?.. .. not so much. Only a couple ways to fix those things, and they all involve nontrivial investments. Even longer term threats are starting to look more plausible these days. Lot of unpredictability out there at the moment.
vitaflo 9mo ago
Should have stayed private. Then they wouldn’t have to care what investors think.
- rchaud 9mo ago
  The whole point of going private is to make the private equity partners a boatload of money by going public again in the future.

weird_trousers 9mo ago

Finally companies understand that consumers do not want AI products, but just better, stronger, and cheaper products. Unfortunately investors are not ready to hear that yet...

neilsimp1 9mo ago
I agree with you, and I don't want anything related to the current AI craze in my life, at all. But when I come on HN and see people posting about AI IDEs and vibe coding and everything, I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing. I cannot explain this.
- CamperBob2 9mo ago
  I cannot explain this. That usually means you're missing something, not that everyone else is.
  - kevinh 9mo ago
    Sometimes, but I didn't get sucked into the crypto/blockchain/NFT hype and feel like that was the right call in hindsight.
    - yeasku 9mo ago
      HN had many phases, crypto, js frameworks, the cloud... The guy coding in C++ still has a great job, he didnt miss anything, is all fucking FOMO.
- walterbell 9mo ago
  https://www.alphanome.ai/post/talking-your-book-the-controversial-practice-in-the-investment-world https://www.alphanome.ai/post/talking-your-book-the-controve...
- add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
  Partly it's these people all trying to make money selling AI tools to each other, and partly there's a lot of people who want to take shortcuts to learning and productivity without thinking or caring about long term consequences, and AI offers that.
- afavour 9mo ago
  I see using AI for coding as a little different. I'm producing something that is designed for a machine to consume and react to. Code is the means by which I express my aims to the machine. With AI there's an extra layer of machine that transforms my written aims into a language any machine can understand. I'm still ambivalent about it, I'm proud of my code. I like to know it inside out. Surrendering all that feels alien to me. But it's also undeniable that AI has sped up a bunch of the boring grunt work I have to do in projects. You can write, say, an OpenAPI spec, some tests and tell the AI to do the rest. It's very, very far from perfect but it remains very useful. But the fact remains that I'm producing something for a machine to consume. When I see people using AI to e.g. write e-mails for them that's where I object: that's communication intended for humans. When you fob that off onto a machine something important is lost.

walterbell 9mo ago

> What we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI .. In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome. Do consumers understand that OEM device price increases are due to AI-induced memory price spike over 100%?

whalesalad 9mo ago

I'm kind of excited about the revival of XPS. The new hardware sounds pretty compelling. I have been longing for a macbook-quality device that I can run Linux on... so eagerly awaiting this.

thesh4d0w 9mo ago
I owned a couple XPS 13 laptops in a row and liked them a lot, until I got one with a touch bar. I returned it after a couple weeks and swapped over the to X1 Carbon. The return back to physical buttons makes the XPS look pretty appealing again.
- xcjs 9mo ago
  This is exactly what I was hoping to see. I also returned one I ordered with the feedback that I needed physical function keys and the touchbar just wasn't cutting it for me.
rationalist 9mo ago
Sweet, TIL! I love my 2020 XPS. The keyboard keys on mine do not rattle, but I have seen newer XPS keyboard keys that do rattle. I hope they fixed that.

m348e912 9mo ago

Protip, if you are considering a dell xps laptop, consider the dell precision laptop workstation instead which is the business version of the consumer level xps. It also looks like names are being changed, and the business laptops are going with a dell pro (essential/premium/plus/max) naming convention.

ishtanbul 9mo ago
I have the precision 5690 (the 16inch model) with a ultra 7 processor and 4k touchscreen (2025 model). It is very heavy, but its very powerful. My main gripe is that the battery life is very bad, and it has a 165 watt charger, which wont work on most planes. So if you fly a lot for work, this laptop will die on you unless you bring a lower wattage charger. It also doesn't sleep properly. I often find it in my bag hours after closing it and the fans are going at full blast. It should have a 4th usb port (like the smaller version!). Otherwise I have no complaints (other than about windows 11!).
- microflash 9mo ago
  After using several Precisions at work, I now firmly believe that Dell does not know how to cool their workstations properly. They are all heavy, pretty bad at energy efficiency and run extremely hot (I use my work machine laid belly up in summer since fans are always on). I’d take a ThinkPad or Mac any day over any Dell.
  - hallmason17 9mo ago
    Power hungry intel chips and graphics cards are inconvenient in laptops when it comes to battery life and cooling. It is especially noticeable if you spend any time using an M-series macbook pro, where performance is the same or better, but you get 16 hours of battery life. I prefer to use thinkpads, but apple just has a big technological advantage here that stands out in the UX department. I really hope advances are made quickly by competitors to get similar UX in a more affordable package.
    - deleted 9mo ago

FfejL 9mo ago

> It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't. I wish every consumer product leader would figure this out.

notatoad 9mo ago
I think they will eventually. It’s always been a very incoherent sales pitch that your expensive PCs are packed full of expensive hardware that’s supposed to do AI things, but your cheap PCs that have none of that are still capable of doing 100% of the AI tasks that customers actually care about: accessing chatGPT.
- voidfunc 9mo ago
  Also, what kind of AI tasks is the average person doing? The people thinking about this stuff are detached from reality. For most people a computer is a gateway to talking to friends and family, sharing pictures, browsing social media, and looking up recipes and how-to guides. Maybe they do some tracking of things as well in something like Excel or Google Sheets. Consumer AI has never really made any sense. It's going to end up in the same category of things as 3D TV's, smart appliances, etc.
  - ryandrake 9mo ago
    I don't remember any other time in the tech industry's history when "what companies and CEOs want to push" was less connected to "what customers want." Nobody transformed their business around 3D TVs like current companies are transforming themselves to deliver "AI-everything".
    - walterbell 9mo ago
      If memory shortages make existing products non-viable (e.g. 50% price increases on mini PCs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514794), will consumers flock to new/AI products like OpenAI "pen" or reject those outright?

tpurves 9mo ago

Dell is cooked this year for reasons entirely outside their control. DRAM and storage/drive shortages are causing costs of those to go to the moon. And Dell's 'inventory' light supply chain and narrow margins puts them in a perfect storm of trouble.

dude250711 9mo ago
Anything but admitting that AI king is naked, here on HN...
- cogman10 9mo ago
  What? No, this is a pretty relevant comment that is being directly caused by AI. Consumer PCs and hardware are going to be expensive in 2026 and AI is primarily to blame. You can find examples of CEOs talking about buying up hardware for AI without having a datacenter to run it in. This run on hardware will ultimately drive hardware prices up everywhere. The knock on effect is that hardware manufacturers are likely going to spend less money doing R&D for consumer level hardware. Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars making a 700 core beast for AI workloads in a datacenter? And you can get a nice premium for that product because every AI company is fighting to get any hardware right now.
  - bluGill 9mo ago
    > Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars You might be right, but I suspect not. While the hardware company are willing to do without laptop sales, data centers need the power efficiency as well. Facebook has (well had - this was ~10 years ago when I heard it) a team of engineers making their core code faster because in some places a 0.1% speed improvement across all their servers results in saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per month (sources won't give real numbers but reading between the lines this seems about right) on the power bill. Hardware that can do more with less power thus pays for itself very fast in the data center. Also cooling chips internally is often a limit of speed, so if you can make your chip just a little more efficient it can do more. Many CPUs will disable parts of the CPU not in use just to save that heat, if you can use more of the CPU that translates to more work done and in turn makes you better than the competition. Of course the work must be done, so data centers will sometimes have to settle for whatever they can get. Still they are always looking for faster chips that use less power because that will show up on the bottom line very fast.

yalogin 9mo ago

They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time. The current froth is all about AI infrastructure not consumer devices.

bluGill 9mo ago
Even customers who care about AI (or perhaps should...) have other concerns. With the RAM shortage coming up many customers may choose to do without AI features to save money even though they want it at a lower price.
jorvi 9mo ago
The only thing Apple is behind on in the AI race is LLMs. They've been vastly ahead of everyone else with things like text OCR, image element recognition / extraction, microphone noise suppression, etc. iPhones have had these features 2-5 years before Android did.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  Kind of a big "only" though. Siri is still shit and it's been 15 years since initial release.
  - 0x38B 9mo ago
    When I'm driving and tell Siri, "Call <family member name>", sometimes instead of calling, it says, "To who?", and I can't get it to call no matter what I do.
  - asdff 9mo ago
    Amazing how its been 15 years and it still can't discern 15 from 50 when you talk to it.
- 9mo ago

beloch 9mo ago

"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome." -------------- What we're seeing here is that "AI" lacks appeal as a marketing buzzword. This probably shouldn't be surprising. It's a term that's been in the public consciousness for a very long time thanks to fiction, but more frequently with negative connotations. To most, AI is Skynet, not the thing that helps you write a cover letter. If a buzzword carries no weight, then drop it. People don't care if a computer has a NPU for AI any more than they care if a microwave has a low-loss waveguide. They just care that it will do the things they want it to do. For typical users, AI is just another algorithm under the hood and out of mind. What Dell is doing is focusing on what their computers can do for people rather than the latest "under the hood" thing that lets them do it. This is probably going to work out well for them.

JohnFen 9mo ago
> People don't care if a computer has a NPU I actually do care, on a narrow point. I have no use for an NPU and if I see that a machine includes one, I immediately think that machine is overpriced for my needs.
- Tsiklon 9mo ago
  Alas NPUs are in essentially all modern CPUs by Intel and AMD. It’s not a separate bit of silicon, it’s on the same package as the CPU
  - JohnFen 9mo ago
    True. But if a company is specifically calling out that their machine has an NPU, I assume they're also adding an surcharge for it above what they would charge if they didn't mention it. I'm not claiming that this is a rational stance, only that I take "NPU" as a signal for "overpriced".

pier25 9mo ago

Consumers are not idiots. We know all this AI PC crap is it's mostly a useless gimmick. One day it will be very cool to run something like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini locally in our phones but we're still very, very far away from that.

MBCook 9mo ago
It’s today’s 3D TVs. It’s something investors got all hyped up about that everybody “has to have“. There is useful functionality there. Apple has had it for years, so have others. But at the time they weren’t calling it “AI“ because that wasn’t the cool word. I also think most people associate AI with ChatGPT or other conversational things. And I’m not entirely sure I want that on my computer. But some of the things Apple and others have done that aren’t conversational are very useful. Pervasive OCR on Windows and Mac is fantastic, for example. You could brand that as AI. But you don’t really need to no one cares if you do or not.
- pier25 9mo ago
  > Pervasive OCR on Windows and Mac is fantastic, for example. I agree. Definitely useful features but still a far cry from LLMs which is what the average consumer identifies as AI.
cco 9mo ago
Not that far away, you can run a useful model on flagship phones today, something around GPT 3.5's level. So we're probably only a few years out from today's SOTA models on our phones.
- trympet 9mo ago
  > you can run a useful model on flagship phones today How?
  - cco 9mo ago
    Cactus Chat is probably the easiest. Just download the app and it has a few built-in model options. The best of those is probably Gemma-3 1B Q4 but on my Pixel 10 Pro I find the best performing model it can reasonably run is Qwen3 8B Q4_K_M. You can download and run any GGUF compatible model with that app.

helsinkiandrew 9mo ago

They’ve just realised that AI won’t be in the PC, but on a server. Where Dell are heavily selling into - “AI datacenter” counted for about 40% of there infrastructure revenue

kingstnap 9mo ago

NPUs are just kind of weird and difficult to develop for and integration is usually done poorly. Some useful applications do exist. Particularly grammar checkers and I think windows recall could be useful. But we don't currently have these designed well such that it makes sense.

criddell 9mo ago
A while ago I tried to figure out which APIs use the NPU and it was confusing to say the least. They have something called the Windows Copilot Runtime but that seems to be a blanket label and from their announcement I couldn't really figure out how the NPU ties into it. It seems like the NPU is used if it's there but isn't necessary for most things.

scblock 9mo ago

This should have been obvious to anyone paying any attention whatsoever, long before any one of these computers launched as a product. But we can't make decisions on product or marketing based on reality or market fit. No, we have to make decisions on the investor buzzword faith market. Hence the large percentage of Youtube ads I saw being "with a Dell AI PC, powered by Intel..." here are some lies.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

GeekyBear 9mo ago

There is one feature that I do care about. Local speech recognition is genuinely useful and much more private than server based options.

delaminator 9mo ago
Whisper works great, even the medium model is pretty good. But I use the 3Gb all day every day. I built a personal voice agent https://github.com/lawless-m/TheHand https://github.com/lawless-m/TheHand

Traster 9mo ago

Fundamentally when you think about it, what people know today as AI are things like ChatGPT and all of those products run on cloud infrastructure mainly via the browser or an app. So it makes perfect sense that customers just get confused when you say "This is an AI PC". Like, what a weird thing to say - my smartphone can do ChatGPT why would I buy a PC to do that. It's just a totally confusing selling point. So you ask the question why is it an AI PC and then you have to talk about NPUs, which apart from anything else are confusing (Neural what?) but bring you back to this conversation: What is an NPU? Oh it's a special bit of hardware to do AI. Oh ok, does it run ChatGPT? Well no, that still happens in the cloud. Ok, so why would I buy this?

deleted 9mo ago

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xnx 9mo ago

> It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't. This seems like a cop out for saving cost by putting Intel GPUs in laptops instead of Nvidia.

recursive 9mo ago
How is saving costs a cop out? That's a genuine goal of most businesses.
rchaud 9mo ago
Discrete GPU + laptop means 2 hours of battery life. The average customer isn't buying those.

tedmcory77 9mo ago

People dont want feature x (AI). They want problem(s) solved.

mjbale116 9mo ago

On the same note, whats going on with Dell's marketing lately? Dell, Dell Pro, Dell Premium, Dell _Pro_ Premium Dell Max, Dell _Pro_ max... They went and added capacitive keys on the XPS? Why would you do this... A lot of decisions that do not make sense to me.

rationalist 9mo ago
It's a lot easier for people to spend more money when they are confused about their choices.
Tajnymag 9mo ago
I thought they actually dumbed down the model names. Basically the more adjactives the laptop has, the higher the model is. Now the machines can have pronounciable names and just add generation number every year or so. Sure, the original numbering system did make sense, but you had to Google what the system meant. Now, it's kind of intuitive, even though the it's just a different permutation of the same words?
seabrookmx 9mo ago
The new XPS's that they just teased at CES bring back the real function keys and have a newly designed aluminum unibody. I've shied away from Dell for a bit because I had two XPS 15's that had swelling batteries. But the new machines look pretty sweet!

almosthere 9mo ago

The typical consumer doesn't care about any checkbox feature. They just care if they can play the games they care about and word/email/netflix. That being said, netflix would be an impossible app without gfx acceleration APIs that are enabled by specific CPU and/or GPU instruction sets. The typical consumer doesn't care about those CPU/GPU instruction sets. At least they don't care to know about them. However they would care if they didn't exist and Netflix took 1 second per frame to render. Similar to AI - they don't care about AI until some killer app that they DO care about needs local AI. There is no such killer app. But they're coming. However as we turn the corner into 2026 it's becoming extremely clear that local AI is never going to be enough for the coming wave of AI requirements. AI is going to require 10-15 simultaneous LLM calls or GenAI requests. These are things that won't do well on local AI ever.

rasz 9mo ago
Even i3 cpu is perfectly fine software decoding 2160p H264, the only consequence is about 2x higher power draw compared to NVidia decoder.
AkelaA 9mo ago
Most regular people use AI to get restaurant recommendations or cheat on homework. I think you massively overestimate just how many people actually care about the more advanced features of AI services.
- poopooracoocoo 9mo ago
  That's not done on an NPU though, even if it could be. That's all done on companies' servers and won't be changing.

metalman 9mo ago

I already have experience with intermitent wipers, they are impossible to use reliably, a newer car I have made the intermitent wipers fully automatic, and impossible to dissable.Now they have figured out how to make intermitent wipers talk, and want to put them in everything. I forsee a future where humanity has total power and fine controll over reality, where finaly after hundreds of years, there is weather controll good enough to make it rain exactly the right amount for intermitent wipers to work properly, but we are not there yet.

4d4m 9mo ago

Happy Dell takes user feedback to heart

disfictional 9mo ago

As someone who spent a year writing an SDK specifically for AI PCs, it always felt like a solution in search of a problem. Like watching dancers in bunny suits sell CPUs, if the consumer doesn't know the pain point you're fixing, they won't buy your product.

martinald 9mo ago
Tbh it's been the same in Windows PCs since forever. Like MMX in the Pentium 1 days - was marketed as basically essential for anything "multimedia" but provided somewhat between no and minimal speedup (v little software was compiled for it). It's quite similar with Apple's neural engine, which afiak is used very little for LLMs, even for coreML. I know I don't think I ever saw it being used in asitop. And I'm sure whatever was using it (facial recognition?) could have easily ran on GPU with no real efficiency loss.
- Maxatar 9mo ago
  I have to disagree with you about MMX. It's possible a lot of software didn't target it explicitly but on Windows MMX was very widely used as it was integrated into DirectX, ffmpeg, GDI, the initial MP3 libraries (l3codeca which was used by Winamp and other popular MP3 players) and the popular DIVX video codec.
  - bombcar 9mo ago
    MMX had a chicken/egg problem; it did take awhile to "take off" so early adopters really didn't see much from it, but by the time it was commonplace it was doing some work.
  - martinald 9mo ago
    ffmpeg didn't come out for 4 years after the MMX brand was introduced! Of course MMX was widely used later but at the time it was complete marketing.
  - conductr 9mo ago
    Similar to AI PC's right now, very few consumers cared in late 90s. Majority weren't power users creating/editing videos/audio/graphics. Majority of consumers were just consuming and they never had a need to seek out MMX for that, their main consumption bottleneck was likely bandwidth. If they used MMX indirectly in Winamp or DirectX, they probably had no clue. Today, typical consumers aren't even using a ton of AI or enough to even make them think to buy specialized hardware for it. Maybe that changes but it's the current state.

pseudosavant 9mo ago

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

kenjackson 9mo ago
I'd love to see a thorough breakdown of what these local NPUs can really do. I've had friends ask me about this (as the resident computer expert) and I really have no idea. Everything I see advertised for (blurring, speech to text, etc...) are all things that I never felt like my non-NPU machine struggled with. Is there a single remotely killer application for local client NPUs?
- martinald 9mo ago
  The problem is essentially memory bandiwdth afiak. Simplifying a lot in my reply, but most NPUs (all?) do not have faster memory bandwidth than the GPU. They were originally designed when ML models were megabytes not gigabytes. They have a small amount of very fast SRAM (4MB I want to say?). LLM models _do not_ fit into 4MB of SRAM :). And LLM inference is heavily memory bandwidth bound (reading input tokens isn't though - so it _could_ be useful for this in theory, but usually on device prompts are very short). So if you are memory bandwidth bound anyway and the NPU doesn't provide any speedup on that front, it's going to be no faster. But has loads of other gotchas so no real "SDK" format for them. Note the idea isn't bad per se, it has real efficiencies when you do start getting compute bound (eg doing multiple parallel batches of inference at once), this is basically what TPUs do (but with far higher memory bandwidth).
  - zozbot234 9mo ago
    NPUs are still useful for LLM pre-processing and other compute-bound tasks. They will waste memory bandwidth during LLM generation phase (even in the best-case scenario where they aren't physically bottlenecked on bandwidth to begin with, compared to the iGPU) since they generally have to read padded/dequantized data from main memory as they compute directly on that, as opposed to being able to unpack it in local registers like iGPUs can. > usually on device prompts are very short Sure, but that might change with better NPU support, making time-to-first-token quicker with larger prompts.

GuB-42 9mo ago

WTF is an "AI PC"? Most of "AI" happens on the internet, in big datacenters, your PC has nothing to do with that. It will more likely confuse users who don't understand why they need a special PC when any PC can access chatgpt.com. Now, for some who actually want to do AI locally, they are not going to look for "AI PCs". They are going to look for specific hardware, lots of RAM, big GPUs, etc... And it is not a very common use case anyways. I have an "AI laptop", and even I, who run a local model from time to time and bought that PC with my own money don't know what it means, probably some matrix multiplication hardware that I have not idea how to take advantage of. It was a good deal for the specs it had, that's the only thing I cared for, the "AI" part was just noise. At least a "gaming PC" means something. I expect high power, a good GPU, a CPU with good single-core performance, usually 16 to 32 GB of RAM, high refresh rate monitor, RGB lighting. But "AI PC", no idea.

zokier 9mo ago
AI PC in MS parlance is a computer with 40+ TOPS NPU built-in. Yes, they are intended for local AI applications.

Galanwe 9mo ago

I have a "Copilot" button on my new ThinkPad. I have yet to understand what it does that necessitates a dedicated button. On Linux it does nothing, on Windows it tells me I need an Office 365 plan to use it. Like... What the hell... They literally placed a paywalled Windows only physical button on my laptop. What next, an always-on screen for ads next to the trackpad?

rzzzt 9mo ago
It's equivalent to Win + Shift + F23 so you can map it to some useful action if you have a suitable utility at hand.
hacker_homie 9mo ago
I used https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd with ``` [ids] * [main] f23 = oneshot(control) [control] toggle(control) ``` To turn it back into a ctrl key
immibis 9mo ago
Good news: Office 365 has been renamed to Microsoft 365 Copilot. I'm serious. They dropped the Office branding and their office suite is now called Copilot. This is good news because it means the Copilot button opens Copilot, which is exactly what you'd expect it to do.

d--b 9mo ago

People don't want AI PC, cause they don't want to spend 5000 bucks for something that's half as good as the free version of ChatGPT. But we've been there before. Computers are going to get faster for cheaper, and LLMs are going to be more optimized, cause right now, they do a ton of useless calculations for sure. There's a market, just not right now.

mirekrusin 9mo ago

Isn't the only AI PC a Mac Studio?

fhd2 9mo ago
According to ancient Apple ads, a "Mac" is not a "PC".
- mghackerlady 9mo ago
  Macs fundamentally can't be personal computers since they're entirely controlled by apple. Any computer running nonfree software can't be a personal one
  - kube-system 9mo ago
    lol so the IBM PC isn't a PC?
    - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
      There are free BIOSes.
      - kube-system 9mo ago
        IBM didn't ship any on their PC
        wizzwizz4 9mo ago
        So? You can replace the ROM chip (or flash it, if it's an EEPROM). The whole point of free software is that you don't have to limit yourself to what the manufacturer says you can do.
        kube-system 9mo ago
        I was responding to: > Any computer running nonfree software can't be a personal one

rsynnott 9mo ago

Well, yes, Dell, everyone knows that, but it is _most_ improper to actually _say_ it. What would the basilisk think?!

tantalor 9mo ago
Yes, everybody should buy an AI PC. Buy two! For all we know, that's exactly what we need for AGI... why would you be against that?
tliltocatl 9mo ago
Why would the basilisk care about people spending money on what is clearly a dead end?
- rsynnott 9mo ago
  The basilisk, clearly, will need somewhere discreet to run. Why _not_ TPUs in Dell laptops? It’s not like they’re going to be used for anything else. (I mean, obviously there is no sinister robot god, but if there were you’d expect it to be keen on the production of wasteful/unlikely-to-be-used AI substrate.)

jimt1234 9mo ago

It seems many products (PCs, TVs, cars, kitchen appliances, etc.) have transitioned from "solve for the customer" to "solve for ourselves (product manufacturers) and tell the customer it's for them, even though it's 99% value to us and 1% value to them".

znpy 9mo ago

I saw the latest xps laptops and I’m really intrigued… finally a high end laptop without an nvidia gpu!

davidmurdoch 9mo ago

We do care. We REALLY don't want AI on by default on our PCs.

yndoendo 9mo ago

They still ship their laptops with the Copilot key. Once that is removed then their statement will follow their actions.

pmontra 9mo ago
I'd be surprised if Microsoft would sell them Windows licenses or would work with them on drivers if they don't put the Copilot key on the keyboard.
- bombcar 9mo ago
  What is with Microsoft and demanding a key for every new thing they come up with?
  - ethmarks 9mo ago
    When had Microsoft done this before? For Cortana maybe? I can't recall them ever mandating dedicated physical keys for anything other than the Windows key, but that was over 30 years ago and I assume that's not what you're talking about.
    - bombcar 9mo ago
      Ah, my memory was off - it was PC manufacturers who kept adding more and weird keys (media keys, for example). All I remember is having all sorts of fun trying to get those keys to work at all in Linux; they often were insanely setup and dependent on windows drivers (some would send a combination keystroke, some wouldn't work unless polled, etc).

mrinterweb 9mo ago

Most consumers aren't running LLMs locally. Most people's on-device AI is likely whatever Windows 11 is doing, and Windows 11 AI functionality is going over like a lead balloon. The only open-weight models that can come close to major frontier models require hundreds of gigabytes of high bandwidth RAM/VRAM. Still, your average PC buyer isn't interested in running their own local LLM. The AMD AI Max and Apple M chips are good for that audience. Consumer dedicated GPUs just don't have enough VRAM to load most modern open-weight LLMs. I remember when LLMs were taking off, and open-weight were nipping at the heels of frontier models, people would say there's no moat. The new moat is high bandwidth RAM as we can see from the recent RAM pricing madness.

aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
> your average PC buyer isn't interested in running their own local LLM. This does not fit my observation. It's rather that running one's local LLM is currently far too complicated for the average PC user.
- AkelaA 9mo ago
  Your average PC buyer doesn’t know what an LLM is, let alone why they should run one locally. They just want a good PC that runs Word and Excel and likely find the fact that Copilot keeps popping up in Word every time they open a new document to be annoying rather than helpful.

havblue 9mo ago

I think the moral of the story is just don't buy any electronics until you absolutely have to now: your laptop, your desktop, your car, your phone, your tv's. Go third party for maintenance when you can. Install Linux when you can. Only buy things that can be maintained and enjoy what you have.

ericmcer 9mo ago
I got a new Subaru and the touchscreen is making me insane. I will avoid electronics in cars as much as possible going forward. It literally has a warning that displays every time you start the car: "Watching this screen and making selections while driving can lead to serious accidents". Then you have to press agree before you can use the A/C or stereo. Like oh attempting to turn the air conditioner on in your car can lead to serious accidents? Maybe you should rethink your dashboard instead of pasting a warning absolving you of its negative effects?
- yeyeyeyeyeyeyee 9mo ago
  It's a liability transfer. Thank corp legal.
  - mjevans 9mo ago
    How about a recall and replacement for that defective dashboard with one that doesn't cause distractions and accidents since it has buttons that can be felt even by someone wearing winter gloves?
- cmckn 9mo ago
  Usually that legalese goes away after ~30 seconds or when you put it in drive, you rarely have to actually hit “OK”. But I haven’t been in a recent Subaru!
- mixmastamyk 9mo ago
  Unless you return it and explain why, then you've supported them with your wallet, the most powerful method of support.

lifetimerubyist 9mo ago

> "One thing you'll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first," Dell head of product, Kevin Terwilliger says with a smile. "So, a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC." > "We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome." He's talking about marketing. They're still gonna shove it into anything and everything they can. They just aren't gonna tell you about it.

cheema33 9mo ago

I did use whisper last night to get the captions out of a video file. The standard whisper tool from OpenAI uses CPU. It took more than 20 minutes to fully process a video file that was a little more than an hour long. During that time my 20-Core CPU was pegged at 100% utilization and the fan got very loud. I then downloaded an Intel version that used the NPU. CPUs stayed close to 0% and fans remained quiet. Total task was completed in about 6 minutes. NPUs can be useful for some cases. The AI PC crap is ill thought out however.

BeetleB 9mo ago
I suggest trying whisper-cpp if you haven't. It's probably the fastest CPU only version. But yeah, NPUs likely will be faster.
- Neywiny 9mo ago
  Depending on the part, it's likely the iGPU will be even faster. The new panther lake has iGPUs with either 80% or 250% the performance of the NPU when at the higher end. But on lower end models, it's lower but still within the same performance class
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  faster-whisper can be faster in many cases, even on CPU.
  - BeetleB 9mo ago
    Looking at that page, it doesn't seem particularly faster than whisper-cpp, except when using batches - but I'm not clear on what that means. Does it have a command line utility I can embed into my scripts?
    - satvikpendem 9mo ago
      Batching is essentially running multiple instances at once, ie bundling 8 segments and running them simultaneously on the processing unit, but which obviously takes more RAM to do. Notice, however, that if you drop the precision to int8 from fp16, you use basically the same amount of RAM as whisper.cpp yet it completes in a fraction of the time using batching [0]. Yes, if you check their community integrations section on faster-whisper [1], you can see a lot of different CLIs, GUIs, and libraries. I recommend WhisperX [2], it's the most complete CLI so far and has features like diarization which whisper.cpp does not have in a production-ready capacity. [0] https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper#benchmark https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper#benchmark [1] https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper#community-integrations https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper#community-integrat... [2] https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX

mrandish 9mo ago

Seems savvy of Dell. With empty AI hype now the default, saying the quiet part out loud is a way to stand out. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean Dell will stop taking MSFT's marketing money to pre-sell the Right-Ctrl key on my keyboard as the "CoPilot" key. I wouldn't hate this so much if it was just a labeling thing. Unfortunately, MSFT changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil. More technical detail: The CoPilot key is really sending: Shift+Alt+Win+Ctrl+F23 which Windows now uses as the shortcut to run the CoPilot application. When you remap the CoPilot key to right-Ctrl only the F23 is being remapped to right-Ctrl. Due to the way Windows works and because MSFT is now sending F23 DOWN and then F23 UP when the CoPilot key has only been pressed Down but not yet released, those other modifiers remain pressed down when our remapped key is sent. I don't know if this was intentional on MSFT's part to break full remapping or if it's a bug. Either way, it's certainly non-standard and completely unnecessary. It would still work for calling the CoPilot app to wait for the CoPilot key to be released to send the F23 KEY UP event. That's the standard method and would allow full remapping of the key. But instead, when you press CoPilot after remapping it to Right-Ctrl... the keys actually being sent are: Shift+Alt+Win+Right-Ctrl (there are also some other keypresses in there that are masked). If your use case doesn't care that Shift, Alt and Win are also pressed with Right-Ctrl then it'll seem fine - but it isn't. Your CoPilot key remapped to Right-Ctrl no longer works like it did before or like Left-Ctrl still works (sending no other modifiers). Unfortunately, a lot of shortcuts (including several common Windows desktop shortcuts) involve Ctrl in combination with other modifiers. Those shortcuts still work with Left-Ctrl but not CoPilot remapped to Right-Ctrl. And there's no way to fix it with remapping (whether AutoHotKey, PowerToys, Registry Key, etc). It might be possible to fix it with a service running below the level of Windows with full admin control which intercepts the generated keys before Windows ever sees them - but as far as I know, no one has succeeded in creating that.

mazone 9mo ago

I wonder if Dell will ever understand why consumers don't care.

benrazdev 9mo ago

I'll never forget walking through a tech store and seeing a HP printer that advertised itself as being "AI-powered". I don't know how you advertise a printer to make it exciting to customers but this is just ridiculous. I'm glad that tech companies are finally finding out people won't magically buy their product if they call it AI-powered.

bane 9mo ago

Something I learned on HN years ago was the principle that often something that is riding to the top of the hyper curve is usually not a good product, but a good feature in another product. At CES this year, one of the things that was noted was that "AI" was not being pushed so much as the product, but "things with AI" or "things powered by AI". This change in messaging seems to be aligning with other macro movements around AI in the public zeitgeist (as AI continues to later phases of the hyper curve) that the companies' who've gone all-in on AI are struggling to adapt to. The end-state is to be seen, but it's clear that the present technology around AI has utility, but doesn't seem to have enough utility to lift off the hype curve on an continuously upward slope. Dell is figuring this out, Microsoft is seeing it in their own metrics, Apple and AWS has more or less dipped toes in the pool...I'd wager that we'll see some wild things in the next few years as these big bets unravel into more prosaic approaches that are more realistically aligned with the utility AI is actually providing.

bfrog 9mo ago

NPU is space that would've probably been better put into something like a low power programmable DSP core, which they more or less are depending on which one you are looking at but with some preconceived ideas on how to feed the DSP its data and get the hardware working. You don't get to simply write programs on them usually from what I've seen.

_carbyau_ 9mo ago

Why would "consumers" as a whole care about an AI specific pc? Consumers consciously choosing to play games - or serious CAD/image/video editing - usually note they will want a better GPU. Consumers consciously choosing to use AI/llm? That's a subscription to the main players. I personally would like to run local llm. But this is far from a mainstream view and what counts as an AI PC now isn't going to cut it.

throwaway2037 9mo ago

I'm not a game programmer, but is there a use case for NPUs in gaming? One idea: If you had some kind of open world game, like a modern role playing game, where the NPCs could have non-deterministic conversations (1990s-style: "talk with the villagers") that could be pretty cool. Are NPUs are a good fit for this use case? Does anyone know: How do these vendors (like Dell) think normie retail buyers would use their NPUs?

gaowanlu 9mo ago

Everyone just wants a laptop with the latest NVIDIA graphics card, but also good cooling and a slim design. That's all. People don't care what AI features are built in; that's for Windows and applications.

gaowanlu 9mo ago
Consumers will prioritize products with the latest hardware, good performance, and low price.
- gaowanlu 9mo ago
  In today's economic environment, cost-effectiveness is a primary consideration for consumers.

kittikitti 9mo ago

Consumers could be using AI upwards of 10 hours a day and still say they don't care about it.

idontwantthis 9mo ago

I just don’t know what an AI PC is. Does that mean it does shit I don’t tell it to do?

freakynit 9mo ago

https://hn-discussions.top/ai-pc-skepticism-dell-ces-2026/ https://hn-discussions.top/ai-pc-skepticism-dell-ces-2026/

hamilyon2 9mo ago

When NPU will become available in most systems, we will see learned indexes like in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01208v1 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01208v1 on client side. If file search indexes and such will be replaced by neural networks, this will be small but measurable improvement in battery life, speed and memory usage.