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 1. Hardware

Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had
in maybe 5 years

News
By Dave James published 6 January 2026

"A bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC."

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Dell COO Jeff Clarke at its CES 2026 pr-briefing
(Image credit: Dell | Alienware)
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The unshakable presence of AI has been an unwelcome companion of my
job for the past few years, but it sure feels like longer. It's not
even like it's some excitingly malevolent artificial mind with
tendrils of influence weaving its way throughout my world. That would
at least be satisfying from a sci-fi perspective. No, what I've had
to deal with can barely write, definitely cannot count, and has only
just figured out what fingers are.

Yet it's been something that has pervading every product
announcement, presentation, or pre-briefing I've been a part of in
recent times from any company even tangentially related to tech. To
the point where I now have a bullshit AI bingo card I fill out just
to distract myself from the barely resistible desire to stab a pen
through my own hand just to feel something real.

 

Every new piece of technology, whether that's a laptop, graphics
card, mouse, keyboard, BBQ, whatever, is now presented as being
powered by AI or comes with an AI assistant, or just has an 'AI'
sticker on the box.

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CES 2026

The CES logo on display at the show.

(Image credit: Future)

Catch up with CES 2026: We're on the ground in sunny Las Vegas
covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names
in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.

So thank you, Dell, for making your CES 2026 pre-briefing so
blessedly free of effusive AI chat that I just had to mention it.

It started off with Dell vice chairman and COO, Jeff Clarke, taking
to a small stage to talk about the state of the industry and where
Dell and its Alienware sub-brand is going this year. He talks
tariffs, the slow transitioning of the industry (he says CPU, but I'm
presuming he meant OS and Windows 10 - 11), and then "we have this
un-met promise of AI, and the expectation of AI driving end user
demand," as well as the fact that "we're about ready to enter 2026
with a memory shortage that is pretty significant."

Clarke and his co-presenters then go on to introduce the return of
the XPS laptop lineup, some new high-end ultraslim Alienware laptops,
as well as some entry-level Alienware laptops (cheap Alienwares?
Really?), new spins of its Area-51 desktops, and a handful of new
monitors.

All of this is very "consumer-first" and aimed at dialling in to both
expand the numbers of people using Dell/Alienware tech and the areas
in which it operates. And the only mention of AI in the entire thing
is Jeff's little line at the beginning. It's clear, concise, focused
on the tech and, in the Q&A that followed, refreshingly honest.

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"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."

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.

Dell's new Alienware ultraslim and entry-level laptops

(Image credit: Dell | Alienware)


    They're not buying based on AI. In fact I think AI probably
    confuses them more than it helps them.

    Kevin Terwilliger, Dell head of product

"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."

In a way, you could argue that's tantamount to dumbing down the
technology for the end user. But this isn't like withholding
information about the core counts of the chips inside your machine,
or the TGP of the mobile GPU at its heart for fear of confusing some
fictitious customer. There are people who care about the hardware
inside these devices, but it's becoming clear there are precious few
who care about the AI components or theoretical capabilities of those
machines.

The fact that a huge PC brand such as Dell/Alienware has decided to
ditch the AI-first marketing that seems to otherwise permeate
everything--and honestly still permeates--is entirely welcome, very
refreshing, and hopefully the mark of things to come.

Because, until AI becomes a valid, useful technology for the end user
of these devices, and not just some marketing check box or buzzword
for investors, every company ought to take a leaf out of Dell's book
and just keep schtum. And that's honestly not something I've said
many times about the big PC box shifter in the past.

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Hardware Alienware
Dave James
Dave James
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Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the
Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race
2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and
finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year
later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing
for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago,
then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3
among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics
card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter
than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

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