[HN Gopher] Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI b...
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Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've
had in 5 years
Author : mossTechnician
Score : 140 points
Date : 2026-01-07 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| alexb_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Should have stayed private. Then they wouldn't have to care
| what investors think.
| weird_trousers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| https://www.alphanome.ai/post/talking-your-book-the-
| controve...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| > I like to know it inside out. Surrendering all that feels
| alien to me.
|
| It's okay, you'll just forget you were ever able to know
| your code :)
| blibble wrote:
| > I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this
| sort of thing.
|
| this is their aim, along with rabbiting on about
| "inevitability"
|
| once you drop out of the SF/tech-oligarch bubble the advocacy
| drops off
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _I cannot explain this._
|
| That usually means _you 're_ missing something, not that
| everyone else is.
| ashleyn wrote:
| If the AI-based product is suitable for purpose (whatever "for
| purpose" may mean), then it doesn't need to be marketed first
| and foremost as "AI". This strikes me as pandering more to
| investors than consumers, and even signaling that you don't
| value the consumers you sell to, or that you regard the
| company's stock as more of the product than the actual product.
|
| I can see a trend of companies continuing to use AI, but
| instead portraying it to consumers as "advanced search",
| "nondeterministic analysis", "context-aware completion", etc -
| the things you'd actually find useful that AI does very well.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It's basically being used as "see, we keep up with the times"
| label, as there is plenty of propaganda that basically goes
| "move entirely to using AI for everything or you're obsolete"
| m000 wrote:
| The problem is that there are virtually no off-the-shelf local
| AI applications. So they're trying to sell us _expensive_
| hardware with no software that takes advantage of it.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| m348e912 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| FfejL wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If memory shortages make existing products non-viable
| (e.g. 50% price increases on mini PCs,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514794), will
| consumers flock to new/AI products like OpenAI "pen" or
| reject those outright?
| tjr wrote:
| Just off the top of my head of some "consumer" areas that I
| personally encounter...
|
| I don't want AI involved in my laundry machines. The only
| possible exception I could see would be some sort of
| emergency-off system, but I don't think that even needs to
| be "AI". But I don't want AI determining when my laundry is
| adequately washed or dried; I know what I'm doing, and I
| neither need nor want help from AI.
|
| I don't want AI involved in my cooking. Admittedly, I have
| asked ChatGPT for some cooking information (sometimes
| easier than finding it on slop-and-ad-ridden Google), but I
| don't want AI in the oven or in the refrigerator or in the
| stove.
|
| I don't want AI controlling my thermostat. I don't want AI
| controlling my water heater. I don't want AI controlling my
| garage door. I don't want AI balancing my checkbook.
|
| I am totally fine with involving computers and technology
| in these things, but I don't want it to be "AI". I have way
| less trust in nondeterministic neural network systems than
| I do in basic well-tested sensors, microcontrollers, and
| tiny low-level C programs.
| the_snooze wrote:
| A lot of consumer tech needs have been met for decades.
| The problem is that companies aren't able to extract rent
| from all that value.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I do think it makes some sense in limited capacity.
|
| Have some half decent model integrated with OS's builtin
| image editing app so average user can do basic fixing of
| their vacation photos by some prompts
|
| Have some local model with access to files automatically
| tag your photos, maybe even ask some questions and add tags
| based on that and then use that for search ("give me photo
| of that person from last year's vacation"
|
| Similarly with chat records
|
| But once you start throwing it in cloud... people get
| anxious about their data getting lost, or might not exactly
| see the value in subscription
| fragmede wrote:
| You and I live in different bubbles. ChatGPT is the go-to
| for my non-techie friends to ask for advice on basically
| everything. Women asking it for relationship advice and
| medical questions, to guys with business ideas and lawsuit
| stuff.
| ericmcer wrote:
| People will want what LLMs can do they just don't want "AI". I
| think having it pervade products in a much more subtle way is
| the future though.
|
| For example, if you close a youtube browser tab with a comment
| half written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose your
| comment if you close this window")`. It does this if the
| comment is a 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert
| would only happen if the comment seemed important but it would
| readily discard short or nonsensical input. That is really
| difficult to do in traditional software but is something an LLM
| could do with low effort. The end result is I only have to deal
| with that annoying popup when I really am glad it is there.
|
| That is a trivial example but you can imagine how a locally run
| LLM that was just part of the SDK/API developers could leverage
| would lead to better UI/UX. For now everyone is making the LLM
| the product, but once we start building products with an LLM as
| a background tool it will be great.
|
| It is actually a really weird time, my whole career we wanted
| to obfuscate implementation and present a clean UI to end
| users, we want them peaking behind the curtain as little as
| possible. Now everything is like "This is built with AI! This
| uses AI!".
| thwarted wrote:
| YouTube could use AI to not recommend videos I've already
| watched, which is apparently a really hard problem.
| everdrive wrote:
| Using such an expensive technology to prevent someone from
| making a stupid mistake on a meaningless endeavor seems like
| a complete waste of time. Users should just be allowed to
| fail.
| plasticsoprano wrote:
| Amen! This is part of the overall societal decline of no
| failing for anyone. You gotta feel the pain to get the
| growth.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Expensive now is super cheap 10 years from now though.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| if somone from 1960 saw the quadrillions of cpu cycles we
| are wasting on absolutely nothing every second, they would
| have an aneurysm
| mossTechnician wrote:
| > if you close a youtube browser tab with a comment half
| written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose your comment
| if you close this window")`. It does this if the comment is a
| 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert would only
| happen if the comment seemed important but it would readily
| discard short or nonsensical input. That is really difficult
| to do in traditional software but is something an LLM could
| do with low effort.
|
| I don't think that's a great example, because you can
| evaluate the length of the content of a text box with a one-
| line "if" statement. You could even expand it to check for
| how long you've been writing, and cache the contents of the
| box with a couple more lines of code.
|
| An LLM, by contrast, requires a significant amount of disk
| space and processing power for this task, and it would be
| unpredictable and difficult to debug, even if we could define
| a threshold for "important"!
| mort96 wrote:
| I think it's an excellent example to be honest. Most of the
| time whenever someone proposes some use case for a large
| language model that's not just being a chat bot, it's
| either a bad idea, or a decent idea that you'd do much
| better with something much less fancy (like this, where
| you'd obviously prefer some length threshold) than with a
| large language model. It's wild how often I've heard people
| say "we should have an AI do X" when X is something that's
| very obviously either a terrible idea or best suited for
| traditional algorithms.
|
| Sort of like how most of the time when people proposed a
| non-cryptocurrency use for "blockchain", they had either
| re-invented Git or re-invented the database. The similarity
| to how people treat "AI" is uncanny.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| > It's wild how often I've heard people say "we should
| have an AI do X" when X is something that's very
| obviously either a terrible idea or best suited for
| traditional algorithms.
|
| Likewise when smartphones were new, everyone and their
| mother was certain that random niche thing that made no
| sense as an app would be a perfect app and that if they
| could just get someone to make the app they'd be rich.
| (And of course ideally, the idea haver of the misguided
| idea would get the lions share of the riches, and the
| programmer would get a slice of pizza and perhaps a
| percentage or two of ownership if the idea haver was
| extra generous.)
| fragmede wrote:
| With Claude Code doing the implementing now, we'll have
| to see who gets which slice of pizza!
| mandevil wrote:
| The difference between "AI" and "linear regression" is
| whether you are talking to a VC or an engineer.
| ambicapter wrote:
| So, like, machine learning. Remember when people used to call
| it AI/ML? Definitely wasn't as much money being spent on it
| back then.
| slg wrote:
| >For example, if you close a youtube browser tab with a
| comment half written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose
| your comment if you close this window")`. It does this if the
| comment is a 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert
| would only happen if the comment seemed important but it
| would readily discard short or nonsensical input. That is
| really difficult to do in traditional software but is
| something an LLM could do with low effort. The end result is
| I only have to deal with that annoying popup when I really am
| glad it is there.
|
| The funny thing is that this exact example could also be used
| by AI skeptics. It's forcing an LLM into a product with
| questionable utility, causing it to cost more to develop, be
| more resource intensive to run, and behave in a manner that
| isn't consistent or reliable. Meanwhile, if there was an
| incentive to tweak that alert based off likelihood of its
| usefulness, there could have always just been a check on the
| length of the text. Suggesting this should be done with an
| LLM as your specific example is evidence that LLMs are
| solutions looking for problems.
| wavemode wrote:
| > Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed
| important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical
| input.
|
| That doesn't sound ideal at all. And in fact highlights
| what's wrong with AI product development nowadays.
|
| AI as a _tool_ is wildly popular. Almost everyone in the
| world uses ChatGPT or knows someone who does. Here 's the
| thing about tools - you use them in a predictable way and
| they give you a predictable result. I ask a question, I get
| an answer. The thing doesn't randomly interject when I'm
| doing other things and I asked it nothing. I swing a hammer,
| it drives a nail. The hammer doesn't decide that the thing
| it's swinging at is vaguely thumb-shaped and self-destruct.
|
| Too many product managers nowadays want AI to not just be a
| tool, they want it to be magic. But magic is distracting, and
| unpredictable, and frequently gets things wrong because it
| doesn't understand the human's intent. That's why people
| mostly find AI integrations confusing and aggravating,
| despite the popularity of AI-as-a-tool.
| bluGill wrote:
| I want magic that works. Sometimes I want a tool to
| interrupt me! I know my route to work so I'm not going to
| ask how I should get there today - but 1% of the time there
| is something wrong with my plan (accident, construction...)
| and I want the tool to say something. I know I need to turn
| right to get someplace, but sometimes as a human I'll say
| left instead: confusing me and the driver where they don't
| turn right, and AI that realizes who made the mistake would
| help.
|
| The hard part is the AI needs to be correct when it doesn't
| something unexpected. I don't know if this is a solvable
| problem, but it is what I want.
| wredcoll wrote:
| > The hammer doesn't decide that the thing it's swinging at
| is vaguely thumb-shaped and self-destruct.
|
| Sawstop literally patented this and made millions and seems
| to have genuinely improved the world.
|
| I personally am a big fan of tools that make it hard to
| mangle my body parts.
| wavemode wrote:
| sawstop is not AI
| wredcoll wrote:
| Sure, where's the line?
|
| If you want to tell me that llms are inherently non-
| deterministic, then sure, but from the point of view of a
| user, a saw stop activating because the wood is wet is
| really not expected either.
| thombles wrote:
| > you can imagine how a locally run LLM that was just part of
| the SDK/API developers could leverage would lead to better
| UI/UX
|
| It's already there for Apple developers:
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels
|
| I saw some presentations about it last year. It's extremely
| easy to use.
| nottorp wrote:
| > The end result is I only have to deal with that annoying
| popup when I really am glad it is there.
|
| Are you sure about that? It will trigger only for what the
| LLM declares important, not what you care about.
|
| Is anyone delivering local LLMs that can actually be trained
| on your data? Or just pre made models for the lowest common
| denominator?
| nkrisc wrote:
| It's because "AI" isn't a feature. "AI" without context is
| meaningless.
|
| Google isn't running ads on TV for Google Docs touting that
| it uses conflict-free replicated data types, or whatever,
| because (almost entirely) no one cares. Most people care the
| same amount about "AI" too.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Honestly some of the recommendations to watch next I get on
| Netflix are pretty good.
|
| No idea if they are AI Netflix doesn't tell and I don't ask.
|
| AI is just a toxic brand at this point IMO.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| There is place for it but it is insanely overrated. AI
| overlords are trying to sell incremental (if in places pretty
| big) improvement in tools as revolution.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Dell are less beholden to shareholder pressure than others,
| Michael Dell owns 50% of the company since it went public
| again.
| nikanj wrote:
| Companies don't really exist to make products for consumers,
| they live to create stock value for investors. And the stock
| market loves AI
| bluGill wrote:
| The stock market as always been about whatever is the fad in
| the short term, and whatever produces value in the long term.
| Today AI is the fad, but investors who care about
| fundamentals have always cared about pleasing customers
| because that is where the real value has always come from.
| (though be careful - not all customers are worth having, some
| wannabe customers should not be pleased)
| pmdr wrote:
| Meanwhile we got Copilot in Notepad.
| tpurves wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Anything but admitting that AI king is naked, here on HN...
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| See also, Crucial exiting the marketplace. That one hit me
| out of left field, since they've been my go-to for RAM for
| decades. Though I also see that as a little bit of what has
| been the story of American businesses: "It's too much
| trouble to make consumer products. Let's just make
| components or sell raw materials, or be middlemen instead.
| No one will notice."
| soupfordummies wrote:
| So it was RAM a couple months ago and now storage/drives are
| going to the moon also?
| stonogo wrote:
| It was RAM a couple months ago, and it continues to be RAM.
| Major RAM manufacturers like SK Hynix are dismantling NAND
| production to increase RAM manufacturing, which is leading to
| sharp price increases for solid-state storage.
| yalogin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Kind of a big "only" though. Siri is still shit and it's been
| 15 years since initial release.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| TTS is absolutely horrible on iOS. I have nearly driven into
| a wall when trying to use it whilst driving and it goofs up
| what I've said terribly. For the love of all things holy,
| will someone at Apple finally fix text to speech? It feels
| like they last touched it in 2016. My phone can run offline
| LLMs and generate images but it can't understand my words.
| nerdjon wrote:
| All of the reporting about Apple being behind on AI is driving
| me insane and I hope that what Dell is doing is finally going
| to be the reversal of this pattern.
|
| The only thing that Apple is really behind on is shoving the
| word (word?) "AI" in your face at every moment when ML has been
| silently running in many parts of their platforms well before
| ChatGPT.
|
| Sure we can argue about Siri all day long and some of that is
| warranted but even the more advanced voice assistants are still
| largely used for the basics.
|
| I am just hoping that this bubble pops or the marketing turns
| around before Apple feels "forced" to do a copilot or recall
| like disaster.
|
| LLM tech isn't going away and it shouldn't, it has its valid
| use cases. But we will be much better when it finally goes back
| into the background like ML always was.
| yalogin wrote:
| Right! Also I don't think Siri is that important to the
| overall user experience on the ecosystem. Sure it's one of
| the most visible use cases but how many people really care
| about that? I don't want to talk out loud to do tasks
| usually, it's helpful in some specific scenarios but not the
| primary use case. The text counterpart of understanding user
| context on the phone is more important even in the context of
| llms, and that what plays into the success of their stack
| going forward
| beloch wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Traster wrote:
| 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?
| xnx wrote:
| > 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.
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