Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not Dell Technologies has joined other PC vendors that bought a ticket on the AI hype train as it prepares to release a swathe of new devices. According to the hardware giant, the industry is at the cusp of a major refresh cycle, and what customers really want is an AI PC (even if they don't know it yet). During a briefing, …
I've quite liked the Dells that I've had over the years. The laptops are great second hand, you can always find replacement parts for older laptops on amazon or ebay, and usually quite cheaply. I refurbished my wife's laptop with a new keyboard and battery for under £50. Try getting parts for an Acer or Asus laptop. When I left my last job I even bought my Dell laptop off them for £200 (for a 2 year old Precision workstation, list price ~£4K). Everything works under linux; its even certified for Ubuntu. My HP laptop wouldn't even boot if you dared change the wifi card for a non HP approved card.
Of course, I never had to deal with the machines coming in. I know a significant percentage arrived DOA, and it was easier to count the number of days a Dell technician was NOT in the office replacing motherboards than the days they were in.
But I called this, two weeks ago. I knew Win12 was going AI, with MS introducing it first in Win11 as a testbed, because the hardware industry would be pushing AI hardware in order to try to stimulate upgrades in this notably-slow update market. It doesn't really matter was us techies want, mass market & volume is where the money is and they're looking to cash in on the AI hype gravy train whilst they can.
The more they push the more I don’t want it
Seriously it is just hype 3D tv etc etc
Yes there are some uses like generating fake content to stir up trouble
I need my pc to do what I want it to do NOT dell or MS or Apple
Eventually everyone will move towards a Linux distro
The cost of things these days have reached ridiculous heights
Ashto5: I need my pc to do what I want it to do NOT dell or MS or Apple
(Calm, soothing, neutral voice.)
You seem to be trying to write an angry posting. Would you like some help?
Maybe you should take a nap and I will do it for you, you will never need to write another post.
Just go and lie down and relax.
I can play soothing music for you.
There, that's better isn't it.
Just go to sleep and all your worries will go away if you do what you are told.
I am here to help.
(And so on)
There is absolutely nothing to worry about here ...
I'm gay, and 'currently available'* so have only myself to blame.
Hmm, maybe there is something to this AI thing after all ...
*By 'currently available' I clearly mean that I am not in a monogamous relationship at the moment**.
** By 'at the moment' I clearly mean "as usual" / "story of my life". Applications, on a postcard, to 'Old, Rich, Desperate and Gullible, Reading UK.
This post has been deleted by its author
Here I sit on my Dell M6800 that was my workstation laptop that I got in about 2014 when I was working for a flash storage startup. When we were bought out by an Apple using company we got to keep our laptops for $100. I replaced the wiped system drive with an M2 drive and later replaced the WiFi card with one that would do WiFi 6. Other than that everything in it is the way it was delivered 10 years ago. We have a lot of old Dell machines at work from when we used to buy instead of leasing. Perhaps we are buying the more professional machines? No consumer in their right mind would want an M6800.
I think it's because the public appears, to a large degree, to have bought into the hype. Manufacturers can see money to be had so are simply encouraging on-going buy-in to the hype, may even have fallen for the hype themselves.
For most prior 'must have' nonsense there have always been plenty of naysayers stepping up to say why it's bullshit and they aren't buying it, in concept or with cash. Currently they aren't being seen nor heard by the public.
Unless current 'AI' proves itself I expect people will eventually come to the conclusion it's not as good as they imagined it would be and will eventually be seen as just another over-rated fad.
It's corporations hungry for profit that are scared at the perspective people will be too poor to be able to buy their stuff so they must hurry to be on the front line. All existing market are almost saturated so anything that might look as a new market starts a frenzy because they know that the first mover usually takes it all.
Every computer is ALREADY infected with the AI malware. Every computer will be an AI spy gadget, whether you like it or not. Most people want nothing to do with it, and understand it's destructive nature, but that's not going to stop California, or the kids. They know if you target the kids, we will have no choice but to adapt it. It's here people, and it's real, no matter how evil, how disturbing, how destructive, or how dysfunctional. Countries that are for more evil are taking full advantage of it as well. The world you knew... is gone. Better get smart, and get off the computer. Turn off, tune out, drop out.
Not so much paranoid as right. I'm on an IT tech site telling people they need to put down the tech and turn off the interwebz because they are being taken advantage of, buy some very unscrupulous actors with a lot of money and power. The world is changing rn. The down votes don't bother me. I appreciate the sentiment tho.
We know that you have 50 individual, unique, unicorn states (and Washington, and a bunch of colonies around the world where you happily tax the residents without giving them the parliamentary representation that a state would get), but to us over here you're all just one amorphous blob.
Best noise cancellation I ever experienced was on military headsets. That was completely analogue. We could stand next to a tank, with the engine running, and couldn't even hear it. We could feel it though. I was developing comms gear for the UK military. You could talk in a normal voice and be heard perfectly and if you took the headsets off you'd have to shout to be heard. Not a microprocessor involved. The comms system used Altera MAX-10000 parts, so it's not like we were all in the past, but the headsets did all the ANR and they were analogue and wonderful. I think one type was by Tannoy.
I don't want or need an AI PC and these hypes are making me think I should leave the IT world behind. I'm sick of all these hypes (microservices, cloud and now AI) which are only being pushed to increase the stock valuation of companies like Microsoft. They don't care about what the user needs or wants.
A friend of mine mentioned that after 30 years Windows Notepad still doesn't have tabs, but there will soon be a version with "AI" built-in it so it can tell me about what I wrote down. Duh! Who needs this shit? No one, of course.
"after 30 years Windows Notepad still doesn't have tabs, but there will soon be a version with "AI" built-in it so it can tell me about what I wrote down. Duh! Who needs this shit? No one, of course."
I'm afraid it does have tabs, though. Well, mine doesn't - my desktop is still on windows 10, and I have no desire to seek out the tabified version, even if it's available to me. But they're a thing in Windows 11.
As I recall, the cockpile explainy "feature" isn't yet in the general release version, and hopefully never will be. But, as you so rightly say, nobody needs it or wants it, so it will probably be forcibly installed by next week.
They're not going to extract much money from me or my family members, since I've migrated them all to Linux Mint.
Seeing Windows run dozens if not hundreds of processes and services which I have no clue what they do makes me think the operating system is untrustworthy and insecure.
I’m sure there will be a good selection of fun and exciting projects spring up to do something useful with that lovely “AI” hardware that we’re all going to be paying a tax on very soon.
Of course, none of these projects will be “AI” - hopefully they will be much more useful than that
"Unless big strides are made for localhost LLMs"
Well that would be useful. The training (using public data) might still happen elsewhere, but using the model could run (using private data) on-prem. You'd still only need a few such machines though, since there's this amazing new tech called a LAN. Perhaps Dell have heard of it?
I'm probably just an out of touch old guy.....but I've not heard anyone out in the Real World (tm) showing any interest in this AI bollocks whatsoever, beyond the odd, cynical comment related to how it might be used to send us more bullshit. I don't think the general public are going to be demanding AI in their tech any time soon. Not until it actually offers the buyers, small business or private individuals something that makes life,or at least their everyday activities, better. And even then there is probably a price boundary.iWatches sell because of all the people who want to check their running distances, sleep patterns and such like. People do talk about that. No one cares how the watch works this out though, not even to the point of questioning how reliable it actually is.
It's never the tech that sells devices, it's the functions
"I'm probably just an out of touch old guy..."
That makes two of us then, though I guess old doesn't have to mean out of touch. I'm aware of one 80+ year old gentleman who is still running his microbusiness and routinely posts to Instagram and now (I find out last week) tiktok. Apparently he gets work via Instagram, and is hoping for the same from tiktok. Speaking as someone who has never used either, I felt very out of touch.
Back on topic. No, I don't see much mention of AI in the real world either, with one exception. A friend's daughter (11) tells me that most of her friends are using chatGPT to "help" with their homework. Just as she has grown up in a world where tablets and smartphones are the norm, they will reach adulthood in a world where chatGPT and its descendants are built in to everything, and they WILL use them. Those of us who prefer to write our own emails, perhaps dabbling with generative AI as an occasionally useful tool, will be left behind by those young whippersnappers who don't know anything else.
There will be no AI revolution, just extremely rapid evolution of tools that today's kids are already using to fiddle their homework. Chances are, their parents are as clueless about AI as our parents were about setting the VCR, and are unlikely to catch up. In less than 10 years, those first year high school students will be entering the workforce, preskilled in tools that their older colleagues have barely heard of.
The rest of us will be quaint, antediluvian relics, our skills replaced by someone who is skilled in telling AI to do something. Of course, that's all very well until the said AI does something entirely different, and our skills are suddenly needed to fix it. But by then in may be too late.
My bet is that we'll see a bunch of kids who do really well in homework and classwork but completely flunk their final exams. This trend will then continue into the workplace, with a sizeable number of new, young employees looking like they know what they're doing right up until the critical point where it becomes obvious they don't.
Queue us old contractors at $3000 a day to fix your 'i cant think for myself problem'
This reminds me of standing ata till and the person behind te till waiting to be told how much change to give. they have no clu how to add and subtract quickly. Im normally telling them and they still wait. I despair.
> I don't think the general public are going to be demanding AI in their tech any time soon.
Who cares what the general public is demanding? Definitely not Dell. The only thing important to them is what new great get-rich-quick scheme marketing can sell their own upper management. It's an internal process.
And the worst part is that those newfangled "AI" PCs will indeed sell, because Dell will push them aggressively (as in "it's the only choice"), and companies like to buy Dell because it's convenient and "safe". So marketing will be proven right(-ish), bonuses will be handed out, and everybody will be happy (except the users, but as I already said nobody cares about them).
It's never the tech that sells devices, it's the functions
Quite true but not completely true. It's the AVAILABILITY that sells devices.
If I'd like to have a product that's, for example, secure and long lived, and all I can buy is an insecure device that lasts 2 years, I'll end up buying what the market offers anyway, because I need one and I cannot have it the way I'd like it.
Then the sellers will boast that "EVERYONE IS BUYING AI PCs". Well of course, we have no choice.
For me that's the death knell for Dell.
I do NOT need MORE Big Brother in my life and nor does anyone else. I already spent far too much time turning off all the telemetry crap with Windows alone. And then the mfg's crap that comes with each new PC.
More? Piss right off. The whole goddamn point of the PC was to be independent of the mainframe.
Though I did just payout a ridiculous amount of money for my own custom built PC along with 192GB ram and an Nvidia 4090. but then i am running lots(20 ish) VM's and playing counter strike source at 300 fps. seems worth it.
I would never by a del or a mac as i hate not having the choice of what i want in it. Though i understand the corporate side, How the hell dell will get decent Ai into a £500 PC will be interesing to see. My graphics card cost close to £1900 quid.
Linux, Linux, Linux - all the way - No AI unless it controlled by the for a specific task and certainly not integrated into the OS that is madness.
Hacker: Hello Windows PC.
MS AI: Hello hacker, what can I do for you today ?
Hacker: Uninstall Windows and upgrade to Linux.
MS AI: Ok, but which Distro shall I install ?
Hacker: Anything except REDHAT or Fedora !
MS AI: But this will make this PC so much faster and there will not be a need to upgrade for years to come !
Hacker: Exactly !
"Manufacturers are therefore pinning their hopes on the hype surrounding AI translating into sales as customers, fearful of missing out on The Next Big Thing,"
Customers don't give toss about The Next Big Thing. If they did then they would not have been buying x86 PC for the last several decades.
-A.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
