Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so AI could be the mechanism to shorten notebook replacement cycles, according to the chief financial officer at Dell. Talking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom 2024 conference last week, Dell exec Yvonne McGill pointed out that the PC industry has just emerged from eight straight quarters of shrinking shipments …
The last bloody thing we want (to keep forking out on new kit).
The entire industry seems to have forgotten what IT is actually for (to perform tasks and run businesses painlessly and cost effectively). Forced obsolescence serves nobody except vendors. It's close to a protection racket -- "replace/ pay up or you'll be unsupported" (meaning of course no more than that the vendor will stop fixing its cock-ups, or worse -- "you need to upgrade [whatever] to continue using our service", which, from the user perspective, performs exactly as before but demands the new tech to operate).
I'm still running xx70-series Thinkpads at home because, beyond that awaits the horrors of soldered RAM and, even on these, they're a shadow of the repairability of older Thinkpads. It's not so much getting them apart but the reliance on clips means they never go back together cleanly, no matter how careful my spudging. "upgrading" would mean ending up with a less repairable device.
It's also disgraceful that I used to be able to replace a keyboard with 4 screws but I now have to pop out the whole motherboard.
"It's also disgraceful that I used to be able to replace a keyboard with 4 screws but I now have to pop out the whole motherboard."
Have Lenovo done that as well? It's one of my major annoyances with recent generations of Dell Latitudes - used to be a case of two screws, two or three clips, and a ribbon cable. Took five minutes max to to replace a keyboard. Now it's a complete dismantle job.
I believe it's the case for the X series from the X240 onwards but I'm not an expert on Thinkpads. I just went from an X230 to an X270. The only benefit I've really felt is better battery life (still not great) and being able to easily pop in nice third party IPS panels. If I could jam a modern CPU in an X230, I'd never want another laptop at that screen size.
well, I don't really need a modern cpu on my x230, what I do need is a battery that would last maybe 3 hrs AND about 2 years of usage. Unfortunately, neither is possible, because now all 6th party batteries are complete garbage on both fronts, wherever you buy them, regardless of price and 'manufactur', they're all shit. So, my x230 (and the x220s) remain forever chained to the wall :(
> Have Lenovo done that as well?
Need to look closely at specs as it varies between the Thinkpad ranges and whether the system is using DDR5, which tends to be soldered…
With my L series, keyboard etc. replacement isn’t as simple as it was with my T60… Also the increasing use of clips instead of screws, means you don’t really want to be taking the system apart too many times…
Soldered memory is not a problem. It's really easy to swap chips if you have right tools (they are not expensive today).
Problem is the access to chips and documentation. For instance if you need to solder some extra resistors or jumpers to let motherboard know that the memory has higher capacity if there is no automatic discovery.
I’m a bit old school and like being able to flip off the back cover and gain ready access to: memory slots, drive bay(s) and other accessory slots.
Also if the device has a second drive bay, I expect the cabling, caddy etc. to be there (or readily available) so it can be used (a problem I have encountered with both HP and Lenovo laptops).
Absolutely, I'd add to my previous preference that I also preferred having to take a single screw out to swap a drive on a T420 over taking the entire base off. The T440P at least had a cover that screwed and slid but, with the T470S, it now has those abominable clips. Apologies for not knowing when these transitions occurred, I'm not a huge Thinkpad collector, I just have a few that, in many ways, mark a bitter decline.
I don't understand the surprise in all this, I said exactly this point a week ago
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/containing/4824008
The hardware upgrade cycle is driving the AI-on-the-desktop push. No if's, and's, or but's about it. The industry needs the next hot hype cycle to re-start large-scale PC sales, which has been in the doldrums for quite a while now, and "AI" will do nicely, thank you.
Thankfully the accountants will not want to see the replacement cycle fall below 3~4 years, so as to maximise the write down tax benefits.
What is going to be interesting is the leasing companies; given a lease generally is Opex, there is no real benefit to their customers in forcing a refresh every 3~4 years, in fact there is greater profit potential for the leasing companies to switch to a subscription, so PCs could be on the books for many years and potentially being resold like cars.
> I'd actually consider my computer not being able to locally run AI models as an advantage.
You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. The incentive is by and for Dell marketing, and don't forget marketing is always totally disconnected from human reality (they are probably another species anyway).
For the average user there is indeed absolutely no point in having AI capacities: Even if your company or lab does use AI somewhere, it will be a limited team of specific people who use specific hardware for a very specific task. But that isn't important, what is important is that "AI" is something new the suckers deciders don't know very well (except that it is something new and supposedly magic which will help you lose weight, fix your thinning hair (and so on)).
Marketing always likes to find a (actually totally ridiculous) supposedly magic thingamabob and celebrate it loudly and repeatedly until weak-willed people are suckered into buying. Unfortunately it works as well for bogus nutritional supplements as for high-end tech, people like to be told what to think, it's so much easier.
Don't forget about user's ego.
It's better to boast about having AI capable machine (even if they don't use it), than about one without such capability.
It's like those people who drive large SUVs in the city to pick a bag of shopping from their local supermarket (where they could just as well walk and carry the bag home using their limbs).
*nod* Until this January, when it got too annoying to have to try to figure out how to swap an AVX-less build of Tensorflow into a Conda environment, I was doing quite well with my Athlon II X2 270 from 2011 running Linux, up to and including Rust development. (Granted, I'd just upgraded it from a 2014 GeForce GTX750 to an RTX 3060 that Cyber Monday.)
Here's hoping my new Ryzen 5 7600 lasts me another decade at least.
That's not a about ego, that's about saving physical effort to let your tools do most of the work for you.
Just as to dig a hole using a shovel instead of your fingers is about saving personal physical effort and not so much about ego.
Ego would be more like the person who pays for flashy looking wheel rims that create a visual effect while driving, but never gets to see them because no one else drives their car.
I'm driving SUV because if traffic is bad or the store is busy I can pull over and take a nap conveniently without being cramped and then continue when the scene is more pleasant to me.
Taking a nap on the way to somewhere without a vehicle to hide in resulted in waking up to ambulances and paramedics asking if I'm okay, and then I have to think fast to say all the right words to make sure the city can't bill me for wasting my time.
I'm 6' 5" in height. First thing I do is get rid of those stupid back seats.
Dunno. I remember showing off 'Eliza' as human like responder. But soon the repetition of answers and the basic BASIC format made it boring. Imagine an animated character you could really chat too - and (for an additional fee) do other things with .... sex always sells. You might want that to stay on your laptop than the cloud ;-)
Good news is there would be less time for social media death scrolling. Goodbye Zuck & Elon.
> Here they are talking it up everywhere
- Talking - Well, obviously, since AI is the best thing since sliced bread, isn't it... Some years ago everyone was talking about tablets taking over and pushing laptop computers to extinction. And all the eminent water cooler experts were agreeing, just like now about AI.
Marketing hype has nothing to do with reality or even plausibility, it only has to do with selling to the unsuspecting. But people who buy into it need desperately to convince others too, because the number of converts reassures them about their own choice. If everybody agrees it can't be wrong, can it.
AI models[1] are now optimized enough to run on almost any computer with more than 1GB of RAM. The companies just know people don't update their firmware enough to bother making an AI patch (And it would actually slow things down very noticeably on older systems).
[1] specifically Stable Diffusion models as an example.
The only incentive, for me, to buy a replacement PC is the death of the current one. Thinkpads, at least old Thinkpads are extremely death resistant. Currently a X270 and a venerable T530. The T530 dual boots Linux and Win11 (yes Win11) off separate SSDs. One replaceable with two external screws (no spudging required). The other is in a DVD caddy tray which just slides out. The I7 still gives me the performance I need so its future replacement will be a, relatively, costly downgrade in convenience and flexibility.
YMMV, I'm currently planning the disposal of some underspecc'd notebooks bought in the pandemic rush. At the time there was a shortage of memory but that has fortunately passed now. Note, these are disposals without replacements. If and when we need new kit, we'll see what the market has to offer but memory, reliability and weight are more important for the vast majority of users than anything to do with AI.
but we are going to convince you to buy hardware to run programs that may never even see the light of day.
(Wanted to put in a good last line, like "Yay, progress" or "Won't anybody think of the salesman's bonus?" but this attitude from Dell, compared to the old days and the heady rush of new kit that sliced the runtime of your real workloads, is just too disheartening)
My organization was running Core 2 duos not 10 months ago. DESKTOPS OLD ENOUGH TO DRINK at this point!
They shoved windows 10 on that poor thing and wanted it to run with 2GB of RAM. I was about to slap a sticker on it saying "I'm tired, boss".
I begged and pleaded to max mine out with 4GB (I said MAX IT OUT, 3GB available deal) so I had to wait 30 minutes instead of nearly an hour to boot it. I knew they had it in stock, yeah, DDR 2's were rusting away on the shelves and I knew it.
Soon after I was loudly heard by the upper management shouting expletives about how those machines were older than my teenage girl, to put it mildly, they upgraded the whole company with Ryzen 5600Gs, you know, the onboard gpu one, with 16GB, and 1080p monitors.
UPGRADED TO 1080p, you read that right.
I was using my phone to do most of my tasks, given how useless those desktops were at that point, before the upgrade, but now they are on par with even my old kit at home.
Using Core 2 duos in 2024 is not nostalgia, not when you have to work, it was downright punishing.
Fancy laptops to run AI ahahaha
"Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away." -- some wag, re PC performance increases.
If your business is locked into the Microsoft pain-train, then yeah, old PCs/laptops suck to use. If you are free to choose your software, then old hardware gives you plenty of performance, to a point. I was quite happy running Linux on my Lenovo netbook-class-power 13" laptop (AMD E-1200 CPU/APU) until it eventually died. It did most of my daily tasks quite snappily. But I did not try running video transcoding jobs on it, because I knew that would take virtually-forever.
""We've been in the longest digestion cycle … in the history of PCs, and so we know it's back-to-back years of double-digit decline, pretty amazing, never seen before results. "
It's not really difficult to understand, is it? There was a significant move to laptops in 2020 (or as soon as companies could get hold of them), and those laptops aren't yet five years old. Many companies will be going with four or five year refresh cycles now.
Some ideas:
Enhanced Surveillance and Productivity Monitoring: Use the AI to monitor employees' activities in real time, tracking everything from keystrokes to eye movements to ensure maximum productivity. It can also alert management if it detects signs of slacking or unauthorised breaks.
Automated Performance Reviews: Deploy the AI to write performance reviews by analysing the quantity and quality of work done by each employee. This system would be relentless, sparing no feelings and focusing purely on metrics, potentially ignoring the nuances of human effort and creativity.
Email and Communication Oversight: Have the AI monitor all incoming and outgoing communications to ensure corporate compliance, flagging any email that contains suspicious or non-work related content. It could also automatically draft responses to common queries, depersonalising the interaction process.
Well, they have been already capable of doing it for years, no need for AI here.
Besides, even if "AI" could somehow improve something, this wouldn't really require that AI to run on every individual computer. After all, all corporate computers are connected to a high speed network...
I changed my MacBook Pro two years ago as my previous one, from 2013, was too slow for some of the video work I then needed/wanted to do. My wife now uses that MacBook for her office work and it does everything she asks of it, without undue lag. It won't take the latest macOS but its current one is still supported; that might change in a year or two but that won't render it useless.
Before I switched to the Mac environment I generally needed to replace my Windows laptop every 3/4 years as newer software/updates placed bigger loads on the hardware. Ironically, that old MacBook ran a Windows 11 VM fine under Parallels - as well as the 1yo Lenovo laptops in a local charity office.
Yes, I could make a Linux box last 10 years but I'd rather spend my time being productive myself than spending it on keeping my kit productive - and after many years laughing at those who used Macs and being tied to Apple's way of working, I've had to eat humble pie and accept that for >90% of users, Apple's approach can actually work if you focus on what it can do rather than what it can't.
Similarly, we may lose some physical abilities as we age and focusing on what we can no longer do can become depressing - but focusing on all we are still able to do means we can continue to enjoy life.
Yes, I could make a Linux box last 10 years but I'd rather spend my time being productive myself than spending it on keeping my kit productive
You are suggesting that I spend lots of time maintaining the system as the hardware is old. Not true. Replacing the PSU and CPU fan [I forgot to mention] did not take long.
Other admin: apt-get update/upgrade, backups, etc, all would be needed on new hardware.
The most time spent was when I moved from CentOS to Debian after RedHat went rogue on the GPL.
"But I can tell you AI PCs won't significantly impact PC market growth in the next 2-3 years until more AI-powered applications run on devices, not in the cloud."
What they probably mean is that the application will use customer machine for computation, but will still require "the cloud". It's just to offload the cost of computation to the customer and to maximise profit.
I really doubt they will get rid of the cloud, as cloud is used to justify subscriptions. Without the cloud it will be harder to convince users to pay a monthly fee.
Short replacement cycles are not good for the environment, think of all that electronic waste that is being generated.
I just had to move to a new laptop due to a fault on my existing one. It took me over a week to re-install all my developer applications and a month later I'm still discovering that I'm missing stuff. I don't want to go through that pain again any time soon. Long refresh cycles for me!
Maybe there should be more focus on making existing software run more efficiently, so that it can continue to run on existing hardware.
generally (solely) profit is associated with individuals that belong to that pesky species that seems to have infected the environment. From this, obvious conclusions follow. But I'm optimistic, once the species has gained enough skills to eradicate itself, it's only a matter of time it zaps itself and the environment regains the balance. Sure, it might take 500 years for that, but what half a millenium anyway? Or ten.
That’s impossible in X86-Wintel-land where hardware and software are not developed under one roof like at Apple. And when I say software I mean the OS kernel. Way too many hardware vendors each with their priorities, technology, firmware differences, and software and API stacks, not to mention multiple OEMs simply looking at the lowest BOM to squeak out 10 cents more profit per unit.
As usual Dell is omitting a critical detail in it's proclamation of AI reducing PC replacements.
Unless the company replaces Microsoft windows 11 or rel 12 or whichever version, PCs will always need constant replacements because of failures in Operating System (OS) updates, severe bugs in OS code and other problems that AI cannot address.
esides, constant replacement of "hardware, even if still quite usable" is good for Dell.
Not really, that's one thing you can't blame Microsoft for - at least until Windows 11. Let's take a decent PC from 2008, it's still capable of web browsing and productivity even today.
It comes shipped with Vista. In 2009 Windows 7 is released, followed by 8, 8.1, and 10. With a suitable graphics adapter and a large enough hard drive/SSD the system could be usable from 2008 until right now.
Upgrading to Windows 11 wouldn't be possible without workarounds because the CPU would be too old, and so would the TPM (if it even had one, back in 2008).
Perhaps you buy the cheaper models, but my experiece is that the Latitude / Optiplex / Precision lines generally last pretty well.
The only exception in recent years has been the Latitude 5411 - avoid at all costs: they are utter crap and highly fauly-prone.
Just, no. This piece of crap that I already have to work on through no choice of my own is an overheating and underperforming mess. Asking the GPU or similar to continuously be grinding AI recommendations (and no doubt, spying for advertising purposes) is not a sales pitch you are going to win us over with.
"But AI can help you write letters and reports". Maybe. But it isn't mature enough right now for anything but the most trivial of tasks.
The battered old 486 in my junk pile is a whole lot more enticing to keep ticking over.
Unfortunately, in engineering, red tape and bureaucracy is life.
I was on a call just yesterday with our external overlords; over 1500 pages of documentation required concerning the business plan alone. And that's before any project specific documentation.
We will oblige of course, but it is endemic of the waste on any civil engineering endeavour created by the bureaucrats. It does not help that there is first hand evidence that they haven't read material sent to them 9 months ago. Certainly not acted on it.
I am acutely aware that the bureaucrats themselves have had their numbers slashed by Grant Schapps while complexity continues to ramp up. This is not the solution if you are serious about cutting the overhead.
Sometimes I wonder whether I'm in the right sector myself; though "someone" has to do it and the T&C's aren't bad. Still, if it gets any worse, I think I'll be out for a change.
I was just fine doing my daily work on our department's timeshared PDP-11/40 Unix system ... until I had to laser-print a document, with all the typesetting calculations required by troff. Then it was a 10~20 minute realtime wait, what with all the other things the -11 was doing.
(We need an icon for a DEC VT-100. Or an IBM 3270.)
> AI probably works for background processing requiring quick indepth decision making
OMG no! We're constantly hearing about AI "hallucinating", going haywire, or whatever other unscheduled malfunction it is capable of. Which obviously means that in the name of cost-cutting, we will rush to put this half-baked AI in charge of everything important/essential we can get hold of...
<blockquote>AI could be the mechanism to shorten notebook replacement cycles, according to the chief financial officer at Dell.</blockquote>
There isn't even any attempt to hide the fact that Dell intend to clamber onto the AI hype train in order to shift product.
You can almost see what will happen next.
Dell will start marketing new lineups of notebooks, where they hype AI capabilities due to "new" chip models - mentioning all the right buzzwords.
Forget the fact that ANY computer that can get onto the internet and use services like ChatGPT can already access AI services.
Forget the fact that even the most powerful notebook GPu/CPu combo won't even come close to matching cloud based services, assuming software on it leverages some form of LLM functionality.
They'll just be slapping stickers on the box "New and improved AI capability!"
It's bullshit.
In the storage room next to our data center a stack of over 10 feet discarded servers was accumulated over the years.
They are old Dells and HP Proliant G6/G7 and G8 in 1U format.
These servers still have perfect fans, double power supplies and in most cases well usable ethernet cards.
It is all for the scrapper, because CPU and memory got obsolete. It wouldn't be magic to design modern motherboards that can be swapped out play and play for a fraction of the price.
As long major players in the industry can dictate this kind of non-sense, not only laptops but also countless tons of high grade equipment will be destroyed due to marketing and profit reasons.
Thing to bear in mind is there will always be a huge risk buying into the first tranche of any new "generation" of processors. Your CPU socket is obsolete as soon as you buy it, there will be a new DRAM standard before you've even unsealed the box and it'll be utterly impossible to upgrade past the first iteration of the gen. Without fail, every single time. That's before we get the *bleed/OoO execution smeg-ups discovered, which means your previous, immune system was a better bet anyway...
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