AI PCs are here but a killer application for biz users? Nope Forrester Research says that although 50 models of AI PCs are already on sale today there remains "no killer app" that would make any of them an essential tool for business users. As spelled out in the research paper's title, The Year Of The AI PC Is 2025, the analyst thinks enterprises need to prepare for next year, and they …
You keep forgetting the truth: Microsoft doesn't write all hardware drivers for devices. They get the latest drivers from the hardware manufacturers and only distribute that driver via Windows Update.
So, if you note, the driver you're looking for doesn't even exist on the hardware manufacturer's website...because they, the manufacturer, don't *want* to make the update in order to force planned obsolesce.
It has nothing to do with Microsoft, I wish everyone would stop blaming them. If you can get the driver update from the manufacturer then MS isn't bothering to distribute it; but, from your complaint, you state you can't get the driver at all and that's a SUPPLIER problem as proven by the fact that you can't get the driver direct from them, either.
The driver interface to Windows is, well, a bit 'peculiar' and has a nasty habit of changing with Windows versions. Since you have to get the thing certified it makes supporting 'old' hardware uneconomic. But, seriously, there's not a whole lot you can do with drivers to make them obsolete -- unless that's the object of the exercise.
Because as anyone knows writing code isn't anything like as time consuming as testing it. The never ending changes promote a test deficit which leads to more unreliability, more updates and a sort of death spiral. Its a mess, the only positive thing to be said about it is that it provides good eatin' for a bunch of people who would otherwise find themselves unemployed.
I just put Linux Mint on them. You keep a "proper" PC around for those handful of applications that just have to have Windows but for everything else Linux does the job. No fuss. No mess. (....and its only after you go back to the Windows system after using it for a bit that you realize just how unmitigatedly awful modern Windows is)
Wow. I guess someone at the PC manufacturers forgot to send their usual Hype cheque to Forrester.
A completely rational take on an overly hyped product - maybe try again next year...
Although as it still holds out that these PCs MIGHT be beneficial at some point, I guess they didnt want to completely alienate the manufacturers and lose out on next years Hype cheque...
Cynical, Moi?
It's far from clear what the uses will be next year either!
The niche areas where LLMs are of significant benefit have mostly already been identified. Wider adoption remains a solution looking for a propblem, while also being unable to articulate what it actually is / does in a way comprehensible to the average person.
Consider this from the article
"With cloud costs increasing, Forrester sees an opportunity "for digital workplace leaders to save cloud costs by pushing AI workloads to the PC.
But...but... we were told only a few years back that the cloud was a way to reduce costs. Did somebody get that wrong, followed by lots of other people jumping on the bandwagon?
My prediction is that in a few years we'll be told AI was/is a load of bullshit and yet another bandwagon on which some stupid people tried to jump. Could be wrong, but I've said many times before that the cloud wasn't a way to reduce costs. Maybe I'll be right twice. Who knows? Not AI, that's for sure.
Not only AI - it’s ALL bullshit.
The PC came about primarily because it gave you computer power at your desk - you no longer had to pay for (very) expensive communal computer time.
Well that worked for quite a long time. But then someone decided that they could make money by convincing everyone to go back to how things used to be; hence the “cloud”. And yes, let’s give it a really cool snappy name while we’re at it, just because we can.
And now, after everyone is starting to realise that there was a reason the PC came about (see above) someone else has decided there’s money to be made by convincing everyone to go back to desktops.
As for AI (no such thing!), the hype around that is too bloody irritating to even think about. I just hope it dies off relatively quickly. If it was real AI, then yes, that WOULD be interesting. But ever-bigger databases with ever-increasingly clever search algorithms to sift through it (and that’s basically what current “AI” is) is not interesting
Blockchain was another fantastically useless hyped-up …thing (not even sure how you categorise that one)
"it's ALL bullshit" -- Came here to make the same comment. Two parts truth plus one part lies, stir in complexity, serve with a generous topping of FOMO, and you can sell turd sandwiches on the street.
"someone decided that they could make money by convincing everyone [insert bullshit here]" Someone looked at the sad history of IT fumbles by non-techie management types and decided there's money to be made in them thar' hills -- selling shovels. The root of that sad history is one unalterable fact: in all its aspects IT is fundamentally *hard*. Instead of digging in and understanding all the details (how a techie would approach the problem) non-techie managers do what they always do -- they get somebody else (anybody else) to do the work. It's a massive failure because deciding is what managers do. That's the one job you cannot delegate. When all the deciders everywhere are delegating the same crucial decision, you get a gold rush. Over and over. Today we sell shovels to move dirt from hole A to pile B. Tomorrow we sell bigger better shovels to move dirt faster from pile B to hole A. And sure, they notice there's no gold, but they still keep buying the next shovel.
Well that worked for quite a long time. But then someone decided that they could make money by convincing everyone to go back to how things used to be; hence the “cloud”
People have short or selective memories. We went through all this with "Thin Clients" which were going to shift all the heavy lifting to remote data centres. Cheaply. Until customers were locked in then the costs ramped up which is the point we are approaching "The Cloud".
AI PC is just a marketing gimmick Intel and Microsoft have dreamed up as a way of trying to flog you a new PC, because now your 12 month old PC doesn't have a NPU and copilot key so isn't AI.
No doubt all those early adopters who do rush out this year to buy an AI PC will find out come 2026 that they actually need one with the latest V2 AI chip to run most of the stuff that actually comes out as those original AI chips had huge security vulnerabilities because they were rushed out to ride the AI wave and had to be patched later which made them run the AI stuff like a potato..
They are being sold by fear of obsolescence - that is, that if you buy a non AI PC in 2024 you'll be left behind if a killer app for AI appears down the road. That fear of obsolescence was a pretty successful strategy for selling 64 bit PCs to corporate buyers in the past, who didn't need 64 bits at the time but didn't want part of their fleet to be left behind when they eventually did.
They don't have anything else to encourage people to upgrade aside from "your Windows 10 PC with an OS that's about to expire won't run Windows 11" because PCs are fast enough that most people are upgrading when their lifespan is up. That is, corporations will only replace them when they're fully depreciated, and consumers will only replace them when they stop functioning entirely.
For example, my mom's PC was purchased with an early version of Windows 7. Once that was about to expire I upgraded it to Windows 10. A couple years ago I added some RAM and swapped out the HDD for an SSD. It is a better PC now than it was when it was bought new. I will probably leave her with an unsupported Windows 10 rather than replace it, because she does so little the odds of her being hacked are low, and she doesn't do any banking type activities on it so if a hacker p0wned it the worst they'd get was access to her grocery rewards account. Even if there was a killer app for an AI PC she would not be interested.
The research seems to question whether you should buy a new AI PC in 2024 or not but doesn't seem to take into account that most companies have a refresh cycle and have to buy a new device of some description - AI PC or non AI PC. If they think AI will be big in 2025 then surely they should be recommending that business owners DO buy AI PC's in 2024 if they are refreshing anyway?
For what it's worth, anyone that's using Teams and has background blur on could already be benefit from an NPU - it takes on this workload much more efficiently than the CPU/GPU, so you dont have the fan kicking in and your laptop battery dwindling early if working away from a power socket.
40 TOPS+ NPU's (not 40 TOPS when combining CPU+GPU+NPU) is where it all becomes potentially more interesting with the likes of AMD Ryzen "Strix". Local inference for Co-Pilot is then possible but I agree, I've not seen a killer use case yet so MS needs to work on demonstrating the benefits for Office365 users.
Apple (boo hiss) has not been hyping the AI capabilities of their kit unlike some other makers. That is IMHO a big different.
As MacBook Pro user, there is nothing specifically AI in the current MacOS that screams at me 'I'm AI'. Perhaps there will be something more overtly AI in a future release.
So far there is IMHO, no killer app that screams our to be AI'ified that us mere mortals would benefit from.
But hey, what do I know eh? I only studied AI systems back in the 1980's.
In a couple of years AI will have gone the way of the metaverse, and they will be hyping something else. Just avoid it all.
Ironically, they could sell twice as much tech simply by promoting two-systems-per-desk for resilience. One net facing, one not connected to the net, airgapped by a carbon-based lifeform. And unlike the legal and operational failure AI is and will be, it would actually be generally beneficial.
What a wonderful idea. Sadly the likes of Microsoft, Google and all the rest of the data slurpers hate the concept of air-gapping for security, The air gap naturally prevents them from capturing your workflow and sending you context related ads for things you don't want, need and can't afford.
All this AI hype will go away unless some absolutely killer app that 90% of users will need daily. There will be fringe use cases but for the mainstream, nothing screams out 'buy me'.
As title, just in the process of moving to Ubuntu for all bar 1 of my machines ... they just browse the Web sitting behind various tellys. Not a gamer, don't use for office etc (well I have a single laptop where I have an install of 2016) I have no interest in AI and am sick of hearing how it's just being used to deepen pockets of execs instead of the benefit of the human race.
And even if you are a gamer.. as a LInux user since like 1994, I can say the Linux 3D stack, and Wine, have both gotten excellent in the last like 3-4 years. Kudos to Valve and all the Mesa and Wine developers (and Nvidia for their excellent drivers). I have like 99% game compatibility, and (for games that don't just hit the 60FPS cap if a game has one..) it's common for games to get a solid 110-125% the frame rate in Linux compared to Windows. My friend had a *Sandy Bridge* and that (despite only having DX10 support in Windows.. Intel's support period ended a month before DX11 came out so they never shipped DX11 drivers for it), it'd run DX11 games fine in Linux. After some patch a few years ago, the FPS got like a 50% boost too. It still was a potato but it was shocking to start throwing all these games on there and have like 80-90% run and have like 70-80% of those have a playable framerate was pretty shocking.
I have a Nvidia desktop, Intel notebook (11th gen Intel, 1115G4), and had a AMD (Ryzen 3450U) just before the Intel one. There's nothing to say, other than games that have specific blocks (like Fortnite, where the anti-cheat specifically detects Wine or Proton so it won't run), it Steam and wine+dxvk/vkd3d seem to run literally every game I throw at them. And if you have an older chip, the support is ridiculous...
I threw an Ubuntu 24.04 (pre-release) install on a *Core 2 Duo*.. this thing is 17 years old.. and not only is the GPU still supported, it's the oldest model (GM965) that has TOTALLY modern Mesa Gallium drivers (Crocus supports it.) i was not brave enough to try running any games on it. I ran steam remote play on it though (streaming off my desktop) and that was flawless. The thing is a bit of a power hog though, it was using like 20-30W of power streaming LOL... I had it plugged in and it's a chunky one so it doesn't try to roast your lap.
This seems so dumb. Like, lets say you DO get some kind of AI workload? I've messed with tensorflow...
It'll run a workload on the CPU. Obviously this is not as fast but (for instance) I did run one of those small ChatGPT models on my notebook, on the 2C/4T CPU, and it was doing like 5-10 words a second. It was slow but it got there in the end.
You've got GPUs on almost everything now! CUDA of course works great for Tensorflow and AI use. It seems like more sensible to just make sure this works with the Intel and AMD Mesa drivers (Linux-side) and I guess the DirectX12 compute on Windows, and use that. The modern Intel GPUs, the integrated one on my notebook has the cut-down 48-EU "Intel Xe", and it's about 2/3rds the performance of the GPU in a Steam Deck. That's the lowest end Intel ships now. If that was applied toward some light AI it'd get 'er done reasonably quickly. No new dedicated hardware required.
AI pc are just meant to process inferencing workloads. Essentially it means having a pc or laptop that hosts the whole or a reduced version of a model (created on nvidia supercomputers, e.g chat gpt) and is capable of generating data (via inference) without connecting to the cloud. AI model creation will still be done on the cloud for a while…
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