Win 11 refreshes delayed, say PC makers – and here's why Admins had better dust off their Windows migration skills if Dell and HP are right that a refresh wave of "aging" commercial PC estates is picking up pace – even though the process is slower to happen than either company seems to have expected. gaming pc If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the …
It's mostly the smoke, coming from the pipe dreams of the OEM hardware sellers.
"AI" might be a hypable selling point to individuals but businesses want a ROI. B and yet here they are, admitting that AI currently offers no benefits to the business user but businesses should invest in it anyway.
Do they read back and listen to their own discussion points or are they so self-unaware that they lack this basic skill? Or is it just their egos talking?
They are broadcasting their wishful thinking out loud, hoping that World+dog will grant them their wish of massive growth in the following quarters. Win11, never mind "AI", just isn't attractive enough to warrant great investments in a proposed promise land of benefits.
I think most people will happily keep their money in their pockets until something truly attractive and worthy of their funds comes on to the market.
Win11, never mind "AI", just isn't attractive enough to warrant great investments in a proposed promise land of benefits.
You are not wrong, but marketing has an answer for that anyway, quoted in the article -
"We also see an opportunity driven by the Windows 11 refresh that is only starting now… this is what is behind some of the strength that we see on the commercial side. Microsoft… will start discontinuing their support for the previous versions, and this always ties the replacement and upgrade," he said, adding "this is going to be driving demand in the coming quarters."
Well - if you are not wrong then where is the flaw in marketing's approach?
Tom's hardware reports - "Linux market share approaching 4.5% for first time, could hit 5% by 1Q25 Global analytics company StatCounter shows that the Linux market share of desktop operating systems has hit an all-time high of 4.44%, up from 3.12% a year ago, and it was just 2.76% in July 2022. While this might look like a small amount, this is a massive jump in terms of real numbers, especially as most Linux distributions are essentially free and have no marketing teams behind them. The Linux operating system first breached the 4% mark in February 2024 but slumped back down to less than 3.9% in April and May. It recovered to 4.05% in June before hitting its record high of 4.44% this July. But if we look at Linux’s previous numbers, the operating system is on track to hit a 5% market share by February 2025, if the trend continues.".
Just food for thought, not an absolute proven conclusion.
Michael Dell said if a new PC that lands on a user's desk which doesn't have an AI feature, they're "going to really wonder what happened."
I know what will have happened - my boss won't have been taken in by the snake-oil hype machine.
"Everybody's going to want that. Every piece of software that you're going to use is going to have an AI assistant."
Which I turn off as soon as I can.
AI in everything is the new snake oil. It's the new Metaverse. It's the 100% self-driving cars (cat 5, IIRC). It has it's uses, but it's too full of fail for general deployment, as evidenced by customer helplines and help points (e.g., on train platforms) that can't cope with anything involving subtlety or nuance.
It's artificial, Jim, but not as we know it intelligent :)
“Many of these PCs .. are four [or] five years after they were bought and they will have to be replaced.”
My previous PC was ten years old when it gave up the ghost and my current one has a good ten years still on the clock. Sorry I'm not getting on the ever-lasting upgrade bandwagon.
“The Reg has discussed the many reasons why companies have held off upgrading machines to Windows 11”
They can't afford to pay the perpetual Microsoft Tax.
“A plethora of AI PCs did hit the market earlier this summer”
Subscribe to an AI provider and your legacy Windows is now AI compliant /s
The most hyped up thing about AI PCs is that the model runs locally, and the data remains on the PC, giving privacy and latency advantages.
Is like the math coprocessors of yore, better have and don't need, than needanddon't have.
If a corporation NEEDS to replace a PC (and remember that the article is referring to TWO corporate events) the replacement PC may as well be an AI PC.
Having said that, no sane corporation will replace a PC that does not need replacing just because it lacks AI
In case a worker needs AI, but the PC does not need replacing, the PC will not be replaced, but rather re-deployed. A long way to say that AI is not leading replacement, but rather, lack of performance, natural attrition, (staged) end of suppor of Win10 and formal replacement policies are...
"Many of these PCs were bought during COVID and now we are four [or] five years after they were bought and they will have to be replaced."
I cannot help feeling that replacing IT equipment on such a scale every four or five years is not good for the environment. How much of the equipment can genuinely be recycled? How much energy is used to recycle the components. I hate to sound like a 'soggy, tree-hugging (British) liberal, knit your own muesli, whinger'*, but, we do all live in 'the environment'.
*I probably am one, but just don't want to sound like one.
"not good for the environment" - well, occupying landfills with still-working tech isn't good for anyone EXCEPT for those whose cash flow depends on obsolescence and replacement of various computer hardware.
The tech is just not improving that fast nowadays. A 10 yo machine is nearly as fast as a "today" machine, maybe with half the RAM, but if the applications were not DELIBERATELY WRITTEN to be PIGS, then that should not be an issue. I'm talking to YOU, Micros~1.
NodeJS-based desktop applications, TIFKAM/UWP, C-pound/.Not, BASS-ACKWARDS 'object-oriented' (which to them means collections, including GARBAGE collections), and all of that OTHER BLOATWARE running within the guts of Winders these days, do NOT an upgrade necessarily require.
I think Micros~1 is just trying to DRIVE HARDWARE SALES AGAIN. And knowing THEM, it will be intended to ENRICH the CCP. And, THEMSELVES.
(the honest business practice is to make people WANT to purchase something by providing what customers want/need, NOT drive them like CATTLE into an ECONOMIC SLAUGHTERHOUSE!!!)
We get our corporate Windows laptops replaced when the Dell warranty runs out.
While the Linux desktops we actually do work on are much older, just add more ram, upgrade SSD->NVME and add this years fanciest graphics card
Ironically the most common 'upgrade' we have to do is a bigger PSU to feed NVidia's insatiable power demands.
I am of the opinion, that even in a corporate environment, standard desktop computers with SSD's should only be replaced, for the most part, when they die.
Processing power has been great on the desktop for basic use cases for well over a decade now.
Buy some spares every year based on failure history and replace the ones that let out the smoke when it happens.
You'll have people damaging their PCs to get new ones. You have to warn them that damaged computers are replaced from the damaged-computer replacement pool, a bulk purchase of Compaq Prolinea 5100s with 32 MB RAM, Quantum BigFoot hard drive, and 16" VGA CRT monitor.
The upgrade in compute power and thus electricity consumption in our Brave New AI World begs the question of how everyone is going to be running our powerful new AI computers, CryptoCoin generators, electric vehicles, and personal wearables, without melting the planet by simple waste heat. In a fairly large 5K - 10K member corporation, what is the electric and HVAC utility tax for moving up? What productivity gain is needed to get the actuaries to authorize it? Does anyone besides NVIDIA and Microsoft actually benefit from this? If not, why are we just going along with it? Can't we please just stop with the proprietary greed, and settle on a nice Linux standard instead, since everyone is already so tired of the shenanigans?
Time due for many organisations who use 365 to consider installing Mint or Ubuntu for certain user types, and adding Edge for Linux, then running 365 within Edge.
No need for Windows 11 whatsover for very many workers out there. Obviously not for everyone.
Also better for the environment by doubling the life of the PC.
Oh...and it's good for the bottom-line too.
OS, Software license and short term HW savings Vs. People retraining costs + Bussiness disruption as procecess adapt.
Decitions, decitions...
My point being, Linux adoption has upsides and downsides. There is no right or wrong answer. Each and every organization has to make their own analysis, and decide accordingly.
If you're actually using the AI, lots of retraining. Training that sounds like "after it wrote the email for you, read it over. If by some miracle it actually looks like something useful, read it again. If it still does, show everyone. Either one of them will see the big problem in it or we can all witness that an LLM managed to do something accurate for once".
But if it's just Windows 11, not so much. There are always users who need retraining when an icon moves, but that's not everyone. I've run Windows 11 for years now on corporate and personal machines and, although there are some differences between it and Windows 10, it's not anything so massive that users en masse will be confused on how to use a computer.
>Time due for many organisations who use 365 to consider installing Mint or Ubuntu for certain user types, and adding Edge for Linux, then running 365 within Edge.
I keep arguing that we could issue Chromebooks
Everything office-ish we do is online on O365/Teams/cloud/Sharepoint and it all works fine from the Linux desktops
And the few Microsoft-only packages we need are too heavy for the corporate laptops anyway
And Chromebooks are built to be child-proof so can safely be given to managers
The first and foremost reason to replace hardware is to be able to run software with up to date security patches. Big corps also like to have hardware that's in warranty
AI? That's not even in the equation.
The manufacturers know this, most of what these droids were saying was to try to get investors to buy more shares.
THe corpos are my age.
They remmeber when they fell in the trap of buying all those 486SX, and NextGen machines, and Cyrix 486DLCs (a 386 pin compatible processor with a 486 instruction set) to save a few bucks, and then got burned by needing the math cocprocessor down the line.
They will not make the same mistake with AI PCs.
AI will not drive adoption of new PCs, instead, when the company decides that a PC has to be replaced, the replacement PC will be an AI PC just because...
... Just because the corpos do not want to miss on the killer device side AI Application (it does not matter if it materializes or not), also, because it is almost certain that some form of NPU with a certain TOPS will be a hard requierement for Wiin12, therefore, an AI PC is their best bet for a computer that can be upgreaded to the next OS. Buying a Non AI PC in 2024 or 2025 and beyond is professional suicide in corpo world.
Having said that, your best bet in corpo world is to hang on to what you have in a safe manner (Supported Win11 or Win10 with ESU) and delay as much as possible new HW purchases until prices go down and there is more clarity about Win12
My not so humble predicition: Win11 EOL will be anounced around 2026 and Will not have an ESU. Win 12 will be announced around the same timeframe. That way, the end of support for all incarnations of Win10 (Win10 IoT 2021 will be supported until Jan 2032) and Win11 (EOS Anounced 1 year in advance, and LTSC duration 5 years only) will be closely matched, and world + dog in the microsoft Sphere will be finally in one only Windows... Win12
PS: In my native language, Spanish, Win12 sounds VERY similar to Windoze, I chuckle every time. And do not get me started about 5G
Desperately trying to generate a 'need' to refresh hardware / OS for the coming 'AI' revolution !!!
As far as I am concerned not being 'AI-ready' makes the hardware more valuable !!!
Definite whiff of 'Male cow excreta' in the air methinks !!!
:)
There will be a lot of fairly high spec PC's hitting the USED market at cheapo prices (No AI Hardware? That's gonna cost you 50% of your resale value)
They will be perfect for W10 or Linux use by individuals and SME's.
I'm using a 3rd hand Dell Keyboard that I bought for £5.00 at a Computer Fair (remember them?) in 2003.
My monitors are 2nd hand Dell 24in devices bought in 2012. Still going strong.
I'm running a 10? 15? year old Dell Optiplex 7020 at home with Fedora Linux.
The only thing I did to it was add an SSD and extra ram (32G total).
It even runs Windows 11 in a VM that's faster than the new Dell 5000 machines we have at work (purchased within the last 6 months).
the wife even kicks me off and takes over my computer so she can do her Facebook, email, and online banking. Using Firefox on Linux.
My company-supplied work wagon is an early 2014 HP ProDesk G1 tower - 4th gen i7 and 32GB of RAM. Boots in 45 seconds, I can be sat with Teams, Outlook, our ticket board and all the robot debugging / dynamics analysis software up and running within 5 minutes.
It's very quiet even under heavy load and does absolutely everything I require of it without an issue - barring component failure and the enforced Win 11 upgrade I can't see any reason it wouldn't be good for another couple of years at least.
Likewise I type this on a 2008 HP laptop running Lubuntu.
Short of putting more cash in Michael Dell's pocket, replacing PC's after 5 years is a pointless exercise unless you genuinely need the newest and highest spec stuff for your work....
In a larger business running a fleet of 1000's, the failure rate over time goes up, often by enough that it becomes worthwhile to just replace the lot. Most of the customer I deal with see exactly this pattern. Most are on a 5 year rolling replacement cycle. There may be a few outliers where some users, for whatever reasons, have some very high end kit that is still fully usable well beyond 5 years. A side effect of this is that they won't be doing a sudden and large estate refresh and will simply continue as they are, AI enabled or not. And for that matter, pretty much anything bought in the 5 years should run Win11 as-is, especially so-called "enterprise" laptops/PCs..
For that matter, regarding the quote in the article, ""I have not met any customers who have said 'We're planning a refresh but we don't want an AI-enabled PC.', I can honestly say I have not met ANY customers who are have said "We're planning a refresh but we WANT an AI-enabled PC". The vast majority, in my experience, are not even thinking about it. They're still trying to get their heads around what AI is and whether it might be useful in some way. I don't think local AI enabled PCs is even on their purchasing radar yet. For that matter, most are still working their migration plans for Win 11 and even then often because it's being forced on them.
"There will be a lot of fairly high spec PC's hitting the USED market at cheapo prices"
I guess I should comb places like E-Bay again for a spare server - it only needs half the processing power as it's merely a firewall amd NAS running mail, subversion, etc. with FBSD. Any 64-bit machine with decent RAM and I merely swap in the hard drive, good to go! the current one has 5G RAM and a 1.8Ghz Intel Core Duo. Works fine with GBit LAN (dual homed). It just needs to be reliable enough, that's all. Runs FBSD with ZFS. Hard drive has been replaced a couple of times, though.
Is also possible to get some CCP piece of crap mini-PC for under $200, multi-homed even. Not sure I'd trust one o' those, however...
Five year old i9 Motherboard (WS C246 PRO), case & PSU. added 128Gb new matched DDR4 (with heatsinks), new GFX card 8Gb DDR5, two 2TB NVMe drives mounted on the motherboard again with heatsinks, running W11 (No TPM).
A number of HP laptops commercial grade, maxed memory & SSD's approximately 7 & 12 years respectively (Blimey where does the time go, seems only a couple years it was 5 & 9 years) on W10 & 11.
I'd suggest replacing those monitors with modern ones, on the grounds that the electricity savings over the next year will pay for them (and you can get reasonable 4k ones that have about the same footprint).
I'm willing to bet those 12 year-old monitors get nice and warm after a day of use...
Due to Covid, the main players had a significant surge in new equipment sold.
Now microsoft has specified hardware requirements which really aren't needed (are they ?), then here is another refresh.
What will Windows 12 or 13 "need" in the next 5 years that disqualifies the current planned refresh from being acceptable ?
Microsoft and the vendors really are taking the piss.
> Microsoft and the vendors really are taking the piss.
It’s probably more chicken and egg.
The vendors welcome MS for giving a reason for people to buy new hardware.
MS need to keep the hardware vendors sweet, or they loose business and hardware vendors start switching to Linux or other….
>MS need to keep the hardware vendors sweet, or they loose business and hardware vendors start switching to Linux or other….
I wonder how true this still is?
MS wants my $30 monthly corporate subscription to O365/Teams/etc.
I'm not sure they care about the $3/unit every 5 years they get as part of an OEM licence deal
Any PC purchased new during the pandemic should be officially supported for Windows 11. We have a bunch of Dell laptops from 2017 and 2018 still in use at my place of work, and the 2018 models are supported. The 2017 models are also running Win11 now, but they are not officially supported. We had to jump through the usual hoops to install on those. These machines are all a bit long in the tooth, but with a battery replacement or RAM upgrade here and there, they are still fit for purpose.
Probably the TOPS requirement will be mandatory, maybe a little bit higher (maybe not). And therefore, the processor cutoff will probably start at lunar lake and AMD AI 300 processors.
Minimum RAM will increase to accomodate the AI models you want to run device side.
Minimum (boot drive) space will increase.
SSD type boot drive will be mandatory.
The WDDM level of your display and HW feature level will increase as well. (currently is WDDM 2.0 and HWL 11)
Other than that, nothing really.
Other than the TOPS, most OEM Win11 PCs sold since Win11 entered the market meet the requirements, and, long before Win12 appears, HW makers will be forced by Microsoft's OEM conditions to sell PCs with those features onboard anyway, to Keep the OEM licenses... It happened before with Win10. OEMs were forced to sell PCs with secureboot and TPM since 2018, a few good years before Win11 entered the chat.
All the 2020-era machines already support Windows 11. So the last refresh already makes another refresh unnecessary. I have seen some companies who refresh their computers every 4-6 years, and this is probably what Dell is thinking about. When I have seen that, it has always seemed wasteful and pointless to me, especially as many places I've worked use the slightly longer period of "until it catches fire or there are bits hanging off". I prefer that one most of the time, though it can be taken a little too far.
"Everybody's going to want that."
Errrrr, nope. I certainly don't.
"Every piece of software that you're going to use is going to have an AI assistant."
If it does, I'll likely be looking for away to uninstall it, or at least disabling it
"You're already starting to see this. And most of those AI cycles are going to run locally on the PC."
Not if it's uninstalled or disabled it ain't.
One reason I could see putting off upgrades -- Moore's law (doubling in performance every 18 months, or same perfromance for half the cost) has been off the table for years. It's more like 3-5 years now. Most peoples computers are fast enough for what they use them for and buying a new one won't get this massive performance boost like it would have 15 or 20 years ago.
Second, SSDs. They're lovely but the price per GB is not. When one may have an older system with like a 750GB HDD and see the comparable new system has a 256GB SSD? It doesn't look like an upgrade.
You are right.
But Pat, Lisa, Michael and Enrique know it.
That's why, unlike the the new machines of my youth, that were made to entice the people that bought their machines a year or 2 ago, the machines of nowadays are made to entice people that bought their machines 5 or more years ago.
If you are happy with the peformance* of your machine, the new machines are not aimed at you.
Performance in the broader sense, and mostly for corpos. ¿Is the security performance/features good enough? ¿Are the centralized management features of your machine fleet good enough? ¿Is the OS and SW supported enough so you can pass HIPPA/PCI certification du jur? ¿Your isurance company is satisfied with said level of support?
Those are the reasons to upgrade a machine nowadays, more so for a Corpo.
And these to events werew by corpos for corpos
Conversely, I have met nobody who has said, "We're planning a refresh and want an AI-enabled PC."
I've also not heard anyone say, "We're planning a refresh, but we don't want an oversized marrow pushed up our rear ends." It's almost as if the thing they haven't mentioned doesn't figure at all on their list of things to worry about. Until it's too late, of course.
It can run Linux and (depending on effort) all of the available software. Or you compile for it. I have a hp OmniBook X14, and it is a nice machine. Booted Ubuntu 24.04 on it, too. Need to write up the device tree, enable BT, remoteprocs, audio, camera (probably not), Gunyah (alternatively boot-to EL2), NPU. And the support for it that's already upstream or under development is pretty great already.
To be fair, even just with WoA this laptop type is very usable. Instant on, you go a day without a charger, lots of compute power - best used when compiled natively.
quote: "I have not met any customers who have said 'We're planning a refresh but we don't want an AI-enabled PC.'
Get out more.
A huge number of PCs coming on to the second hand market just as MS run with AI PCs could offer a huge boost to Linux. But is there a single, stable, consumer-friendly, market-dominating version of Linux out there to offer pre-installed? Because that is what the mainstream needs.
Between W11 and AI PCs, MS have gone above and beyond in poisoning their chalice. More than ever before. If Linux is ever to go mainstream, it may be this refresh.
Let's follow this argument:
Massive investment in AI data centers. Use lots of power, real estate, much of everything really.
Massive sales push of new hardware "so you can run AI locally on a machine".
Spot the problem?
Now for the fun part: the second bit hits your budget directly and is really not needed other than to run a new version of Windows which (a) doesn't seem to offer anything more or new or otherwise more productive (if anything, it's less) and (b) pretends it needs more hardware, which has already been disproven by people who found a hidden switch to bypass that demand. Most of us do. not. need. new. hardware. for Winge 11.
What I find specifically dirty is that we thus have two budget drains that are desperately trying to hide from each other so they can both suck your company dry: Win11 + pretend AI hardware hits your CAPEX budget, AI membership drains hits your OPEX budget. As Microsoft has spent years making sure that nobody ever looks at these together (or it would be clear that TCO for Microsoft products is FAR higher than just new gear due to massive amounts of wasted manhours), it is clear that you're looking at a two-pronged strategy to make even more profit.
Sorry guys, but trying to flog snake oil on both levels at once is just too greedy for words.
Frankly, you can both stick it where combustible fumes reign. I'm not playing.
Pardon me for being thick, (or maybe not?), but how is a PC able to run a "proper" AI service, when I hear a lot about how the AI LLMs operate in humongous data centres needing vast quantities of e-juice?
No, an honest question which I'd be interested to hear about from those who know what's what. TIA
Training LLMs to the extent needed so they look even slightly useful is very expensive in power, time, and chips. That is not something that can easily be done on your computers, though if you're motivated enough, you can do something. You'll just use every computer you have and can borrow or steal for a year and get something not that great at the end.
Running them is easier. The biggest requirement is RAM. To run the headline models, you'll need a ton of that. GPUs with 100 GB of RAM are expensive, so it's not easy to run those. You could, if you wanted, buy one and run a large model. But there's yet another step: intentionally smaller models and quantization. With each of those downgrades, the quality produced by the model will decrease slightly, but it makes it easier to run them. I've done it to play around. With 16 GB of RAM and no GPU at all, I can run an LLM that generates plenty of text and code. Without the GPU, it generates it more slowly, but the response generally starts to appear within ten seconds and is complete in a minute. If you don't have 16 GB of RAM, you can quantize that model and make it run in as little as 4. In my experience, the quality is not that different from the larger models in that yes, they do tend to give you stupid and useless output, but I get that from the large ones too.
If you have something that would benefit from a locally-run LLM, you can accomplish it. The Register has had a few articles explaining some ways to run them. You don't need an NPU or Microsoft Copilot (any of them) to do it.
If you have something that would benefit from a locally-run LLM, you can accomplish it.
Again, what we are talking about here is that elusive use-case. Because, who actually has a use for it? Who has "something that would benefit from a locally-run LLM" that is actually useful, and not a toy or proof-of-concept?
I wonder if anyone has quantified the difference between time saved by using AI to solve a problem vs amount of time required to check the AI output for bullsh*t.
Worth doing, because IIRC a couple of lawyers here in the US tried to use AI to generate documents, which they then provided to a judge, who was less than pleased to find completely fabricated citations of cases that never existed. Said lawyers were then called into the judge's presence to explain themselves.
This made the papers, and I suspect the lawyers involved are updating their resumes.
Devices become "old" when their performance degrades to the point where it impacts productivity. This used to be pretty much entirely down to the steep drop-off in performance of old-skool hard drives as they aged. These days, most 5-year-old business devices will have an SSD, so there is no real reason to replace them purely on the basis of age until parts start failing at an unsupportable rate.
As for performance, newer devices are definitely faster and more powerful... but is that delta change enough to justify the expense and staff resource of replacement? If a 4-year-old laptop is still performing adequately, why pay £££ for a 30% performance hike? And that's where AI comes in I guess... but Open AI and MS have screwed the pooch on that one by supporting the AI hardware demands at the server side, not the computer side. Why should customers pay for new hardware for AI when they already get AI on old hardware? And we have been told repeatedly for many years that this sort of thing is exactly the reason we should all use the cloud, so why is it our problem to fix?
A lot of people can see this for exactly what it is - a dishonest attempt to convince us that perfectly serviceable hardware is now obsolete. No wonder there's low uptake.
...when their performance degrades to the point where it impacts productivity.
In my experience, that's usually about three months after the admin nazis remove the ability to defrag and clean up from their users and install some corp clogware running in the background to ensure they can't.
Michael Dell said if a new PC that lands on a user's desk which doesn't have an AI feature, they're "going to really wonder what happened.""Everybody's going to want that. Every piece of software that you're going to use is going to have an AI assistant. You're already starting to see this. And most of those AI cycles are going to run locally on the PC."
I think users are more likely to wonder what an "AI PC" actually is, and whether it provides any features that are actually useful, and worth paying for. Those who have invested heavily in the current hype bubble around LLMs and generative "AI" have yet to find a "killer app" for it. Humans are quite capable of generating superficially convincing bullshit without inventing machines to do it for them.
"Michael Dell said if a new PC that lands on a user's desk which doesn't have an AI feature, they're "going to really wonder what happened.""
Wrong "they". What Mr. Dell means is that "the Dell marketing department is going to really wonder what happened."
I seem to recall there was another kerfluffle about not wanting to upgrade to Win 11 / AI / Co-Pilot based machines.
Thought I had a snapshot of the webpage with the reason but I guess not.
Oh well, maybe AI will search around and find it for me later.
Microsoft, with their insistence on modern CPUs and TPM2.0, or the populace, who don't see why they should buy a new PC "because".
As we techies all know, that until M$ implemented the locks properly, Windows 10 runs with quite acceptable performance on all sorts of old junk. Certainly 10-12year-old medium/high-end laptops are quite usable.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
