PC shipments stuck in neutral despite AI buzz The PC market is not showing many signs of a rebound, despite the hype around AI PCs, with market watchers split over whether unit shipments are up or down slightly. Those magical AI PC boxes were supposed to fire up buyer enthusiasm and spur the somewhat listless market for desktop and laptop systems into significant growth …
Gee, and here I am holding off on buying new machines till this pervasive integrated AI shite goes away. Okay, you can neuter the worst of it with registry and gpedit fixes, but the last thing I want is a laptop with an 'AI' button on the keyboard. Even though you can remap it, it would be quite the badge of shame - imagine showing up at a conference with your widdle AI waptop, awwwww. And then being a complete pariah because nobody wants to be near anything running Recall - like being a glasshole.
I just bought a laptop to replace an ageing machine that was getting very long in the tooth. Did I care about AI? No. Did I care about the processor performance, the size of the hard disk, the quality of the screen and the amount of RAM? yes. (The GPU didn't really matter to me, pretty much anything is good enough for simple photo editing nowadays....)
In fact, the one thing I wanted from the PC that I didn't get was to not have to spend ages trying to understand why it wouldn't connect to my network disk at home. (I missed the announcement (if there was one) that the latest builds of windows 11 require SMB shares to ask for a username and password when you connect to them unless you muck about with the registry.... Older builds are happy to use a guest login...
Sometime yesterday my Chromebook acquired a new desktop icon. Google "Gemini" has arrived! I'm not exactly sure what I'd do with it (if anything) but I was impressed with Google's FAQs which were, surprisingly quite factual, explaining rather well what this facility can both do and not do.
If Google can drop their AI on some cheap 'n cheerful Chromebook then I have to wonder why Windows users are being forced to replace hardware and software. Especially as if you really need to run this sort of stuff locally you can do it quite well on a decent spec current PC.
>> thanks to strong demand from businesses, which now have just a year to upgrade their fleets to Windows 11 to avoid paying extended support fees for Windows 10.
Most PCs out there now can run Windows 11 one way or another. Also, bottom line, it's cheaper to pay for Windows 10 extended support than to buy a new Windows 11 pc.
And then you get people like me - my Linux server runs just fine, and I'm going to image my Windows drive so that if it ever gets but (not likely), I'll just re-image the system drive and be done with it. Probably be okay for another decade.
Gartner always gets it wrong, no reason why this time should be different
The market is going to go WAY up May or June if M$ doesn't budge on the termination date of Windows 10 support. Many companies and public institutions will have to if MS doesn't budge as they have to carry cyber insurance in many cases and cyber insurance policies require all of the systems to be on a supported OS in general. So by July of 2025 I expect that PC makers will have a huge surge in demand. Get your PC now as the latter half of 2025 it will be impossible or stock up now and make bank come October.
This is only one of five possibilities. The other are: 1. Those who need W11 for insurance are already on it. 2. As LVPC above says, most PCs can run W11. Some of those users will simply upgrade to 11 when pushed and no sooner. 3. Also as LVPC says some will pay for extended W10 support rather than buy a new PC. 4. Heave a sigh of relief that the damn thing isn't going to get yet another upgrade that ties it in knots and/or removes something that was depended upon.
Is this because home PC users don't give a crap about AI since all they are doing is gaming, borwsing pr0n or doing home accounts and unless the home PC explodes they're not going to replace it.
I actually do a bit of AI work at home but it't image based and works fine on any machine with a GPU, special AI chippery not necessary
Today, most people do not have a PC. Some have a laptop and that's their only computer. Most people just have a tablet and a phone or just a phone. Only gamers and people that do not want to use their phone for everything buy PC today. That is a ever shrinking part of the population.
Companies buy PC's on the large scale and that's keeping that PC business alive today. For how long is anyone guess.
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