Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected? PC makers were salivating at the prospect of AI notebooks driving up their margins yet it seems the price difference coupled with a lack of killer apps and the destabilizing influence of tariff talk means customer adoption is slower than expected. the commercial segment in particular is still figuring out what AI overall can …
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For people who like AI, the local NPU/GPU can't run the larger models anyway, so it's a bit useless
And for those of us who despise AI with a deep-seated hatred, the NPU is nothing more than an embedded spy-chip, enabling creepy, privacy-breaking "features" that nobody in their right mind would ever want, such as Recall
Just to pile on what cyberdemon posted: the folks who are most likely to buy one of these behemoths, are also the ones most likely to understand that "AI', such as it is these days, is unmitigated shit(e), and so have no motivation (and also know better than) to spend money on these things.
And besides, these things also don't even make good gaming machines. So what's the point?
The ones the vendors think are most likely to buy then are those who think they're unmitigated shite. The ones actually likely to buy them are those who don't know any better, believe what the salesman says and think they need what the salesman's telling them it will do. And then can get the budget signed off if they need to. That probably leaves the usual suspects - the senior executives whose PAs handle their email - as the largest group.
Spot on. The ones who will fall for the salesdroids hype.
Avoid them like the plague. Sooner or later, the hype bubble will burst and these PC's will be heavily discounted. That will be the time to buy unless MS has moved the goalposts and they won't run W12.
But in time they will all have it, won't they? It's just the familiar theme of new innovations starting at the expensive end of the market and working downwards. In a year or two all new PCs will have it, whether or not (most likely the latter!) you actuall want it...
PCs without AI are going to be increasingly sought after, so I expect someone will be warehousing pallet loads of them to cash in.
All the creepy stuff MS is forcing on people - Recall as well as AI - is a security risk of unknown proportions. Instead we should be removing intranets from contact with the public internet. Someone is going to be minting it flogging Windows LTSC machines. Leave AI to the mugs who bought into the metaverse, NFTs and all the other next big things.
Even if we did want it†, we all know that the first generation of any "next great thing" will be crap and probably useless when the later generation devices come on stream. So early adopters will probably end up with useless machines.
† which most of us don't.
They'll just remove PCs without AI from sale so you've no choice but to buy one and then put out a statement that everyone is buying AI PCs after all therfore we're all desperate for the tech-bros to have our data to keep the AI train rolling.
The problem to me now is that everything comes with so much added shit yet in such a low quality package that I no longer want to buy anything. Cars? Expensive yet full of cheap electronics and even cheaper plastics. Laptops? full of added advertising cruft, shit OSs and now they've added AI that does nothing but up the price down the battery and steal my data. Flying? Assuming you get to survive the flight on a cut price dev Boeing, now you get to stand, booking is full of dark patterns, and you're abandoned if there is an issue. Clothes? All Temu standard now and disintegrate on the first wash etc etc
In general - whole hearted agreement. These days things are designed down to a price rather than up to a quality.
>>Clothes? All Temu standard now and disintegrate on the first wash
Now you are being a trifle unfair to Temu here. Some Temu clothing is quite high quality - SWMBO has several T-Shirts that have survived her use and abuse for more than a Year! - the trouble is telling 'good' from 'bad'.
OK nothing on Temu matches my well worn gig T-Shirt from 1988/89. That shirt is still almost completely intact, with the usual deliberate holes, and only one or two others. It may be a little translucent these days but has proven to be well worth the money I paid for it
I have a Watsons Heavies t-shirt I was given for Christmas in 1991 and is pretty much the same as it was. Every time I wear it I'm reminded that a) if you make clothes out of good quality heavy-duty fabrics they can last incredibly well, b) most modern clothes are not made out of good quality fabric, and c) fashionable t-shirts in the early nineties were massive.
I don't know that the company made it into this century - the downside of making clothes tough enough that they never need replacing one supposes.
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What is the use case for these? To me, it still isn't clear. I don't use AI at all, but my wife does use ChatGPT at times - however she doesn't need an "AI PC" to use that.
I'm still waiting for a big app or a big use-case/clear benefit from having an NPU on your PC. And no, that abomination known as Recall doesn't count!
To me, it's just another case of a solution looking for a problem...
Unlike ChatGPT which is an on demand thing that you have to prompt, on PCs it can be involved in what you are doing, and help you do it.
For example, it can summarise your recent emails, or it can check the document you have open, read a long document and summarise it.
It can create content for you or help you set up a pivot table, just a few examples.
Today I asked ChatGPT to make me a logo for a software business and it made an impressive one. However, there were similar found when I did google image search with it.
>Unlike ChatGPT which is an on demand thing that you have to prompt, on PCs it can be involved in what you are doing, and help you do it.
But you don't need an "AI PC" to do that. The app can just make remote API calls to an online LLM. There are several apps that work exactly like that. You'd only need an "AI PC" to do it offline, but that's a corner case these days.
> For example, it can summarise your recent emails, or it can check the document you have open, read a long document and summarise it.
And to think it has taken since 1988 (for me anyway) when the first PC's appeared in front of me until now to realise that we have been begging and gasping for something to "summarise " all the previous word diarrhoea humankind has spewed out, my goodness! how did we survive all those intervening years!!??
Be like me, when someone at my place spams me with shit, add a rule to forward all to deleted
If there is a subject that will get lots is responses, do the same
That way I can summarise my emails very quickly
As for a document. I find the TOC works really well and all our docs have a Synopsis and solution as the first 2 headings
No need for ai shit
It is worse than 'a problem looking for a question' !!!???
It is a 'Small problem' looking for a 'Larger problem' ....
The 'Large problem' = the question you are looking to answer.
The 'Small problem' is the 'AI' & NPU on your PC trying to solve the 'Large problem' ...
The net result is that you have a 'Best guess' at the answer to the 'Large problem' ... remember 'AI' does not guarantee the answer is valid.
And you have the 'Small problem' ensconced on your PC wreaking havok in the background ...
Seems a 'Good Deal' to me .... NOT !!!
:)
The whole point of a laptop is to be portable. This means they will be out in the real world with muggers. A high price turns a laptop into a mugger magnet. There are three features I will pay for:
1) Sturdy enough to use as a weapon.
2) Light enough that I can still flee from a concussed mugger.
3) A reasonable xorg server so if I need some difficult computing done I can ssh to something far enough away that the fan noise does not bother me.
I understand my requirements are strongly counter to the manufacturers. They are look for ways to increase the price and fragility. We parted company years ago and I doubt we will become best friends again. These days I can bolt a keyboard, mouse, battery, portable monitor and a raspberry pi to a brief case. As a bonus I can swap parts as required instead of having to replace everything in one go - including the parts that still work fine.
I miss my VAIO T2... While it didn't meet the first requirement
Well it definitely met #2, being 1.2Kg at a time when laptops were usually around 3Kg and met #3 since that was one of the reasons why I bought it : being able to X-Window/SSH for a whole day without havig to plug it ad far enough from the back of the servers to avoid edig up with a cold... whiole being small enough to be put on top of stuff where a regular laptop (at that time) wouldn't fit and light enough to be carried around for hours.
Sadly the fondleslabs killed that kind of laptops and it's impossible nowadays to find a decent 10 or 11" laptop (well it's impossible to find any 10 or 11" laptop)
>” and it's impossible nowadays to find a decent 10 or 11" laptop”
Back in the day it was also very difficult to find any decent 10 or 11” laptop that was actually in stock and purchasable.
However, it was very easy to buy under powered and limited netbooks…
Intel and MS killed the small form factor laptop. Firstly by crippling the netbook and secondly by making decent ones excessively more expensive than 15~17” laptops; Apple with the iPad had a product that largely satisfied the demands of this demographic at a “reasonable” price.
Today, I use an iPad with a keyboard case instead of a Wintel laptop. Yes it was ~£1000, but it fits my use case.
Decent laptops smaller than 12" were never common anyway (the brief netbook craze produced low-spec laptops at 10 or 11"). There used to be good 12" business-grade laptops, but they seem to have disappeared now. Dell doesn't produce anything with a screen smaller than 13".
Kindof sometimes. I got a laptop when I had to live for a while in a place with not much room. Having a laptop form factor took up less space both when using and when not. Real portability was not a consideration and as such I got a heavy workstation type desktop replacment which was only portable in theory. Lot of people have laptops not for portabilioty be to avoid have a number of large boxes taking up space permanently.
Back when Lenovo was still IBM I was mightily impressed with their durability. Could survive being in the boot of the car while cornering at adventurous speeds, minor drops, used as a coaster, kids teething on them and still kept on ticking. And I certainly wouldn't like to take a smack in the face from one.
I mean....even the smallest Chromebook to the face, with an average swing, will totally rock your shit.
Honestly though, "muggers" don't care how much the laptop costs, they will steal it anyway. Later, when they find out the value, they might be a bit irritated but it won't change anything.
I do quite a bit of CAD work with this laptop (Dell with a core i5) and it copes quite well (I had the installed RAM upped to 16GB as that is really the minimum for such things).
I have seen some frankly ridiculous claims on various sites about AI can do this or that (the latest fad is it can design your circuit and lay it out and another claiming you won't need to read the datasheets anymore).
I can't see this aggregated ignorance [1] providing any assistance in the core part of designing electronics (by the time I start actually using the tools I have already designed the thing at a decent level). One of the other things I do is troubleshooting, and given that each and every circuit is a bit (or a lot!) different, not sure how that will somehow miraculously find the solution to all the problems we can see.
I just can't see the value (and nor do my IT group, AFAIK) in paying for internal functionality that we neither want or need (to say nothing of the slurpage going on).
The vendors are desperate but if they are that desperate maybe they should be selling what the buyers actually want. [2]
1. Brazenly stolen from a post here some time ago. Best description I have ever seen.
2. I know, I know...
You demand that I buy a flawed, but very expensive NEW COMPUTER, that I am legitimately trying to rid myself of at this point, with money I do not have, just so you can use it's "power" to spy, data base, manipulate, and commit flat out CRIME and CRIMINAL activity against me to the point that it is slower, more difficult, less useful, and more invasive than the machine I already am running?
Why? What's the pay off? It can't do anything but ruin my life. Tech has been boiled down to crime and criminals at this point. Why would I give them another avenue to commit crime against ME?
Well you see, it's all the criminals at this point. You've got the criminals in the food industry trying to foist off agricultural industrial waste products as packaged convenience food. You've got the international tech companies seeking ever more intrusive and enslaving tech products. And most worryingly, you've got the politicians, who always HAVE been criminals, but up to now at least didn't have the data gathering tools to completely eliminate grassroots democratic action, steamrolling their 'vision' into the most complex and dystopian reality imaginable. It's criminals all the way down, spud.
AI PC is just like when 5G first launched, sure some people will rush out as early adopters but then they find there is little benefit to paying extra for the feature.
Maybe in a few years time when there is something actually useful they can do on an AI PC and the price is the same as one without it then it will be adopted by the masses?
Although on a personal level ive yet to see any app or service that would only work with a 5G handset that doesn't also work with a phone that only has 4G, so maybe the AI PC apps just will never take off?
Local AI / LLM user here -- laptops with AI accel are hopelessly under-powered to hold a light to what is available in-cloud , and readily available at that.
Building a local rig -its just that, lots of GPU, oversized PSUs, frameworks that update twice a week, models each few, its a lot of feeding and watering - enthusiast territory over buy and use.
The problem is I have an RTX 4070 Ti. It is far more capable than the so-called "AI PC" LLM capabilities are, at 12GB of memory and many more gigaflops (fractional teraflops?) of processing power as well. Yet still the only LLMs I can run are brain damaged 9GB models that are useless for anything except prototyping code because they hallucinate like psychopathic daydreamers with delusions of canned solutions for the "hard parts" the LLM can't "solve".
Just use this non-existent library/jar/maven package and all thine problems shalt go away... in LLM fantasy land.
I recently dabbled with ollama on CPU only 64gb old cheap server loading for example Gemma3 37GB model for cpu infrrencing. It _is_ slow but say 10 minutes for complete answer is not eternity either.
From what I understand ollama can work hybrid, load as much to gpu vram as possible, and the rest to system RAM.
This way you could still use gpu, and models bigger than its VRAM
I am still noob, mind you
Tested on Ubuntu 22.04
And he is an architecture astronaut that the rest of the group uses as a barometer of what not to do.
He doesn't trust ISPs or mail providers, so he hosts his own mail server, which has been down for months.
He won't use an FTP server, preferring to set up a microservice architecture, with SwarmKit to orchestrate it in a VM, of course.
And he needs an $8,000 four-processor Ryzen desktop with 128GB of ram, 16TB of SSD, and 6 NICs so that everything can be run in a dozen separate VMs.
Naturally, he's trying to run his own LLM on his desktop.
That's the target audience for desktop AI. The people whose lights dim in their house when they fire up a compiler because their computers use more power than their air conditioners.
Everyone else is using web-based ProtonMail or the like for mail, they use a shared DropBox account to share files, and they run $300-$1,000 computers (for the gamers) that get just as much done, if not more, because they're not rebuilding the internet service infrastructure on their desks.
The average user doesn't care about running Proxmox, or Kubernetes, or setting up an industrial data warehouse. And they don't care about having an LLM on their desktop, either.
Computer makers are salivating over AI processors because it means being able to sell high margin machines again, and since the market doesn't currently have AI chips, there's a potential market of billions of machines to be sold. The only thing missing is any indication that end users asking for it.
Does anyone else remember 15 years ago, when TV makers were pushing 3D television sets? You couldn't find a TV without 3D for a while. How many do you see today?
Sure, AI and LLMs are important, and people will use them. Remotely. End users love email, too, but they're not running out to install and configure SMTP servers on their desktop, they just use a remote server that provides it for them. The same will be true for LLMs.
I'm sure that AI features will creep into regular desktop chipsets; that's probably inevitable. But needing a dedicated AI chip is a solution in search of a problem.
I am looking for a new laptop to replace my current 10 year old machine. I am struggling to find a suitable replacement at the moment I am looking at either having to drop from 17" to 16" or accept no biometrics. Super Clippy is nowhere amongst my requirements. Indeed if anything lack of support for recall is a positive not a negative. I rather expect to finish up with a copilot+ machine but that is likely because that is all I will be offered not because it is what I want.
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