You DO see Windows 11 as an AI PC opportunity, say Dell and Intel With three months to go until Microsoft ends support for Windows 10, Dell and Intel want to convince corporate buyers that upgrading their PC fleet is a virtue and not a necessity. Someone using an AI-powered PC Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive READ MORE In a specially drafted "Windows 11 & AI PC Readiness …
But you know what that's about, don't you? Money.
If they hadn't let recent purchasors upgrade they'd have had the ambulance chasing lawyers gearing up for action. Nothing to do with limited generousity.
If they let everybody upgrade they wouldn't get the licence sales from new hardware.
Most jokes I hear about lawyers come from lawyers; e.g.---
"The medical research community is seriously thinking of using lawyers as lab animals for research, rather than white rats, because--
1) the researchers definitely won't get emotionally attached to lawyers;
2) there are more lawyers than lab rats;
3) there are some things that a lab rat just won't do.
Your post downvoted for not reading carefully. The complaint was about the ambulance chasing variety. Earlier in my career I spent a lot of time in the courts. As with any other profession there were good and, shall we say, not so good. I found the episodes where they shunted the jury (if there was one) out of earshot fascinating while they debated points of law. Particular respect for Dessie Boal for, amongst other things, getting FIB 1 as his number plate although it sounds like you'd disapprove of his doing that.
They should have turned down the US raah raah do this and you'll be a winner bullshit because it comes across as rather gauche. We all know they're doing this to try and inflate this quarter's numbers rather than the next quarter's.
The bump-up in price for "AI-ready" PC's is likely to put businesses off more than anything.
Most places I've worked at saw any IT provision as a necessary evil - computers get replaced if they die, and everything is run on a shoestring.
My last employer was a very conservatively run family-owned business, and resolutely assigned desktops to everyone - even the MD didn't have a laptop. Our sole IT guy worked two days a week as a contractor.
As a lowly technician starting in 2016, the desktop I got given was a 2006 era tower complete with a single-core Intel processor (can't remember if it was a Core Solo or a Celeron), that appeared to have been built out of stuff our IT contractor had lying around in the cupboard. I also remember being handed a rollerball PS2 mouse to complete the setup with! Windows XP was used on a lot of the lower end machines until about 2017, when some updates to software simply refused to run on it....so we got upgraded to W7 as hardly anything could cope with Windows 10.
Given attitudes like this aren't unusual in the slightest (although I admit that place was impressively miserly), who do Dell and Intel think they're kidding in hoping anyone will shell out the extra dosh for all the AI crap?
I was stunned to learn that the so-called "AI" laptops are nearly CAN$1000 more than their non-AI predecessors. All so you can be spied on 24/7 by Microsoft and US law enforcement through "Recall."
Nor is the "AI" aspect of these machines worth crap, because they've a fraction of the horsepower and memory available that my RTX4070Ti does, and I still can't run LLMs more than 9GB in size. Which means they're so compressed they hallucinate like they've snorted cocaine, sucked on a tab of LSD, and done a dose of Ketamine, all within the space of five minutes...
A trivial example, I appreciate but, nevertheless an example of how AI can streamline ones life.
eBay now offers to AI generated listing descriptions.
They are so consistently useless crap that I now simply disregard any item with an AI generated description and move on to the next.
The list of likely candidates shrinks.
A useful.time saver
Killer app?
Are there any even vaguely useful apps that require an AI PC?
Seriously.
Searching throws up a few toys. So far, not even anything that looks like it'll help anybody who is already doing anything locally with ML, as they (still) need the beefy GPU (they already have) to make any real dent in execution times.
AI does have a few good artistic uses (for examples see the videos produced by Music-and-Songs on YouTube) but so far I have yet to see any serious use for AI as the results are far too likely to be incorrect. Until AI can produce results that are more accurate than the average YouTube video there is very little justification for the huge hype and expenditure.
I do agree that "ITDM" is not A Thing. Internspeak?
In legalese, you use acronyms or abbreviations (Abbrevs) like this if you are planning to use This Important Legal Term over and over and over ...
I have never heard of DM's, except for the derivative from PM's, but "decision maker" written out is pure Salesese in the United States.
You may have a database full of company contacts, but, if they are Decision Makers, you are golden.
I actually *DO* have an A.I. PC on order. It's a Tuxedo Computers laptop that I shall need as I embark on a prolonged chapter of intermittent international travelling since I don't particularly wish to lug my water-cooled development desktop around the world with me. It shall be A.I. capable and also contain the necessary TPM 2 and other bits to enable the running of Windows 11.
I do see it as a great opportunity to avoid running either A.I. workloads or Windows 11 on it at all costs. I actually relish the prospect.
Of course, I selected the new hardware because of its Vulkan 1.4 support which I need because I'm developing software the uses Vulkan 1.3 ~ 1.4 features and extensions. I'm sure I'll run KataGo on it at some point, too, since I'm a Go player, and that's OpenCL so I wouldn't be surprised if the "A.I. features" of the GPU do get employed at least for something at some point in their lifetime – at least, I know that the fp16 support will very likely be used.
And fp16 support is literally the only thing that this "new opportunity" has that I could even enumerate as a feature that isn't supported on that aforementioned water-cooled development desktop (i7 7700, GTX 1080) which I assembled in 2017~18 and haven't upgraded(*) even once, which does not have any kind of TPM, which does not have "AI cores", which runs KataGo and other OpenCL workloads "just fine" because even fp16 features are not at all a hard requirement, and – CRITICALLY – which also never ran Windows 11, nor shall it! (It could, with hacks, but I am not inclined to bother to hack it even for shits-and-giggles and I've even run Windows ME for laughs, in my time, so there you go!)
The new laptop is all-AMD so it should support Linux much better than the desktop. I've conquered nVIDIA's shitty drivers on the latter so that's also quite OK (as long as I enforce the use of xwayland for all the things that freak out when the status-quo is nVIDIA+Wayland – while nVIDIA's drivers have improved over recent years, there are still a lot of things that just don't work with them under Wayland.)
If it was not for the need to take my dev. environment with me on an aeroplane, I honestly wouldn't have upgraded or even seen a need to in the near future.
But, still: I am going to absolutely love toting a Windows-11- and fully-AI-capable relative super-notebook around, running Gentoo (or Arch if I lose my nerve before Autumn and conclude that trying to hack on Gentoo over third-world Internet is not likely to be "fun" of the pleasantly-forgettable kind and opt for a safer, binary distro, instead.)
(*): I moved houses without draining the reservoir, once, and the pump died – presumably because the ~800m altitude difference was significant enough to force it to ingest water from the filled and sealed system – so that's been switched out. That is literally the only maintenance I've ever had to do on it beyond topping up the coolant.
From another publication:
"On Tuesday, Jenn Saavedra, Dell's chief HR officer, announced that the employee net promoter score, or eNPS — an industry-standard measure of employee satisfaction — had fallen to 32, according to a transcript of an internal video update obtained by <publication>. The results mark a double-digit drop in the eNPS for the second year running at Dell — it fell from 63 to 48 in 2024 — and an almost 50% decline in two years."
And they're thinking AI and RTO are going to save this ship. We don't need no stinking employees, we have automation.
Best of luck, all.
'AI' systems will leach your data for LLM crunching, breaking every data privacy rule in the book. The 'AI' they offer is not 'I', doesn't work well enough to be allowed anywhere near enterprise systems and is little more than a scam. Recall is a recipe for disaster. And the cloud has now been weaponised for geopolitics. W11 requirements are an e-waste holocaust and will burn a hole in your budget at a time when governments are killing global growth. How many red flags do you need?
Do your stuff on your current kit with standalone software (not SaaS/Cloud) on an intranet using local storage and never connect it to the public internet. Where needed, connect cheap Linux systems to the internet and air gap them from your intranet with carbon based lifeforms.
Post-'AI', an internet connection is too great a security/privacy risk for your internal network.
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