alt Hacker NewsDell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
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> It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't.
I wish every consumer product leader would figure this out.
I did use whisper last night to get the captions out of a video file. The standard whisper tool from OpenAI uses CPU. It took more than 20 minutes to fully process a video file that was a little more than an hour long. During that time my 20-Core CPU was pegged at 100% utilization and the fan got very loud. I then downloaded an Intel version that used the NPU. CPUs stayed close to 0% and fans remained quiet. Total task was completed in about 6 minutes.
NPUs can be useful for some cases. The AI PC crap is ill thought out however.
As someone who spent a year writing an SDK specifically for AI PCs, it always felt like a solution in search of a problem. Like watching dancers in bunny suits sell CPUs, if the consumer doesn't know the pain point you're fixing, they won't buy your product.
They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time. The current froth is all about AI infrastructure not consumer devices.
Fundamentally when you think about it, what people know today as AI are things like ChatGPT and all of those products run on cloud infrastructure mainly via the browser or an app. So it makes perfect sense that customers just get confused when you say "This is an AI PC". Like, what a weird thing to say - my smartphone can do ChatGPT why would I buy a PC to do that. It's just a totally confusing selling point. So you ask the question why is it an AI PC and then you have to talk about NPUs, which apart from anything else are confusing (Neural what?) but bring you back to this conversation:
What is an NPU? Oh it's a special bit of hardware to do AI. Oh ok, does it run ChatGPT? Well no, that still happens in the cloud. Ok, so why would I buy this?
Consumers are not idiots. We know all this AI PC crap is it's mostly a useless gimmick.
One day it will be very cool to run something like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini locally in our phones but we're still very, very far away from that.
I think the moral of the story is just don't buy any electronics until you absolutely have to now: your laptop, your desktop, your car, your phone, your tv's. Go third party for maintenance when you can. Install Linux when you can. Only buy things that can be maintained and enjoy what you have.
Finally companies understand that consumers do not want AI products, but just better, stronger, and cheaper products.
Unfortunately investors are not ready to hear that yet...
Well, yes, Dell, everyone knows that, but it is _most_ improper to actually _say_ it. What would the basilisk think?!
Protip, if you are considering a dell xps laptop, consider the dell precision laptop workstation instead which is the business version of the consumer level xps.
It also looks like names are being changed, and the business laptops are going with a dell pro (essential/premium/plus/max) naming convention.
Why would "consumers" as a whole care about an AI specific pc?
Consumers consciously choosing to play games - or serious CAD/image/video editing - usually note they will want a better GPU.
Consumers consciously choosing to use AI/llm? That's a subscription to the main players.
I personally would like to run local llm. But this is far from a mainstream view and what counts as an AI PC now isn't going to cut it.
Something I learned on HN years ago was the principle that often something that is riding to the top of the hyper curve is usually not a good product, but a good feature in another product.
At CES this year, one of the things that was noted was that "AI" was not being pushed so much as the product, but "things with AI" or "things powered by AI".
This change in messaging seems to be aligning with other macro movements around AI in the public zeitgeist (as AI continues to later phases of the hyper curve) that the companies' who've gone all-in on AI are struggling to adapt to.
The end-state is to be seen, but it's clear that the present technology around AI has utility, but doesn't seem to have enough utility to lift off the hype curve on an continuously upward slope.
Dell is figuring this out, Microsoft is seeing it in their own metrics, Apple and AWS has more or less dipped toes in the pool...I'd wager that we'll see some wild things in the next few years as these big bets unravel into more prosaic approaches that are more realistically aligned with the utility AI is actually providing.
I'm not a game programmer, but is there a use case for NPUs in gaming? One idea: If you had some kind of open world game, like a modern role playing game, where the NPCs could have non-deterministic conversations (1990s-style: "talk with the villagers") that could be pretty cool. Are NPUs are a good fit for this use case?
Does anyone know: How do these vendors (like Dell) think normie retail buyers would use their NPUs?
Everyone just wants a laptop with the latest NVIDIA graphics card, but also good cooling and a slim design. That's all. People don't care what AI features are built in; that's for Windows and applications.
Dell is cooked this year for reasons entirely outside their control. DRAM and storage/drive shortages are causing costs of those to go to the moon. And Dell's 'inventory' light supply chain and narrow margins puts them in a perfect storm of trouble.
> What we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI .. In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.
Do consumers understand that OEM device price increases are due to AI-induced memory price spike over 100%?
On the same note, whats going on with Dell's marketing lately?
Dell, Dell Pro, Dell Premium, Dell _Pro_ Premium Dell Max, Dell _Pro_ max... They went and added capacitive keys on the XPS? Why would you do this...
A lot of decisions that do not make sense to me.
They still ship their laptops with the Copilot key. Once that is removed then their statement will follow their actions.
NPU is space that would've probably been better put into something like a low power programmable DSP core, which they more or less are depending on which one you are looking at but with some preconceived ideas on how to feed the DSP its data and get the hardware working. You don't get to simply write programs on them usually from what I've seen.
They’ve just realised that AI won’t be in the PC, but on a server. Where Dell are heavily selling into - “AI datacenter” counted for about 40% of there infrastructure revenue
We do care. We REALLY don't want AI on by default on our PCs.
Consumers could be using AI upwards of 10 hours a day and still say they don't care about it.
"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."
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What we're seeing here is that "AI" lacks appeal as a marketing buzzword. This probably shouldn't be surprising. It's a term that's been in the public consciousness for a very long time thanks to fiction, but more frequently with negative connotations. To most, AI is Skynet, not the thing that helps you write a cover letter.
If a buzzword carries no weight, then drop it. People don't care if a computer has a NPU for AI any more than they care if a microwave has a low-loss waveguide. They just care that it will do the things they want it to do. For typical users, AI is just another algorithm under the hood and out of mind.
What Dell is doing is focusing on what their computers can do for people rather than the latest "under the hood" thing that lets them do it. This is probably going to work out well for them.
Most consumers aren't running LLMs locally. Most people's on-device AI is likely whatever Windows 11 is doing, and Windows 11 AI functionality is going over like a lead balloon. The only open-weight models that can come close to major frontier models require hundreds of gigabytes of high bandwidth RAM/VRAM. Still, your average PC buyer isn't interested in running their own local LLM. The AMD AI Max and Apple M chips are good for that audience. Consumer dedicated GPUs just don't have enough VRAM to load most modern open-weight LLMs.
I remember when LLMs were taking off, and open-weight were nipping at the heels of frontier models, people would say there's no moat. The new moat is high bandwidth RAM as we can see from the recent RAM pricing madness.
I'll never forget walking through a tech store and seeing a HP printer that advertised itself as being "AI-powered". I don't know how you advertise a printer to make it exciting to customers but this is just ridiculous. I'm glad that tech companies are finally finding out people won't magically buy their product if they call it AI-powered.
I wonder if Dell will ever understand why consumers don't care.
There is one feature that I do care about.
Local speech recognition is genuinely useful and much more private than server based options.
NPUs are just kind of weird and difficult to develop for and integration is usually done poorly.
Some useful applications do exist. Particularly grammar checkers and I think windows recall could be useful. But we don't currently have these designed well such that it makes sense.
People don't want AI PC, cause they don't want to spend 5000 bucks for something that's half as good as the free version of ChatGPT.
But we've been there before. Computers are going to get faster for cheaper, and LLMs are going to be more optimized, cause right now, they do a ton of useless calculations for sure.
There's a market, just not right now.
I have a "Copilot" button on my new ThinkPad. I have yet to understand what it does that necessitates a dedicated button.
On Linux it does nothing, on Windows it tells me I need an Office 365 plan to use it.
Like... What the hell... They literally placed a paywalled Windows only physical button on my laptop.
What next, an always-on screen for ads next to the trackpad?
I already have experience with intermitent wipers, they are impossible to use reliably, a newer car I have made the intermitent wipers fully automatic, and impossible to dissable.Now they have figured out how to make intermitent wipers talk, and want to put them in everything. I forsee a future where humanity has total power and fine controll over reality, where finaly after hundreds of years, there is weather controll good enough to make it rain exactly the right amount for intermitent wipers to work properly, but we are not there yet.
People dont want feature x (AI). They want problem(s) solved.
Happy Dell takes user feedback to heart
I saw the latest xps laptops and I’m really intrigued… finally a high end laptop without an nvidia gpu!
It seems many products (PCs, TVs, cars, kitchen appliances, etc.) have transitioned from "solve for the customer" to "solve for ourselves (product manufacturers) and tell the customer it's for them, even though it's 99% value to us and 1% value to them".
This should have been obvious to anyone paying any attention whatsoever, long before any one of these computers launched as a product. But we can't make decisions on product or marketing based on reality or market fit. No, we have to make decisions on the investor buzzword faith market.
Hence the large percentage of Youtube ads I saw being "with a Dell AI PC, powered by Intel..." here are some lies.
Unfortunately, their common sense has been rewarded by the stock tanking 15% in the past month including 4% just today alone. Dell shows why companies don't dare talk poorly of AI, or even talk about AI in a negative way at all. It doesn't matter that it's correct, investors hate this and that's what a ton of companies are mainly focusing on.
The typical consumer doesn't care about any checkbox feature. They just care if they can play the games they care about and word/email/netflix.
That being said, netflix would be an impossible app without gfx acceleration APIs that are enabled by specific CPU and/or GPU instruction sets. The typical consumer doesn't care about those CPU/GPU instruction sets. At least they don't care to know about them. However they would care if they didn't exist and Netflix took 1 second per frame to render.
Similar to AI - they don't care about AI until some killer app that they DO care about needs local AI.
There is no such killer app. But they're coming. However as we turn the corner into 2026 it's becoming extremely clear that local AI is never going to be enough for the coming wave of AI requirements. AI is going to require 10-15 simultaneous LLM calls or GenAI requests. These are things that won't do well on local AI ever.
I'm kind of excited about the revival of XPS. The new hardware sounds pretty compelling. I have been longing for a macbook-quality device that I can run Linux on... so eagerly awaiting this.
Seems savvy of Dell. With empty AI hype now the default, saying the quiet part out loud is a way to stand out. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean Dell will stop taking MSFT's marketing money to pre-sell the Right-Ctrl key on my keyboard as the "CoPilot" key.
I wouldn't hate this so much if it was just a labeling thing. Unfortunately, MSFT changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil.
More technical detail: The CoPilot key is really sending: Shift+Alt+Win+Ctrl+F23 which Windows now uses as the shortcut to run the CoPilot application. When you remap the CoPilot key to right-Ctrl only the F23 is being remapped to right-Ctrl. Due to the way Windows works and because MSFT is now sending F23 DOWN and then F23 UP when the CoPilot key has only been pressed Down but not yet released, those other modifiers remain pressed down when our remapped key is sent. I don't know if this was intentional on MSFT's part to break full remapping or if it's a bug. Either way, it's certainly non-standard and completely unnecessary. It would still work for calling the CoPilot app to wait for the CoPilot key to be released to send the F23 KEY UP event. That's the standard method and would allow full remapping of the key.
But instead, when you press CoPilot after remapping it to Right-Ctrl... the keys actually being sent are: Shift+Alt+Win+Right-Ctrl (there are also some other keypresses in there that are masked). If your use case doesn't care that Shift, Alt and Win are also pressed with Right-Ctrl then it'll seem fine - but it isn't. Your CoPilot key remapped to Right-Ctrl no longer works like it did before or like Left-Ctrl still works (sending no other modifiers). Unfortunately, a lot of shortcuts (including several common Windows desktop shortcuts) involve Ctrl in combination with other modifiers. Those shortcuts still work with Left-Ctrl but not CoPilot remapped to Right-Ctrl. And there's no way to fix it with remapping (whether AutoHotKey, PowerToys, Registry Key, etc). It might be possible to fix it with a service running below the level of Windows with full admin control which intercepts the generated keys before Windows ever sees them - but as far as I know, no one has succeeded in creating that.
> "One thing you'll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first," Dell head of product, Kevin Terwilliger says with a smile. "So, a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC."
> "We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."
He's talking about marketing. They're still gonna shove it into anything and everything they can. They just aren't gonna tell you about it.
WTF is an "AI PC"? Most of "AI" happens on the internet, in big datacenters, your PC has nothing to do with that. It will more likely confuse users who don't understand why they need a special PC when any PC can access chatgpt.com.
Now, for some who actually want to do AI locally, they are not going to look for "AI PCs". They are going to look for specific hardware, lots of RAM, big GPUs, etc... And it is not a very common use case anyways.
I have an "AI laptop", and even I, who run a local model from time to time and bought that PC with my own money don't know what it means, probably some matrix multiplication hardware that I have not idea how to take advantage of. It was a good deal for the specs it had, that's the only thing I cared for, the "AI" part was just noise.
At least a "gaming PC" means something. I expect high power, a good GPU, a CPU with good single-core performance, usually 16 to 32 GB of RAM, high refresh rate monitor, RGB lighting. But "AI PC", no idea.
> It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't.
This seems like a cop out for saving cost by putting Intel GPUs in laptops instead of Nvidia.
I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.