Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs • Hacker News Board

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#131

Post by reactordev » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #62

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's wild how often I've heard people say "we should have an AI do X" when X is something that's very obviously either a terrible idea or best suited for traditional algorithms. Likewise when smartphones were new, everyone and their mother was certain that random niche thing that made no sense as an app would be a perfect app and that if they could just get someone to make the app they’d be rich. (And of course ide…

With Claude Code doing the implementing now, we'll have to see who gets which slice of pizza!

Difference is now, that person with an idea, doesn’t need a programmer or anyone to share the pizza with. They are free to gorge on all 18” of it.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#132

Post by disfictional » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

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.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#133

Post by pseudosavant » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

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.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#134

Post by publicdebates » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

ericmcer wrote: post #25

FfejL wrote: post #10

> 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.

People will want what LLMs can do they just don't want "AI". I think having it pervade products in a much more subtle way is the future though. For example, if you close a youtube browser tab with a comment half written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose your comment if you close this window")`. It does this if the comment is a 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed…

> readily discard short or nonsensical input

When "asdfasdf" is actually a package name, and it's in reply to a request for an NPM package, and the question is formulated in a way that makes it hard for LLMs to make that connection, you will get a false positive.

I imagine this will happen more than not.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#135

Post by Telemakhos » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #122

yndoendo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magic in real life never works 100% of the time. It is all an illusion were some observers understand the trick and others do not. Those that understand it have the potential to break the magic. Even the magician has the ability to fault the trick. I want reproducibility not magic.

It is magic that I can touch a swith on the wall and lights come on. It is magic that I have a warm house despite the outside temperature is near freezing. we have plenty of other magic that works. I want more

Electricity, light, and heat aren't magic: they're science. Science is something well understood. Something that seems magical is something poorly understood. When I ask AI a question, I don't know whether it will tell me something truthful, mendacious in a verisimilitudinous way, or blatantly wrong, and I can only tell when it's blatantly wrong. That's magic, and I hate magic. I want more science in my life.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#136

Post by i386 » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #120

thwarted wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube could use AI to not recommend videos I've already watched, which is apparently a really hard problem.

It just might be that lot of users watch same videos multiple times. They must have some data on this and see that recommending same videos gets more views than recommending new ones.

I work for YouTube. You’re hired.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#137

Post by mjfisher » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

ericmcer wrote: post #125

wavemode wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical input. That doesn't sound ideal at all. And in fact highlights what's wrong with AI product development nowadays. AI as a tool is wildly popular. Almost everyone in the world uses ChatGPT or knows someone who does. Here's the thing about tools - you use them in a predictable way and they give you a…

But... A lot of stuff you rely on now was probably once distracting and unpredictable. There are a ton of subtle UX behaviors a modern computer is doing that you don't notice, but if they all disappeared and you had to use windows 95 for a week you would miss. That is more what I am advocating for, subtle background UX improvements based on an LLMs ability to interpret a users intent. We had limited abilities to look…

Serious question: what are those things from windows 95/98 I might miss?

Rose tinted glasses perhaps, but I remember it as a very straightforward and consistent UI that provided great feedback, was snappy and did everything I needed. Up to and including little hints for power users like underlining shortcut letters for the & key.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#138

Post by brailsafe » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:24 PM UTC

RevEng wrote: post #106

neilsimp1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, and I don't want anything related to the current AI craze in my life, at all. But when I come on HN and see people posting about AI IDEs and vibe coding and everything, I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing. I cannot explain this.

Even as a principal software developer and someone who is skeptical and exhausted with the AI hype, AI IDEs can be useful. The rule I give to my coworkers is: use it where you know what to write but want to save time doing it. Unit tests are great for this. Quick demos and test benches are great. Boilerplate and glue are great for this. There are lots of places where trivial, mind-numbing work can be done quickly and…

I think you've captured how I feel about it too. If I try to go beyond the scopes you've described, with Cursor in my case and a variety of models, I often end up wasting time unless it's a purely exploratory request.

"This package has been removed, grep for string X and update every reference in the entire codebase" is a great conservative task; easy to review the results, and I basically know what it should be doing and definitely don't want to do it.

"Here's an ambiguous error, what could be the cause?" sometimes comes up with nonsense, but sometimes actually works.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#139

Post by GuB-42 » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:29 PM UTC

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.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#140

Post by kenjackson » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

pseudosavant wrote: post #133

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.

I'd love to see a thorough breakdown of what these local NPUs can really do. I've had friends ask me about this (as the resident computer expert) and I really have no idea. Everything I see advertised for (blurring, speech to text, etc...) are all things that I never felt like my non-NPU machine struggled with. Is there a single remotely killer application for local client NPUs?