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.
Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
11–20 of 418 posts
Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
#12Finally 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...
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.
Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
#13Dell 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.
Anything but admitting that AI king is naked, here on HN...
Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
#14> 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 think they will eventually. It’s always been a very incoherent sales pitch that your expensive PCs are packed full of expensive hardware that’s supposed to do AI things, but your cheap PCs that have none of that are still capable of doing 100% of the AI tasks that customers actually care about: accessing chatGPT.
Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
#15Dell 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.
Anything but admitting that AI king is naked, here on HN...
What? No, this is a pretty relevant comment that is being directly caused by AI.
Consumer PCs and hardware are going to be expensive in 2026 and AI is primarily to blame. You can find examples of CEOs talking about buying up hardware for AI without having a datacenter to run it in. This run on hardware will ultimately drive hardware prices up everywhere.
The knock on effect is that hardware manufacturers are likely going to spend less money doing R&D for consumer level hardware. Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars making a 700 core beast for AI workloads in a datacenter? And you can get a nice premium for that product because every AI company is fighting to get any hardware right now.
Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
#16> 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 think they will eventually. It’s always been a very incoherent sales pitch that your expensive PCs are packed full of expensive hardware that’s supposed to do AI things, but your cheap PCs that have none of that are still capable of doing 100% of the AI tasks that customers actually care about: accessing chatGPT.
Also, what kind of AI tasks is the average person doing? The people thinking about this stuff are detached from reality. For most people a computer is a gateway to talking to friends and family, sharing pictures, browsing social media, and looking up recipes and how-to guides. Maybe they do some tracking of things as well in something like Excel or Google Sheets.
Consumer AI has never really made any sense. It's going to end up in the same category of things as 3D TV's, smart appliances, etc.
Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
#17Finally 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...
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.
Partly it's these people all trying to make money selling AI tools to each other, and partly there's a lot of people who want to take shortcuts to learning and productivity without thinking or caring about long term consequences, and AI offers that.
Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
#18Finally 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...
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.
I see using AI for coding as a little different. I'm producing something that is designed for a machine to consume and react to. Code is the means by which I express my aims to the machine. With AI there's an extra layer of machine that transforms my written aims into a language any machine can understand. I'm still ambivalent about it, I'm proud of my code. I like to know it inside out. Surrendering all that feels alien to me. But it's also undeniable that AI has sped up a bunch of the boring grunt work I have to do in projects. You can write, say, an OpenAPI spec, some tests and tell the AI to do the rest. It's very, very far from perfect but it remains very useful.
But the fact remains that I'm producing something for a machine to consume. When I see people using AI to e.g. write e-mails for them that's where I object: that's communication intended for humans. When you fob that off onto a machine something important is lost.
Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they will eventually. It’s always been a very incoherent sales pitch that your expensive PCs are packed full of expensive hardware that’s supposed to do AI things, but your cheap PCs that have none of that are still capable of doing 100% of the AI tasks that customers actually care about: accessing chatGPT.
Also, what kind of AI tasks is the average person doing? The people thinking about this stuff are detached from reality. For most people a computer is a gateway to talking to friends and family, sharing pictures, browsing social media, and looking up recipes and how-to guides. Maybe they do some tracking of things as well in something like Excel or Google Sheets. Consumer AI has never really made any sense. It's goin…
I don't remember any other time in the tech industry's history when "what companies and CEOs want to push" was less connected to "what customers want." Nobody transformed their business around 3D TVs like current companies are transforming themselves to deliver "AI-everything".
Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
#20Finally 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...
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.
> I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing.
this is their aim, along with rabbiting on about "inevitability"
once you drop out of the SF/tech-oligarch bubble the advocacy drops off