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Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

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

#101

Post by yndoendo »

bluGill wrote: post #50
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…

I want magic that works. Sometimes I want a tool to interrupt me! I know my route to work so I'm not going to ask how I should get there today - but 1% of the time there is something wrong with my plan (accident, construction...) and I want the tool to say something. I know I need to turn right to get someplace, but sometimes as a human I'll say left instead: confusing me and the driver where they don't turn right, a…

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.

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

#103

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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…

> 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 important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical input. That is really difficult to do in traditional software but is something an LLM could do with low effort.

I agree this would be a great use of LLMs! However, it would have to be really low latency, like on the order of milliseconds. I don't think the tech is there yet, although maybe it will be soon-ish.

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

#104

Post by ehnto »

nikanj wrote: post #48
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.

Companies don’t really exist to make products for consumers, they live to create stock value for investors. And the stock market loves AI

As someone pointed out, Dell is 50% owned by Michael Dell. So it's less influenced by this paradigm.

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

#105

Post by ehnto »

m000 wrote: post #47
weird_trousers wrote: post #3

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...

The problem is that there are virtually no off-the-shelf local AI applications. So they're trying to sell us expensive hardware with no software that takes advantage of it.

Yes it's a surprising marketing angle. What are they expecting people to run on these machines? Do they expect your average joe to pop into the terminal and boot up ollama?

Anyone technical enough to jump into local AI usage can probably see through the hardware fluff, and will just get whatever laptop has the right amount of VRAM.

They are just hoping to catch the trend chasers out, selling them hardware they won't use, confusing it as a requirement for using ChatGPT in the browser.

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

#106

Post by RevEng »

neilsimp1 wrote: post #5
weird_trousers wrote: post #3

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...

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 effortlessly with an AI. These are cases where it's actually making life better for the developer, not replacing their expertise.

I've also had luck with it helping with debugging. It has the knowledge of the entire Internet and it can quickly add tracing and run debugging. It has helped me find some nasty interactions that I had no idea were a thing.

AI certainly has some advantages in certain use cases, that's why we have been using AI/ML for decades. The latest wave of models bring even more possibilities. But of course, it also brings a lot of potential for abuse and a lot of hype. I, too, all quite sick of it all and can't wait for the bubble to burst so we can get back to building effective tools instead of making wild claims for investors.

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

#107

Post by rationalist »

mjbale116 wrote: post #102

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.

It's a lot easier for people to spend more money when they are confused about their choices.

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

#108

Post by rationalist »

whalesalad wrote: post #8

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.

Sweet, TIL!

I love my 2020 XPS.

The keyboard keys on mine do not rattle, but I have seen newer XPS keyboard keys that do rattle. I hope they fixed that.

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

#109

Post by almosthere »

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.

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

#110

Post by gt0 »

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…

Would that be ideal though? Adding enormous complexity to solve a trivial problem which would work I'm sure 99.999% of the time, but not 100% of the time.

Ideally, in my view, is that the browser asks you if you are sure regardless of content.

I use LLMs, but that browser "are you sure" type of integration is adding a massive amount of work to do something that ultimately isn't useful in any real way.

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