Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

I think it does make sense if you're at a certain level of user hardware. If you make local computing infeasible because of the computational or hardware cost it makes it much easier to sell compute as a service. Since about 2014 almost every single change to paid software has been to make it a recurring fee rather than a single payment, and now they can do that with hardware as well. To the financially illiterate paying a $15 a month subscription to two LLMs from their phone they have a $40 monthly payment on for two years seems like a better deal than paying $1,200 for a desktop computer with free software that they'll use a tenth as much as the phone. This is why Nvidia is offering GForce Now the same way in one hundred hour increments, as they can get $20 a month that goes directly to them, with the chance of getting up to an additional $42 maximum if the person buys additional extensions of equal amount (another one hundred hours). That ends up with $744 a year directly to Nvidia without any board partners getting a cut, while a mid grade GPU with better performance and no network latency would cost that much and last the user five entire years. Most people won't realize that long before they reach the end of the useful lifetime of the service they'll have paid three to four times as much as if they had just bought the hardware outright.

With more of the compute being pushed off of local hardware they can cheapen out on said hardware with smaller batteries, fewer ports and features, and weaker CPUs. This lessens the pressure they feel from consumers who were taught by corporations in the 20th century that improvements will always come year over year. They can sell less complex hardware and make up for it with software.

For the hardware companies it's all rent seeking from the top down. And the push to put "AI" into everything is a blitz offensive to make this impossible to escape. They just need to normalize non-local computing and have it succeed this time, unlike when they tried it with the "cloud" craze a few years ago. But the companies didn't learn the intended lesson last time when users straight up said that they don't like others gatekeeping the devices they're holding right in their hands. Instead the companies learned they have to deny all other options so users are forced to acquiesce to the gatekeeping.

are you really asking why someone would like a much better siri?

- truck drivers that are driving for hours.

- commuters driving to work

- ANYONE with a homepod at home that likes to do things hands free (cooking, dishes, etc).

- ANYONE with airpods in their ears that is not in an awkward social setting (bicycle, walking alone on the sidewalk, on a trail, etc)

every one of these interaction modes benefits from a smart siri.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Why can’t I have a siri that can intelligently do multi step actions for me? “siri please add milk and eggs to my Target order. Also let my wife know that i’ll pick up the order on my way home from work. Lastly, we’re hosting some friends for dinner this weekend. I’m thinking Italian. Can you suggest 5 recipes i might like? [siri sends me the recipes ASYNC after a web search]”

All of this is TECHNICALLY possible. There’s no reason apple couldn’t build out, or work with, various retailers to create useful MCP-like integrations into siri. Just omit dangerous or destructive actions and require the user to manually confirm or perform those actions. Having an LLM add/remove items in my cart is not dangerous. Importantly, siri should be able to do some tasks for me in the background. Like on my mac…i’m able to launch Cursor and have it work in agent mode to implement some small feature in my project, while i do something else on my computer. Why must i stare at my phone while siri “thinks” and replies with something stupid lol. Similarly, why can’t my phone draft a reply to an email ASYNC and let me review it later at my leisure? Everything about siri is so synchronous. It sucks.

It’s just soooo sooo bad when you consider how good it could be. I think we’re just conditioned to expect it to suck. It doesn’t need to.

Not that far away, you can run a useful model on flagship phones today, something around GPT 3.5's level.

So we're probably only a few years out from today's SOTA models on our phones.

Happy Dell takes user feedback to heart

Nailed it? Maybe close. They still have a keyboard button dedicated to Copoilot. That thing can’t be reconfigured easily.