Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 418 posts

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

#221

Post by themafia »

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…

I want a functioning search engine. Keep your goofy opinionated mostly wrong LLM out of my way, please.

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

#223

Post by Tajnymag »

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.

I thought they actually dumbed down the model names. Basically the more adjactives the laptop has, the higher the model is. Now the machines can have pronounciable names and just add generation number every year or so.

Sure, the original numbering system did make sense, but you had to Google what the system meant. Now, it's kind of intuitive, even though the it's just a different permutation of the same words?

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

#224

Post by pmontra »

yndoendo wrote: post #222

They still ship their laptops with the Copilot key. Once that is removed then their statement will follow their actions.

I'd be surprised if Microsoft would sell them Windows licenses or would work with them on drivers if they don't put the Copilot key on the keyboard.

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

#226

Post by nottorp »

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.

The "AI" gold rush pays a lot. So they're trying to present themselves as "AI" experts so they can demand those "AI" gold rush salaries.

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

#227

Post by microtonal »

observationist wrote: post #218
zozbot234 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPUs are still useful for LLM pre-processing and other compute-bound tasks. They will waste memory bandwidth during LLM generation phase (even in the best-case scenario where they aren't physically bottlenecked on bandwidth to begin with, compared to the iGPU) since they generally have to read padded/dequantized data from main memory as they compute directly on that, as opposed to being able to unpack it in local reg…

The idea that tokenization is what they're for is absurd - you're talking a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of a percent of efficiency gain in real world usage, if that, and only if someone bothers to implement it in software that actually gets used. NPUs are racing stripes, nothing more. No killer features or utility, they probably just had stock and a good deal they could market and tap into the AI wave with.

I think they were talking about prefill, which is typically compute-bound.

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

#228

Post by mrinterweb »

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.

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

#229

Post by fragmede »

bitwize wrote: post #179
kenjackson wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"WHAT IS MY PURPOSE?" "You multiply matrices of INT8s." "OH... MY... GOD" NPUs really just accelerate low-precision matmuls. A lot of them are based on systolic arrays, which are like a configurable pipeline through which data is "pumped" rather than a general purpose CPU or GPU with random memory access. So they're a bit like the "synergistic" processors in the Cell, in the respect that they accelerate some operatio…

Do compilers know how to take advantage of that, or do programs need code that specifically takes advantage of that?

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

#230

Post by eterm »

tliltocatl wrote: post #213
eterm wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only one I can think of, literally the only one, is grouped icons. And even that's only because browsers ended up in a weird "windows but tabs but actually tabs are windows" state. So yeah, I'd miss the UX of dragging tabs into their own separate windows. But even that is something that still feels janky in most apps ( windows terminal somehow makes this feel bad, even VS code took a long time to make it feel oka…

It's not like grouped icons wasn't technically infeasible on win95. And honestly, whatever they are more useful is quite debatable. And personally, I don't even have a task panel anymore. The real stuff not on Win95 that everyone would miss is scalable interfaces/high DPI (not necessary as in HiDPI, just above 640x480). And this one does require A LOT of resources and is still wobbly.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Technically feasible", but it wasn't supported by explorer.

You could have multiple windows, and you could have MDI windows, but you couldn't have shared task bar icons that expand on hover to let you choose which one to go to.

If you mean that someone could write a replacement shell that did that, then maybe, but at that point it's no longer really windows 95.

Post reply on HN