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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

#51

Post by bluGill »

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

The stock market as always been about whatever is the fad in the short term, and whatever produces value in the long term. Today AI is the fad, but investors who care about fundamentals have always cared about pleasing customers because that is where the real value has always come from. (though be careful - not all customers are worth having, some wannabe customers should not be pleased)

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

#52

Post by hallmason17 »

microflash wrote: post #45
ishtanbul wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the precision 5690 (the 16inch model) with a ultra 7 processor and 4k touchscreen (2025 model). It is very heavy, but its very powerful. My main gripe is that the battery life is very bad, and it has a 165 watt charger, which wont work on most planes. So if you fly a lot for work, this laptop will die on you unless you bring a lower wattage charger. It also doesn't sleep properly. I often find it in my bag hou…

After using several Precisions at work, I now firmly believe that Dell does not know how to cool their workstations properly. They are all heavy, pretty bad at energy efficiency and run extremely hot (I use my work machine laid belly up in summer since fans are always on). I’d take a ThinkPad or Mac any day over any Dell.

Power hungry intel chips and graphics cards are inconvenient in laptops when it comes to battery life and cooling. It is especially noticeable if you spend any time using an M-series macbook pro, where performance is the same or better, but you get 16 hours of battery life. I prefer to use thinkpads, but apple just has a big technological advantage here that stands out in the UX department. I really hope advances are made quickly by competitors to get similar UX in a more affordable package.

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

#53

Post by bluGill »

yalogin wrote: post #27

They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time.…

Even customers who care about AI (or perhaps should...) have other concerns. With the RAM shortage coming up many customers may choose to do without AI features to save money even though they want it at a lower price.

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

#54

Post by bluGill »

cogman10 wrote: post #15
dude250711 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars

You might be right, but I suspect not. While the hardware company are willing to do without laptop sales, data centers need the power efficiency as well.

Facebook has (well had - this was ~10 years ago when I heard it) a team of engineers making their core code faster because in some places a 0.1% speed improvement across all their servers results in saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per month (sources won't give real numbers but reading between the lines this seems about right) on the power bill. Hardware that can do more with less power thus pays for itself very fast in the data center.

Also cooling chips internally is often a limit of speed, so if you can make your chip just a little more efficient it can do more. Many CPUs will disable parts of the CPU not in use just to save that heat, if you can use more of the CPU that translates to more work done and in turn makes you better than the competition.

Of course the work must be done, so data centers will sometimes have to settle for whatever they can get. Still they are always looking for faster chips that use less power because that will show up on the bottom line very fast.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by jorvi »

yalogin wrote: post #27

They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time.…

The only thing Apple is behind on in the AI race is LLMs.

They've been vastly ahead of everyone else with things like text OCR, image element recognition / extraction, microphone noise suppression, etc.

iPhones have had these features 2-5 years before Android did.

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

#57

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

mort96 wrote: post #35
mossTechnician wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think it's an excellent example to be honest. Most of the time whenever someone proposes some use case for a large language model that's not just being a chat bot, it's either a bad idea, or a decent idea that you'd do much better with something much less fancy (like this, where you'd obviously prefer some length threshold) than with a large language model. It's wild how often I've heard people say "we should have…

> 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 ideally, the idea haver of the misguided idea would get the lions share of the riches, and the programmer would get a slice of pizza and perhaps a percentage or two of ownership if the idea haver was extra generous.)

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

#59

Post by nerdjon »

yalogin wrote: post #27

They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time.…

All of the reporting about Apple being behind on AI is driving me insane and I hope that what Dell is doing is finally going to be the reversal of this pattern.

The only thing that Apple is really behind on is shoving the word (word?) "AI" in your face at every moment when ML has been silently running in many parts of their platforms well before ChatGPT.

Sure we can argue about Siri all day long and some of that is warranted but even the more advanced voice assistants are still largely used for the basics.

I am just hoping that this bubble pops or the marketing turns around before Apple feels "forced" to do a copilot or recall like disaster.

LLM tech isn't going away and it shouldn't, it has its valid use cases. But we will be much better when it finally goes back into the background like ML always was.

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

#60

Post by pier25 »

MBCook wrote: post #49
pier25 wrote: post #38

Consumers are not idiots. We know all this AI PC crap is it's mostly a useless gimmick. One day it will be very cool to run something like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini locally in our phones but we're still very, very far away from that.

It’s today’s 3D TVs. It’s something investors got all hyped up about that everybody “has to have“. There is useful functionality there. Apple has had it for years, so have others. But at the time they weren’t calling it “AI“ because that wasn’t the cool word. I also think most people associate AI with ChatGPT or other conversational things. And I’m not entirely sure I want that on my computer. But some of the things…

> Pervasive OCR on Windows and Mac is fantastic, for example.

I agree. Definitely useful features but still a far cry from LLMs which is what the average consumer identifies as AI.

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