They’ve just realised that AI won’t be in the PC, but on a server. Where Dell are heavily selling into - “AI datacenter” counted for about 40% of there infrastructure revenue

We do care. We REALLY don't want AI on by default on our PCs.

Isn't the only AI PC a Mac Studio?

"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

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What we're seeing here is that "AI" lacks appeal as a marketing buzzword. This probably shouldn't be surprising. It's a term that's been in the public consciousness for a very long time thanks to fiction, but more frequently with negative connotations. To most, AI is Skynet, not the thing that helps you write a cover letter.

If a buzzword carries no weight, then drop it. People don't care if a computer has a NPU for AI any more than they care if a microwave has a low-loss waveguide. They just care that it will do the things they want it to do. For typical users, AI is just another algorithm under the hood and out of mind.

What Dell is doing is focusing on what their computers can do for people rather than the latest "under the hood" thing that lets them do it. This is probably going to work out well for them.

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.

Consumers could be using AI upwards of 10 hours a day and still say they don't care about it.

I wonder if Dell will ever understand why consumers don't care.

I'll never forget walking through a tech store and seeing a HP printer that advertised itself as being "AI-powered". I don't know how you advertise a printer to make it exciting to customers but this is just ridiculous. I'm glad that tech companies are finally finding out people won't magically buy their product if they call it AI-powered.

There is one feature that I do care about.

Local speech recognition is genuinely useful and much more private than server based options.