Dell Walks Back AI-First Messaging After Learning Consumers Don't Care (pcgamer.com)
- Reference: 0180533457
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/07/1556212/dell-walks-back-ai-first-messaging-after-learning-consumers-dont-care
- Source link: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/dells-ces-2026-chat-was-the-most-pleasingly-un-ai-briefing-ive-had-in-maybe-5-years/
"One thing you'll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first," Dell head of product Kevin Terwilliger said during the presentation. "A bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC." The shift stems from Dell's observation that consumers simply aren't making purchasing decisions based on AI capabilities. "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 said. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/dells-ces-2026-chat-was-the-most-pleasingly-un-ai-briefing-ive-had-in-maybe-5-years/
Finally (Score:2)
A tech company with some early displays of a return to common sense.
AI PCs are the 3D TVs of today (Score:2)
Remember 3D TVs? Great idea in theory, but they just didn't work out. On-device AI is kinda similar. Any AI stuff you want it to do makes more sense to do in the cloud either due to local processors not being able to handle it or it benefitting from frequent model updates. In general, I am a huge skeptic of LLMs, especially as they're marketed, but for most LLM-tasks...nope...of all the use cases I know of, there's not a huge benefit to doing on device. This is a solution looking for a problem.
You
Re: (Score:2)
Furthermore, why would I want to pay for hardware that can do it locally if it is available on the cloud? It's funny that so much software has gone the way of "if you aren't online you can't use it" but AI is going the way of "you need this so bad you need it to run locally".
No shit Sherlock (Score:2)
The closest âoeAIâ comes to being useful is through a web browser using someone elseâ(TM)s servers. An âoeAIâ PC does not provide any value whatsoever.
Re: (Score:2)
That's mostly true. I've run some LLMs locally: they're slow and not very powerful, but there are times when having it local is nice for privacy.
I do expect this to change over time, with more operations being practical to run locally. I would really like to have voice input be a local task, for example.
What they don't admit... (Score:2)
Obviously they aren't going to say so; but their 'AI' marketing was not so much 'confusing' as 'fucking stupid and actively irrelevant'. You bother me with a video of a parent and child watching video on a laptop on the couch and tell me that Dell means longer battery life with AI? And the one with a generic small business owner sitting in front of a Dell, which acts intelligently so you can run your business. So, what do you mean by that exactly? Auto-dimming backlight based on ambient light? Nothing in pa
It's not that we don't care (Score:3)
We hate it intensely. The only thing it's good for is helping Donald Trump underest teenagers on grok and taking all the jobs, electricity, water and RAM and storage.
It is a psychotic and destructive technology that rapaciously steals everything it can get its grubby little paws on and gives it to a group of five or six billionaires planning on being trillionaires at our expense.
I think we've actually found a technology worse than the nuclear bomb. At least with the nukes we got a brief period of Peace caused by mutually assured destruction until we put lunatics in charge. We're not even going to get anything like that out of AI.
What does AI get you? (Score:2)
If I am getting a device that is AI enabled, what do I get? Does it do more for me? Not right now as a far as I can tell. I don't have any apps that require AI running on my device. It's because with AI the industry is putting the cart before the horse. If you buy the next gen graphics card or double memory, you know what the result is going to be. What if your device comes with an NPU? What capability does that bring to the device for a consumer? I'm a techie and I know what a NPU does, but I have no reaso
no AI please (Score:2)
I was thinking about changing my phone, the first thing I wanted to know how to avoid AI, how to disable AI, how to make sure there is no AI on my equipment. Thank you.
Re: (Score:2)
Not possible. Even the slowest processor can run AI algorithms, just a lot slower. No way to avoid it.
Re: (Score:2)
Browsers and apps can run simple inference or access remote services. This shit is going to be everywhere.