Unfortunately, their common sense has been rewarded by the stock tanking 15% in the past month including 4% just today alone. Dell shows why companies don't dare talk poorly of AI, or even talk about AI in a negative way at all. It doesn't matter that it's correct, investors hate this and that's what a ton of companies are mainly focusing on.
The problem is that there are virtually no off-the-shelf local AI applications. So they're trying to sell us expensive hardware with no software that takes advantage of it.
> What we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI .. In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.
Do consumers understand that OEM device price increases are due to AI-induced memory price spike over 100%?
I'm kind of excited about the revival of XPS. The new hardware sounds pretty compelling. I have been longing for a macbook-quality device that I can run Linux on... so eagerly awaiting this.
Protip, if you are considering a dell xps laptop, consider the dell precision laptop workstation instead which is the business version of the consumer level xps.
It also looks like names are being changed, and the business laptops are going with a dell pro (essential/premium/plus/max) naming convention.
I think part of the issue is that it's hard to be "exciting" in a lot of spaces, like desktop computers.
People have more or less converged on what they want on a desktop computers in the last ~30 years. I'm not saying that there isn't room for improvement, but I am saying that I think we're largely at the state of "boring", and improvements are generally going to be more incremental. The problem is that "slightly better than last year" really isn't a super sexy thing to tell your shareholders. Since the US economy has basically become a giant ponzi scheme based more on vibes than actual solid business, everything sort of depends on everything being super sexy and revolutionary and disruptive at all times.
As such, there are going to be many attempts from companies to "revolutionize" the boring thing that they're selling. This isn't inherently "bad", we do need to inject entropy into things or we wouldn't make progress, but a lazy and/or uninspired executive can try and "revolutionize" their product by hopping on the next tech bandwagon.
We saw this nine years ago with "Long Blockchain Ice Tea" [1], and probably way farther back all the way to antiquity.
Dell is cooked this year for reasons entirely outside their control. DRAM and storage/drive shortages are causing costs of those to go to the moon. And Dell's 'inventory' light supply chain and narrow margins puts them in a perfect storm of trouble.
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 current froth is all about AI infrastructure not consumer devices.
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.
Apple’s AI powered image editor (like removing something from the background) is near unusable. Samsung’s is near magic, Google’s seems great. So there’s a big gap here.
That is rather funny because I think Google's and Samsung's AI image actions are completely garbage, butchering things to the point where I'd rather do it manually on my desktop or use prompt editing (which to Google's credit Gemini is fantastic at). Whereas Apple's is flawless in discerning everything within a scene or allowing me to extract single items from within a picture. For example say, a backpack in the background.
> had these features 2-5 years before Android did.
"first" isn't always more important than "best". Apple has historically been ok with not being first, as long as it was either best or very obviously "much better". It always, well, USED TO focus on best. It has lost its way in that lately.
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.
"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."
--------------
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.
I actually do care, on a narrow point. I have no use for an NPU and if I see that a machine includes one, I immediately think that machine is overpriced for my needs.
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 Apple and others have done that aren’t conversational are very useful. Pervasive OCR on Windows and Mac is fantastic, for example. You could brand that as AI. But you don’t really need to no one cares if you do or not.
Just download the app and it has a few built-in model options. The best of those is probably Gemma-3 1B Q4 but on my Pixel 10 Pro I find the best performing model it can reasonably run is Qwen3 8B Q4_K_M.
You can download and run any GGUF compatible model with that app.
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
NPUs are just kind of weird and difficult to develop for and integration is usually done poorly.
Some useful applications do exist. Particularly grammar checkers and I think windows recall could be useful. But we don't currently have these designed well such that it makes sense.
A while ago I tried to figure out which APIs use the NPU and it was confusing to say the least.
They have something called the Windows Copilot Runtime but that seems to be a blanket label and from their announcement I couldn't really figure out how the NPU ties into it. It seems like the NPU is used if it's there but isn't necessary for most things.
This should have been obvious to anyone paying any attention whatsoever, long before any one of these computers launched as a product. But we can't make decisions on product or marketing based on reality or market fit. No, we have to make decisions on the investor buzzword faith market.
Hence the large percentage of Youtube ads I saw being "with a Dell AI PC, powered by Intel..." here are some lies.
Fundamentally when you think about it, what people know today as AI are things like ChatGPT and all of those products run on cloud infrastructure mainly via the browser or an app. So it makes perfect sense that customers just get confused when you say "This is an AI PC". Like, what a weird thing to say - my smartphone can do ChatGPT why would I buy a PC to do that. It's just a totally confusing selling point. So you ask the question why is it an AI PC and then you have to talk about NPUs, which apart from anything else are confusing (Neural what?) but bring you back to this conversation:
What is an NPU? Oh it's a special bit of hardware to do AI. Oh ok, does it run ChatGPT? Well no, that still happens in the cloud. Ok, so why would I buy this?
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?
The typical consumer doesn't care about any checkbox feature. They just care if they can play the games they care about and word/email/netflix.
That being said, netflix would be an impossible app without gfx acceleration APIs that are enabled by specific CPU and/or GPU instruction sets. The typical consumer doesn't care about those CPU/GPU instruction sets. At least they don't care to know about them. However they would care if they didn't exist and Netflix took 1 second per frame to render.
Similar to AI - they don't care about AI until some killer app that they DO care about needs local AI.
There is no such killer app. But they're coming. However as we turn the corner into 2026 it's becoming extremely clear that local AI is never going to be enough for the coming wave of AI requirements. AI is going to require 10-15 simultaneous LLM calls or GenAI requests. These are things that won't do well on local AI ever.
Most regular people use AI to get restaurant recommendations or cheat on homework. I think you massively overestimate just how many people actually care about the more advanced features of AI services.
I already have experience with intermitent wipers, they are impossible to use reliably, a newer car I have made the intermitent wipers fully automatic, and impossible to dissable.Now they have figured out how to make intermitent wipers talk, and want to put them in everything.
I forsee a future where humanity has total power and fine controll over reality, where finaly after hundreds of years, there is weather controll good enough to make it rain exactly the right amount for intermitent wipers to work properly, but we are not there yet.
As someone who spent a year writing an SDK specifically for AI PCs, it always felt like a solution in search of a problem. Like watching dancers in bunny suits sell CPUs, if the consumer doesn't know the pain point you're fixing, they won't buy your product.
I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.
Also the Copilot button/key is useless. It cannot be remapped to anything in Ubuntu because it sends a sequence of multiple keycodes instead if a single keycode for down and then up. You cannot remap it to a useful modifier or anything! What a waste of keyboard real estate.
I did some research on if the transistor budget for the NPU was spent on something else in the SoC/CPU, what could you get?
You could have 4-10 additional CPU cores, or 30-100MB more L3 cache. I would definitely rather have more cores or cache, than a slightly more efficient background blurring engine.
92 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 95.3 ms ] threadUnfortunately investors are not ready to hear that yet...
Do consumers understand that OEM device price increases are due to AI-induced memory price spike over 100%?
I love my 2020 XPS.
The keyboard keys on mine do not rattle, but I have seen newer XPS keyboard keys that do rattle. I hope they fixed that.
It also looks like names are being changed, and the business laptops are going with a dell pro (essential/premium/plus/max) naming convention.
I wish every consumer product leader would figure this out.
People have more or less converged on what they want on a desktop computers in the last ~30 years. I'm not saying that there isn't room for improvement, but I am saying that I think we're largely at the state of "boring", and improvements are generally going to be more incremental. The problem is that "slightly better than last year" really isn't a super sexy thing to tell your shareholders. Since the US economy has basically become a giant ponzi scheme based more on vibes than actual solid business, everything sort of depends on everything being super sexy and revolutionary and disruptive at all times.
As such, there are going to be many attempts from companies to "revolutionize" the boring thing that they're selling. This isn't inherently "bad", we do need to inject entropy into things or we wouldn't make progress, but a lazy and/or uninspired executive can try and "revolutionize" their product by hopping on the next tech bandwagon.
We saw this nine years ago with "Long Blockchain Ice Tea" [1], and probably way farther back all the way to antiquity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
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.
apple is so hit or miss.
I think the image ocr is great and usable. I can take a picture of a phone number and dial it.
but trying to edit a text field is such a nightmare.
(try to change "this if good" to "this is good" on iphone with your fingers is non-apple cumbersome)
"first" isn't always more important than "best". Apple has historically been ok with not being first, as long as it was either best or very obviously "much better". It always, well, USED TO focus on best. It has lost its way in that lately.
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.
For me, the Copilot key outputs the chord "Win (Left) + Shift (Left) + F23". I remapped it to "Ctrl (Right)" and it's functioning as it should.
To be fair, they did announce flashy AI features. They just didn't deliver them after people bought the products.
I've been reading about possible class action lawsuits and even the government intervening for false advertisement.
--------------
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.
I actually do care, on a narrow point. I have no use for an NPU and if I see that a machine includes one, I immediately think that machine is overpriced for my needs.
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.
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 Apple and others have done that aren’t conversational are very useful. Pervasive OCR on Windows and Mac is fantastic, for example. You could brand that as AI. But you don’t really need to no one cares if you do or not.
So we're probably only a few years out from today's SOTA models on our phones.
How?
Just download the app and it has a few built-in model options. The best of those is probably Gemma-3 1B Q4 but on my Pixel 10 Pro I find the best performing model it can reasonably run is Qwen3 8B Q4_K_M.
You can download and run any GGUF compatible model with that app.
Some useful applications do exist. Particularly grammar checkers and I think windows recall could be useful. But we don't currently have these designed well such that it makes sense.
They have something called the Windows Copilot Runtime but that seems to be a blanket label and from their announcement I couldn't really figure out how the NPU ties into it. It seems like the NPU is used if it's there but isn't necessary for most things.
Hence the large percentage of Youtube ads I saw being "with a Dell AI PC, powered by Intel..." here are some lies.
Local speech recognition is genuinely useful and much more private than server based options.
What is an NPU? Oh it's a special bit of hardware to do AI. Oh ok, does it run ChatGPT? Well no, that still happens in the cloud. Ok, so why would I buy this?
This seems like a cop out for saving cost by putting Intel GPUs in laptops instead of Nvidia.
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.
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?
I've shied away from Dell for a bit because I had two XPS 15's that had swelling batteries. But the new machines look pretty sweet!
That being said, netflix would be an impossible app without gfx acceleration APIs that are enabled by specific CPU and/or GPU instruction sets. The typical consumer doesn't care about those CPU/GPU instruction sets. At least they don't care to know about them. However they would care if they didn't exist and Netflix took 1 second per frame to render.
Similar to AI - they don't care about AI until some killer app that they DO care about needs local AI.
There is no such killer app. But they're coming. However as we turn the corner into 2026 it's becoming extremely clear that local AI is never going to be enough for the coming wave of AI requirements. AI is going to require 10-15 simultaneous LLM calls or GenAI requests. These are things that won't do well on local AI ever.
You could have 4-10 additional CPU cores, or 30-100MB more L3 cache. I would definitely rather have more cores or cache, than a slightly more efficient background blurring engine.