My general point is that discussing the intricacies of potential local AI model usage is way over the head of the people that would even in theory care about the facile “AI PC” marketing message. Since no one is making it trivial for the casual user to actually do anything with those NPUs, then it’s all a moot point for this sort of marketing. Even if there were an enthusiast market that would use those embedded NPUs without a distinct more capable infrastructure, they wouldn’t be swayed/satisfied with just ‘AI PC’ or ‘Copilot+’, they’d want to know specs rather than a boolean yes/no for ‘AI’.

The issue is that to the extent that might even make sense, no major player is actually doing anything to help that happen. Every big player is exclusively focused on taking AI use cases into their datacenters, because that’s the way to maintain control and demand subscriptions.

If you did do it, then the users would complain that the ‘AI feature’ as executed on their puny NPU is really slow compared to what the online alternative does.

So that scenario is a hypothetical, and they are trying to make sales based on now. ‘AI PC’ doesn’t make any sense because people imagine what you describe, but in reality just cannot tell a difference because nothing works any differently for their ‘AI experience’. Their experience is going to be a few niche Windows features work that most people don’t even know about or would want.

Well, first Dell’s use of ‘confused’ is mainly a way to walk “away” from AI as a marketing strategy without having to walk it “back” (they can’t walk it back: Microsoft will keep Copiloting it up, the processor comparies will keep bundling NPUs, and the consumer exposure to AI will continue to have nothing to do with any of the ‘AI PC’ or not). So ‘confused’ is a way to rationalize the absence of ‘AI PC’ in their marketing strategy without having to actually change what they are doing.

But to the extent ‘confusing’ may apply, it’s less about ‘AI’ and more about ‘AI PC’. What about this ‘AI PC’ would impact your usage with AI, for most people the answer is ‘not at all’, since mostly it’s over the internet. So for the layperson, an ‘AI PC’ just enables a few niche Windows features no one cares about. Everything pushing around the ‘AI’ craze is well away from actually running on the end user devices.

The real ‘quiet part’ would be that they are avoiding it because a large number of people hate ‘AI’. To say they are ‘confused’ is still keeping the quiet part quiet…

More to the point, the casual consumer isn’t going to dig into the nitty gritty of running models locally and not a single major player is eager to help them do it (they all want to lock the users into their datacenters and subscription opportunities).

On the Dell keeping NPUs in their laptops, they don’t really have much of a choice if they want modern processors, Intel and AMD are all-in on it still.

It’s just a softer thing to say than ‘a lot of people hate AI and it’s alienating potential customers’. They can’t come out and say that out loud, they don’t want to piss off Microsoft too much and they aren’t going to try to do NPU-free systems (it’s not really possible). They aren’t going to do anything to ‘fight back’ against the AI that people hate (they can’t), so their best explanation as to why they pull back from a toxic brand strategy is that ‘people just don’t care’ rather than ‘people hate this thing that we are going to keep feeding’.

But if they need to rationalize the perspective, an “AI” PC does nothing to change the common users experience with the AI things they know, does not change ChatGPT or Opus or anything similar, that stuff is entirely online. So for the common user, all ‘AI’ PC means is a few Windows gimmicks that people either don’t care about or actively complained about (Recall providing yet another way for sensitive data to get compromised).

In terms of “AI” as a brand value, the ones most bullish about AI are executives that like the idea of firing a punch of people and incidently they actually want to buy fewer PCs as a result. So even as you can find AI enthusiastic people, they still don’t want AI PCs.

For most people, their AI experience has been:

• News stories talking about companies laying off thousands or planning to lay off thousands for AI, AI is the enemy
• News stories talking about some of those companies having to rehire those people because AI fell over, AI is crap
• Their feeds being flooded with AI slop and deepfakes, AI is annoying
• Their google searches now having a result up top that, at best, is about the same as clicking the top non-sponsored link, except that it frequently totally botches information, AI is kind of pointless

For those that have actually positive AI experience, they already know it has nothing to do with whether the PC is ‘AI’ or not. So it’s just a brand liability, not a value.

Outlook not so good… nailed that one too.

Inspired by your comment, I polled ChatGPT 5 direct and Copilot itself, and ChatGPT was smarter than the executive by saying it was a bad idea, while Copilot itself said it might be a bad idea, but it’s aligned with Microsoft’s vision, which may be more important, but ultimately seemed to have no idea if it was a good idea or bad idea…

So I guess ChatGPT at least is smarter than the MS CEO. Of course Copilot seemed primed to try to favor and vindicate Microsoft’s decision. I tried a more aggressive statement that it was stupid to try to get that ‘I agree with you by default’ and it still tried to soften the perspective in favor of Microsoft.

As a bonus, I asked if it would be a good idea to rename LibreOffice to LibreSidekick. It looked more like the ChatGPT 5 answer for Office to Copilot, saying it’s a dumb idea, until the end when it said unless it has an AI assistant like Microsoft Copilot, then it would be a good idea…

It’s really vague, and does warrant some specific examples…

I’d say if anything, they pretend some things are more peaceful than they are. Like sending the military in to capture a foreign leader being portrayed as simply “a military operation” rather than “act of war”. Emphasizing celebrations by Venezulan ex-pats.

The nominally socialist nations that receive media attention are generally truly not particularly peaceful, and the socialist nations that are pretty good peace wise are well known, but just too ‘boring’ to be in a ‘news’ cycle.

I suppose the point is that people can’t just take someone’s declaration of ‘socialism’ at face value, as there’s too many examples of malicious authoritarianism that claimed affinity to socialism as part of their rise to power. Not to say that capitalist nations are faring any better, just that the word ‘socialism’ when wielded as a brand isn’t to be trusted.

Ugh, the color choices for ‘former’ versus ‘socialist ruling party’ are impossible for color blind folks…

Yeah, absolutely nothing in the writing explained why he stuck with the emperor. I feel like the last thing he would have done based on his motivation to that point is stick with palpatine. Beyond being a psychopath, it doesn’t even make sense by those standards.

Empire strikes back set up a couple of plot twists that the series really couldn’t execute on. Nice in the movie since they got to leave it open ended, but bad for the series when they actually had to run with resolving those twists.

Also, he was the one who killed his wife.

Upon finding out that he was the one ultimately responsible, he went “nooooo” and I suppose went “well, as long as I’m in this cool suit, guess I’ll just keep doing the evil then”.

Frankly, I find his arc to be one of the least convincing “how a guy went evil and was redeemed” in fiction. Empire strikes back had the benefit of being able to leave it vague enough to leave it a potentially interesting turn, but when they actually had to delve into it, was pretty unfulfilling

Fun space action movies, but execution on the “twists” was not the strong point.

The reference is an example of a flippant sort of response of answering the request, but with something lacking the depth the person was asking about.

He probably doesn’t mind talking about the game broadly, but it can be a bit much for someone to be annoying about saying it should have been a different genre that they would have enjoyed. I suppose your question could be flipped around, why attend a panel discussing doom if you don’t really care for doom?

Sounds like a couple of randos, no one significant. The perspective is the interesting part, not the person expressing the perspective.

Oh phone trees are terrible, I refer exclusively to online self service. I suppose an LLM might be able to help a caller connect to the correct set of humans better than phone trees…

If I’m resorting to phone, it’s because I really really need a human. I know there still exist some very old people stuck calling… But if they can’t work your online portal, they won’t be able to work a phone tree either…

The robo-bullshit is great, if the thing has no nuance. Self checkout, paying bills, buying stuff online.

The things is those things are great because they are so predictable. LLM takes the predictability out. It’s also generally not allowed to do anything that the self service portal was not allowed to do, so you get stuck with a more imprecise interface instead of the nice, precise interface of a traditional portal, and no access to more nuanced help. It’s the worst of both worlds.

Yeah, have a new executive who managed a vaguely segment appropriate “hello world” with code gen and so regularly rants about why we should be paying human developers.

The biggest improvement on the user side was to stop trying to weigh the bagging area to prevent loss.

The newer machine vision based systems are less likely to screw up. “Unexpected item in bagging area” was an almost universal experience, nowadays I have only been flagged for human review once.

Also, one store I was at just lets you put your items under a camera without finding barcodes, and you just confirm the identified products.

Think the issue is either a self service portal that works in very predictable way (like the self checkout) or a human to deal with nuance.

To the extent an LLM might be useful, it’s likely blocked from doing so because the operator doesn’t trust it either.

The biggest annoyance is that the LLM support tends to more aggressively refuse to bring a human in.

So, Windows is harder to use you say. And “incompetent” users should stick to Linux?

That’s a take that would have been absurd many years ago. I personally am willing to do things the hard way for some benefit, so I have a Windows PC for gaming. But all my other systems are Linux systems, laptop, workstation, or embedded. However Windiws is supposed to be the easier choice.

I’ll even grant that Windows PITA is mostly not deliberate action by Microsoft. It’s mostly letting vendors be their crappy self and messing up the experience, with a bit of windows driver model incompatibilities breaking hardware support abandoned by vendor, but kept alive Linux side.