this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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This is such a hilarious bit of branding nonsense. There is no such thing as "AI PCs".
I mean, I technically own one, in that the branding says I do and it has a Copilot button, but... well, that's definitely not why I purchased it and I don't think I've used an "AI feature" on it. I'm not even opinionated against them, I have run local LLMs in my other computers, it's just not a good application for the device I own that is specifically branded for "AI".
The stupidity of it is that my "AI device" is an ARM device, and I absolutely love the things ARM Windows does that are actually useful. I pulled up my old x64 device that I used before I got this and man, the speed of Windows Hello, how much better it handles video streams, the efficiency... I'd never go back for a portable device at this point.
But the marketing says it's "AI", so once people start telling each other that "AI PCs" are bad and new AMD and Intel "AI" CPUs are released it's anybody's guess how the actually useful newer Windows ARM devices will fare.
I'm still hoping that the somewhat irrational anger towards "AI" stuff subsides so we can start talking about real features now, because man, this has been a frustrating generation to parse for portable Windows devices, and we still have Android, iOS and Mac devices coming down the pipe with similar branding nonsense.
I think this is referring to machines that come with APUs that have enough tensor (or whatever the equivalent is) cores in order to provide a certain baseline of "AI" operations per second, so Microsoft et al can rely on that for Recall etc without users thinking it slow.
Amusingly, the first generation of these didn't really have enough, so they're truly unwanted.
Yeah, my problem is that this was made to coincide with the Snapdragon Windows PCs, which are really good at a bunch of stuff and specifically not good at NPU performance, so the result of the "AI" branding ends up being really disappointing.
We could talk about all the other growing pains and the ways those devices were covered, but the obsessive focus on "AI" certainly didn't help, as demonstrated by the bizarre reporting linked in the OP.