from Hacker News

Intel admits what we all knew: no one is buying AI PCs

by ajdude on 4/29/25, 1:44 PM with 39 comments

• by washadjeffmad on 4/29/25, 3:35 PM

  I liken it to when ultrabooks and netbooks launched in a time when most people were offline and uninterested in connectivity. Full featured laptops existed then, as well.

  In this case, dedicated capacity for AI has been in systems for a while behind the scenes (ie- Intel GNA) but without consumer demand; it's OEMs and OS/software vendors who are most interested in pushing the "AI Ready" standard.

  If Microsoft built a set of local tools and models that integrated with Office or other applications (like Krita + ComfyUI) that were "sold" out of the Microsoft Store and only available on AI Ready systems, it might ignite some consumer interest.

  However, leading with "Look how we can record your screen in secret and use AI to harvest your private information!" instead of "Here's you as a cartoon character" more or less solidified everyone's distrust in their responsible intent.

• by jaredcwhite on 4/29/25, 7:07 PM

  AI has become a negative brand for a fast-growing cohort. When you advertise something as having AI or adding AI, people are turned off rather than excited. And even if they feel neutral about it, they'll certainly opt to spend less money on the non-AI version if they can.

  It's simply another sign that we're at the tail-end of a massive bubble that's about to burst spectacularly.

• by JohnFen on 4/29/25, 1:47 PM

  Makes sense. I wouldn't want to pay a premium for a feature that I'm not interested in having.

  My employer just refreshed all of our dev machines, and they didn't go with "AI PCs" either.

• by jdboyd on 4/29/25, 6:39 PM

  I think there is a mismatch with Intel/Window's idea of an AI PC being a beefed up edge TPU core, while customers who do want AI want LLMs, which I'm under the impression the Lunar Lake AI features aren't that great at accelerating (but are presumably good at non LLM vision and audio processing). If I'm misunderstanding this, I'd love a reply.

• by sixtyj on 4/29/25, 2:00 PM

  Premium price is one issue, the second one is dependence on some proprietary AI system. I remember buying LG or Samsung phone with their systems that they stopped to support and switch to Android.

  And you don’t want to buy premium brick if you don’t have to.

• by karmakaze on 4/29/25, 6:28 PM

  I actually want an AI PC, but not the kind that are being marketed. Basically I want to see a cheaper Mac M3 Ultra with about 128GB unified memory combined with discrete-performance GPU on-board. AMD is moving in that direction and might get there in 3 or so generations. Could perhaps get away with less hardware if software improves before then.

  Nvidia's DGX Spark is a bit of a joke with only 273 GB/s memory bandwidth which is less than a 10 year old Radeon Fury X with 512 GB/s or the current RTX 5090's 1.79 TB/s.

• by pjmlp on 4/29/25, 3:10 PM

  Of course, AI PCs are useless on GNU/Linux, and no one wants the return of Clippy and Minority Report on their Windows machines.

  I doubt CoPilot+ PC with Qualcom chips are doing any better.

• by scarface_74 on 4/29/25, 2:57 PM

  More expensive than Apple’s ARM computers, less battery efficient, Lame

  (and I bet this will stand up to the test of time better than the original quote)

• by nerdjon on 4/29/25, 3:53 PM

  Frustratingly though, it’s going to get hard and harder to avoid.

  Even looking at building my own machine today, “AI PC” is all over much of this.

• by bionhoward on 4/29/25, 2:58 PM

  Won’t big enterprises eat this stuff up once they figure out Microsoft Recall lets them copy employees in 5-10 years by recording everything every employee does on every work computer and training AI on all that juicy “behavior cloning” data?

  Terrible for wagies, great for capitalist equity lords