These rich scumbags have artificially created a demand for themselves, but they hoped for more with pushing the AI scam. You know, sales must only go up etc.
Just got a W11 laptop new from work, (replacing a dead W10 machine). It is such a mess. It is trying hard to be a modern desktop like KDE Plasma or GNOME, but without a cohesive setup. And bluescreened twice already, had a WebApp failure error, and locked up completely another time at login. This is brand-new Out of the Box.
Hmmm. I don't really like Windows myself and haven't setup a machine without for me in one a decade. But neither my work "development" laptop (in quotation marks because I'm not a developer) nor a mini PC I installed for my dad ever had bluescreens. They can still happen, of course... but it almost seems to require effort with really bad drivers or broken hardware.
The obvious Windows issues nowadays are a different category from 20 years ago in my opinion.
I don’t think that the people still on windows 10 are in a hurry to upgrade. I suspect that either they don’t want to or are not aware of the risk of outdated security updates. So in the end it probably will come down to whether those people need an actual hardware upgrade or not.
Who actually uses "local AI" beyond developers and a handful of end users? These NPUs are wasted silicon - akin to sticking a gaming GPU in your CPU that only works for games that are either in development or 99% of people don't give a shit about
The only real advantage of local AI is privacy and that it's much cheaper if you use it a lot.
The only consumer use case I see in the wild with some real momentum behind it is role play.
All the local AI communities I browse are 50% people trying to find usecases for it at their job (like me; unsuccessfully I might add) and 50% people interested in role play.
People will apparently spend thousands to jerk off to a soulless machine demon simulacrum shell of a human.
To be fair, I can see the appeal of local AI for video games, like RPGs. There is this really fun game called "Suck Up", where you are a vampire trying to convince AI to let you inside their house. That is the one real "killer" application I see atm.
I personally see a lot of other useful usecases for local AI, but from my experience at work, I would estimste it will take another 5 years until any of it is anywhere near consumer ready.
AI is being driven by LLMs hosted on the cloud, so why would anyone in their right mind buy a Laptop with "AI" "inside" it?
Even the most technophobic consumer understands this - you can Google something today with a PC from 2014 and it'll spit out AI slop for you to slurp on. AI chatbots are embedded into every website you can think of -- you already have AI shit in your device, it's just being outsourced to data centers.
AI accelerators should've always been an add-on card like GPUs, or at least embedded into GPUs (like some are) but this whole embedded-into-every-chip-imaginable AI bollocks is a waste of silicon and largely a marketing gimmick to uplift CPU prices.
CPU vendors are struggling to keep justifying new generations and they're getting desperate. For 90% of people (conservative guess) a CPU needs no more raw processing power than something from 2010-2014 and 4-6 cores; The kicker is, that this requirement hasn't been touched for years - the host OS has just artificially bloated itself to push sales.
Yeah my gaming pc is from 2014 and runs modern shit fine. Well did, my GPU seems to have packed it in over the weekend. So I'm on the verge of buying a entire new machine. Ten years is pretty good
Every person I know either already has a Windows 11 ready device, or doesn't know what an OS is. In the later case, I doubt they would trust themselves to buy a new laptop, rightfully tho. Luckily we have a bunch of old laptops from work, Win 11 compatible. Nobody will buy a new Laptop in my village!
And for those tech-savvy, or with tech-savvy family members, you can put Win11 on basically any PC. It may run like shit, but all the requirements can be disabled.
Hi there. Nice to meet you. I am a person. My desktop computer's motherboard is from 2009ish and only has BIOS, no UEFI. I cannot upgrade it to Windows 11 because of this. I know what an OS is.
Anyone who is just starting out with Linux and doesn't want to put in a lot of effort should definitely choose Mint over Arch. If you really want to learn the ins and outs, Arch is great. If you just want a usable computer, Mint is your daddy.
Even Ubuntu is fine as a gateway drug. Or Pop Os! Don’t be afraid to recommend easy solutions to Linux beginners who otherwise might not be interested in learning the internals.