News AI PCs aren't driving sales — The need to upgrade from Windows 10 drove 2025 laptop sales

[magbarn]

Stop wasting die space on useless AI. x86 has fallen so behind Apple's M4 it's not even funny anymore. How does Apple do it without using crappy chiplets that add latency?

 

[Notton]

IMO, it ultimately boils down to an unneeded, luxury add-on feature when the people's wallets are already constrained.
It's not even free because the AI enabled chips aren't cheap compared to existing CPUs.

 

[abufrejoval]

I finally found some time and went through upgrading some of my older, officially outdated hardware to Windows 11.

It wasn't a ton of fun, but it worked.

The goal was to have a working Windows OS without any of the cloud pressure Microsoft as a software vendor is trying to impose on PC owners, so no OneDrive, Edge, online-searching, ads, Co-Pilot , Bitlocker, VBS (I stilll prefer VMware for nested virtualization) and other nasties.

Base was the just released LTSC IoT 24H2 ISO, which already removes quite a lot of the restrictions, but still won't install e.g. on the Skylake gamer notebook that I used as a first test vehicle, due to "incompatibility".

I used NTlite to remove anything I didn't want and set most of the registry tweaks and then installed on a system with an acceptable CPU.

And then copied that image to all kinds of other devices, which failed installation, but work just fine with an OS already "installed".

Renamed the machines, switched the language settings (IoT only comes in US-English) went through the November patches and everything just works.

Verified with various Kaby Lakes, Skylakes, Broadwells and Goldmont Atoms.

And, of course, no Windows 11 ever complained about installation or running in a VM on these machines, neither with KVM on Linux or VMware Workstation on Windows...

That should last another ten years now, if I understand LTSC IoT correctly, unless Microsoft goes even more rogue.

By then AI has either bankrupted Microsoft or the rest of the economy.
Or perhaps some sanity has returned...

What's too bad is that switching to an LTSC release implies that an upgrade installation is blocked (another artifical obstacle).

But since I am finally replacing Microsoft Office with Libreoffice and Thunderbird anyway to escape the other involuntary cloudification via Office 365, that's not as bad as it would have been with licensed software otherwise.

I try to keep OS and app vendors strictly separate, so Microsoft only gets to do the OS (FlightSim a single exception) on Windows, just like I avoid anything Google on Android.

For me the main remaining hurdle for Linux-only is Games, but the more Microsoft pushes, the better that will get.

And perhaps they will finally just be broken up as they and others like them should have been long ago.

P.S. Of course that same image also works just fine on brand new machines...

 

[philipemaciel]

2025, the year of Linux on the desktop?

 

[jp7189]

We had a junior dev that is so far down the AI rabbit hole, I'm worried that he'll never be found again.

College classes, daily "stuff", wanting it to write code for him...

He was PISSED when I banned any "AI" generated code from our projects.
"Dude, you need to know how to do this yourself, before depending on an AI to do it for you" (among a LOT of other reasons)

Yes, you absolutely need to know how to code well, AND an AI coding assistant can save a ton of time if you know how and when to use it properly.

Do they make mistakes that a human needs to be able to recognize? Yes. Of course. Do they make more mistakes than a junior coder? Unclear.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

People move to Linux pleasee!

How about everybody move to FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

 

[NatalieEGH]

And an application is far more than just the code.

Upfront design, and often figuring out what the customer/user is actually wanting to do.
Which is very often not what they verbally ask for.

Very true. One of my last major projects before retiring was writing schedule monitoring package for a major brokerage firm. All jobs had to be finished by schedules established by the FTC or there were major fines (some over $1,000,000). This meant all jobs in the job chain had to finish within parameters or the various final products would not be completed before penalties.

The original specifications stated to track and report on a screen every 30 seconds the status of all the jobs, over 12000 at the time. There were other specifications but this was the first I saw and asked my boss if they were serious. They were and the specifications had been approved all the way up to CFO and CTO levels. I was actually hired to be assigned the job so the new person would be the one fired when the job could not be completed on time.

I called for a meeting with the customers. I was told no. I pushed and did it anyway, the primary customers begrudgingly agreed. They asked at them how good their eyes were? They asked me what I meant. I said the requirements would result in 400 lines per second being scrolled on the screen (standard 25 lines) or about .07 seconds for a line from top to bottom. They said I was wrong. I pointed out the 12000 jobs being reported with full status information (when start, how long ran, job status on completion, completion time, ...) so 1 line per job. 12000 lines/30 seconds = 400 lines/second, 25 lines(screen)^-1/400 lines(second)^-1=1second/16screens. After they realized what they had asked for, I asked what they wished to accomplish and why. After about 30 minutes, I had a good idea of what was needed. I asked for another meeting in a week to present a fleshed out idea on what I thought would work, I just had to check information available to me to make sure, I could do what I was thinking.

I spent the week pouring over system files, the specific subsystem, ... and came up with a general program. I presented it to them. I indicated, it might have a few problems to be worked out but the program should work.

Basically I build a database of jobs, start times, and run times. I then only reported jobs starting late, running long, or terminating abnormally. There was one more major problem in that they wanted information displayed immediately. To do so, literally ate up all 4 processors of a large mainframe computer. The job was disallowed to run as it mean spending something like $30,000,000 for a complete system. The people complained and I asked if I could sleep the system and only run the information every 30 seconds. They agreed. No new system required, jobs reported that were late, long running, or aborted, and at most a few seconds lost (assuming the production control people glanced at the screen once or twice a minute. Customer happy.

An AI can not look at the various factors. An AI cannot determine what is actually needed from what is listed in a pie-in-the-sky specification. An AI cannot recognize human limitations. AI based programming is good for taking what has been and reusing. It is not good for creating whole new ways of looking at the problem so finding whole new solutions.

Finally I know few work in macro assembler and machine language anymore but do they even have AI's that code in those languages for efficiency?

 

[NatalieEGH]

I think most people that are tech savvy don't want Ai laptops. It's a BS marketing hype that is just another form of collecting your personal information.
I also don't think most people want to upgrade from Windows 10; but M$ is trying to force everyone, because again, it comes with a lot more tracking BS built in, including key-loggers.

I did not want to upgrade from Windows 7. And I had a laptop that had Windows 11. It now runs Linux.

 

[DaverosUK]

Who needs an AI PC/Laptop that takes a screenshot of what you're looking at, every few seconds, to send it to 'Wherever' for the purpose to bring you a 'better experience'?!!

I mean, if you're in a business that makes you jump through hoops on security, to just use word/excel, imagine then having your ai laptop/pc, take a snapshot and forward it onto the cloud/bosses of the company and ANY company that wants the data inbetween, lol. No one is going to buy that tech, let alone want to own it!!

....PS I work for McDonald's, we have no secret menus! 🤣