Dell’s CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I’ve had in maybe 5 years
Bad news, they’re still doing AI despite knowing it’s not profitable
https://xcancel.com/Dexerto/status/2008950427459649811
Despite that admission, Dell confirmed that AI hardware remains a core part of its product strategy
Well that’s fucking refreshing, now that Dell has dropped that truth bomb, hopefully other companies follow suit! As Dell as seen the race to the bottom that a lot of tech firms that drank the Koolaid are beginning to engage with. Making a business decision not to market based on AI and instead functional computers with the option, is much better! Even better if they start working with Linux (as I know you can get some of their PCs with a Linux distro installed instead of the Microslop OS).
Dude, I’m gettin a Dell.
I had a Dell Precision M4800 for like a decade. It was a really good machine. A few minor complaints over the years, but overall, pretty solid machine. Not all their computers are good computers, some they are certainly capable of making some.
So, the shittiest computer brand is the one to chose the better road without AI?What’s next, Apple creating budget systems? Microsoft creating a privacy driven OS?
What’s next, Apple creating budget systems?
According to our IT department at work, a Mac is now on-par for price in the Q1 2026 numbers we have for our region with the Lenovos we have been getting and cheaper than comparable (hardware spec enterprise type) HP models, so kinda, yeah.
Currently it sounds like any member of our workforce that wants a Mac can get one now, where previously it was deemed cost-prohibitive and required an exception and approval.
Who knows if that will hold, though, those numbers might be based on Apple’s existing stock of RAM and subject to change when they need to re-up.
In the K12 computer space I always found it was cheaper to buy Apple devices for my users. Both from the fact that those devices did actually have less problems and lasted longer and so required less human monetary investment, but also an actual cost perspective since a MacBook Air could be bought for $800 after education enterprise discounts. Which was a much better than most devices in that price range (this was like 2018).
And in a world where HP exists you say the shittiest computer brand with dell?? (I work in tech sales now and I always joke with first time customers that they have to tell me their brand preference first since everyone in IT has a preference of devices between Dell, HP and Lenovo.)
Statistically Dell performs far less than HP, while HP sucks and is full of bloatware. Apple may be reliable, but it’s only for people who are so dumb they can’t be entrudted with windows or for people who know basic coding+. But still a lot of their price is just brand, so bangs for bucks wise apple doesn’t suffice. Their own M chip is much better than the shit they delivered before though. They made a comeback. But for power users who aren’t specialized into graphics it’s not the best choice.
Fair note, Microsoft is fucking up Windows so hard right now, so I guess both are shit options OS wise. Google turned mega evil these days, so I guess Linux is the best option OS wise. But for hardware, I’d suggest building your own rig, or with the RAM prices these days, buying a secondhand DDR4 system.
I was a sysadmin, so my thoughts above were more from the enterprise deployment side of things. I tend to stay out of the recommending of tech hardware to people since they’re not likely going to put up with Linux, or even listen to me past the beginning explainer of how simple building your own machine is.
Their computers are shit but they at least have pretty good monitors, I am still rocking a 2021 S2722DGM because it was a very good VA panel for it’s time especially considering it’s BFI implementation is quite good.
Dell monitors are unironically solid, same with Hewlett Packard. Don’t know why but even if their PCs are shit the monitor is usually solid.
I have three U2312Ms in my house. They’ve been my monitors for over a decade and they’ve held multiple roles. They used to be all on my desk but they’re now on three different setups and I’ve literally never had an issue with any of them.
They’re from 2011.
Why shittiest? The do pretty good pcs
They do not.
Sure, the 2013 optiplexes are cheap and reliable, but that’s because they are overengeneered 3kg metal boxes. Once they break, you can’t get propriatery replacement parts anymore.
Never seen a gamers nexus review of their systems?
Idk the laptop is pretty good for work and light gaming and battery life is really good on Linux, and price is fine… But haven’t seen any review.
So, the shittiest computer brand is the one to chose the better road without AI?
Lenovo has entered the chat…
Lenovo actually has decent systems for a reasonable price.
If you stick to select Thinkpad lines…
I bought an “IdeaPad” for someone and I have hated it. Shoddy reliability and just a hideous amount of glue in the way of repairs. Also had to get reasonable repair parts.
Thinkpad X and P series have continued to be good and easy to work on when needed, but my experiences with their budget lines has been terrible.
Lenovo is so much better than anything dell ever made
That is lovely.
…Hear that?
That’s the sound of a bubble wobbling.
But this isn’t like withholding information about the core counts of the chips inside your machine, or the TGP of the mobile GPU at its heart for fear of confusing some fictitious customer. There are people who care about the hardware inside these devices, but it’s becoming clear there are precious few who care about the AI components or theoretical capabilities of those machines.
Oh, there are. I’m one of them.
There are dozens of us!
…Problem is, NPUs are junk.
I could ramble on, but basically they’ve fallen into the hole of “obtuse proprietary APIs for esoteric hardware” that FPGAs did, so no one wrote anything useful for them outside of business niches, like (say) face recognition to login to Windows or embedded vision stuff for industrial robots. I can’t do anything useful with an NPU, even being familiar with the software stacks/APIs.
To be more concrete, if I had a shiny new laptop and wanted to use my NPU for an LLM, my only option is basically proprietary weights of llama 8B. A tiny, obsolete model, with obsolete quantization, with obsolete sampling and features and API.
Vision? Audio? Forget it. Same with newer models; no one is working on it. Going outside the tiny NPU memory pool for offloading? Batching? Laughs.
And you couldn’t even run old models until ~2025! It wasn’t even developed. Best one can do right now is the AMD Lemonade or a similar Intel docker server because it’s otherwise such a nightmare to install/develop. How many laptop buyers do you think use docker for an obscure piece of software?
And why the heck would I even bother with that when I can run GLM 4.6V 120B quickly on a CPU and tiny GPU? And, more importantly, it fucking works.
The only functional “AI” product in the western market is Strix Halo (branded as the AMD AI Max series), which is so expensive it’s not worth it over used stuff. Until now, I guess.
The Chinese market is a bit different with homegrown server NPUs, but that’s a whole other tangent.
TL;DR:
Brands don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, as their products don’t actually work for self hosting/local inference. It’s all bullshit!
Dell finally figured that out. Good on them.
It never ceases to amaze me how companies can hate consumer money so much. They all know we all fucking hate AI and yet no one refuses to crank up the money generating machine by giving consumers what they want. It’s like they have an ulterior motive or something.
People on Lemmy hate AI. People who have even a modicum of knowledge about AI hate AI.
Get outside your echo chamber and 90% just blindly accept AI. They make images with it. They use AI search results as “research”. They quote AI results.
It’s the blind 90% they cater to. Not us.
Most my friends hate AI, though that’s probably biased. But even my mom hates AI because it’s shoved everywhere
Id say its probbaly more like 95% lol.
Most humans are idiots with computers, just how it is.
IDK I’m hopeful. My 55 year old co-worker who’s basically tech illiterate loudly explained “OMG more AI bullshit, get this crap off my screen!” The other day when copilot popped up in her Outlook.
I’d say 90% is pretty high.
My sample size of “a few people not on Lemmy or Reddit” hate AI shoved in their faces. They may use ChatGPT some, or Copilot at work because they have to, but that’s it. They are interested in that AI specifically, not their fridge generating body horror on demand.
I"ve had my uncle, complete luddite, ask me how to get his computer to stop bothering him about AI because “I don’t understand it.”
Interesting. I imagine some people (especially older folks) might find it a bit spooky. So human, but also not? How to make sense of it? It’s like the uncanny valley of technology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people who weren’t raised with tech find it particularly unsettling.
Because companies don’t serve customers. They serve shareholders.
AI is the hotness right now and every boards of directors wants to know what the company plans to do with AI.
Not just shareholders. We’ve had several employees asking how is our company leveraging AI, or why he haven’t implemented AI into our products. We don’t sell anything even closely related to tech. Hell, our product doesn’t even use electricity. It’s insane
On interviews? Why do you think they do that?
Are they afraid your company will get “left behind,” or something?
On townhall meetings, or whenever we have open forums to discuss things with executive management
Yeah people underestimate how widely the AI mind virus has spread. Some people are addicted to it, they can’t live without it. It’s all they can talk about, or think about.
They all know we all fucking hate AI and yet no one refuses to crank up the money generating machine
Because there really isn’t any money in building things people actually want. Creating an actually useful product takes investments in infrastructure and labour, all the things that shareholders hate.
In our economy we don’t make money by building things, we make money by withholding things and selling access to them.
It’s why the monied class is so obsessed with AI. It sells the dream that you can not only get rid of labour cost, but actually make money off of selling access to the simulacrum of it.
It’s also infinitely scaling. There’s no need to worry about the human logistics side of it when it’s all a bunch of software that can, theoretically, scale forever.
Thanks—that’s very well stated.
Business people are so separated from the rest of the world they have no idea how your average person operates. “Whaddaya mean people don’t like the robot that will kill jobs at the cost of the environment?!” People who need jobs and live in the environment- :|
Investor money is so much more than consumer money…
Despite Dell being a horrible brand and company this is significant. Finally a big player states the obvious and gets back to actually focusing on what consumers want. Again, it’s Dell and I won’t touch their products with a ten foot pole, but the messaging is really quite frank and surprising. I wonder if others will follow.
Then again, which company would you touch up close? Cause I feel like there is none left. At least not a major company.
Their business and enterprise lineup has been solid however though, e.g. Latitude, PowerEdge, etc.
I agree. Their business line up and support is great. It’s just a shame that their consumer service is piss poor.
Love my old precision, but my new latitude uses this Intel ipu6 bullshit with god-awful kernel support on Linux. No effort made from Intel or Dell on upstreaming. Onboard audio support only halfway works, webcam straight up doesn’t work in-tree, and power management is hilariously bad. Shit’s already awful on Windows, but on Linux I’m delighted if I get 90 minutes of runtime, and even when sleeping I only get maybe 8 hours before the battery empties.
Also don’t get me started on DisplayLink. The real thunderbolt docking stations work great though, love mine.
But I would never buy a Dell product I haven’t used before at work. My experience is literally 50/50 between “great, no notes” and “I would rather use anything else”.
Their business lineup used to be solid, but they haven’t been for quite a while in my experience. I have owned and used Dell’s business laptops and SOHO style servers for nearly two decades and if I had to put a time frame on when they went downhill it would be somewhere around 2013-2015. They did a major shakeup in their offerings then and their Lattitude and Precision PCs started resembling their far lower quality consumer PCs. My current company had bought quite a few high end business laptops from them over the past several years and they have been a shit show. I have quite literally never seen hardware from a reputable OEM with such chronic and severe issues, especially not when we’re talking $3k-$5k machines. We won’ t even consider buying from them again.
What are you considering replacing them with?
We ended up split down the middle between people willing to use Apple and (for now) Framework laptops. I have no desire to use an Apple laptop and it wouldn’t work for me anyway since I mostly use Linux, but I need the option to use Windows as well as I do a lot of work for another company that is a strictly Windows-only shop.
I just finished refurbishing an aging G5, and while it has some issues overall it has been an absolute workhorse. Especially given its price, not many laptops hold up to nearly 15,000 hours of power-on time between any major maintenance.
Dell batteries also don’t balloon or catch fire when they die, they fail gracefully and just stop holding charge. Too many popped mac and Razer batteries sitting in the battery bins at my local recycler, but they have a whole shelf of used Dell batteries that have a couple more years in them.
Can anyone explain what an AI PC is? How is it different from a regular PC? Are you running a model locally or something?
AI computers have a NPU chip in them. These ones do too, the article seems to be mostly about how they’re not marketing AI heavily because people really don’t care about AI.
To the extent people actually might like AI, they exclusively think about remote executed stuff. They don’t care about on device stuff.
But for the rest, it is worse than not caring, many people hate it. It’s a toxic brand for those.
Which is weird to me because the only time I ever actually got to utilize NPUs was for local running stuff like tensorflow or pytorch.
Only other space I’ve seen them utilized is mobile devices for image enhancements, etc. On a laptop, not so much.
I don’t blame you for staying away from CoPilot.
There’s this “Copilot+ PC” branding Microsoft launched a while back. A mix of hardware requirements and software features. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/20/introducing-copilot-pcs/
I thought a lot of those were still run remotely, because they needed capabilities that weren’t practical for the actual devices?
From memory, the NPUs needed to be four times as powerful as they were before they could run a local CoPilot instance.
Too bad their build quality is absolutely shit. I’d always wanted an Alienware growing up, but they were way out of my budget. In 2020, I bought my wife and I new Alienware laptops. $5000 worth of laptops. Mine did a firmware update and died in 2023. Dell offered to diagnose it for $200 if I shipped it to them. My wife’s has had to be repaired 3 times, and her hdmi port died yesterday.
I have a 2018 XPS and its build quality is quite good.
I love my 2021 xps. Thin, light, powerful, and good Linux support. It’s starting to show its age but I use the hell out of it.
The only reason next laptop won’t be an XPS is because the owners went full maga. If the decision was hardware based, I’d probably go xps again.
Business lines are like that, see also Thinkpad.
Yea, wife and I are still running 2017 XPS, no issues at all over all these years and travels
My wife loves her 2019 2-in-1 but it took like 6 months for all the feet and things to start falling off.
The plastic coating on mine has gone all sticky.
The palm rest on mine is a little tacky, that’s a good point. I might have to try to wipe the soft-touch coating off with some isopropanol.
I have an IBM ThinkPad R32, and even the original battery is still holding a 40ish minute charge. Things used to be built to last. Not so much anymore.
I have a Thinkpad T430 and the original battery still gets me through a 3 hour lecture at school no problem.
I have a way newer HP ProBook 455 G7 but I rather use the Thinkpad if I don’t need the power
This battery phenomenon actually boggles my mind, if somebody knows what’s going on and is willing to help clarify.
Lithium batteries are lithium batteries. They all degrade over time and with cycle count, nothing manufacturers can do about it.
But why are lithium batteries from the GameBoy Advance still capable of holding a charge today, and why you can find old power sucking laptops with original batteries that at least hold charge for an hour, but modern lithium batteries simply die after three years?
Part of this is the charge controller on the battery, the other part is the cheap components of the battery.
When the lithium battery degrades to a certain point (or on a set schedule), the controller just stops the charge. This is not usually done in malice, though. The other components are cheaper quality (because it’s cheaper to manufacture), so controlling the charge at a certain point helps avoid a fire (and a lawsuit).
Back in the R32 and GBA days, batteries were built with better components, so the charge controller didn’t need to be so aggressive. Therefore, they still work to some capacity.
Similar experience here. My wife and I both got Alienware laptops, although a little before 2020. Mine died a few years back and had to ship back and have motherboard replaced. A few months later hers died and we shipped back.
“Motherboard needs to be replaced but we don’t have them in stock anymore. Best of luck.”
So yeah we are done with Dell.
Oh that’s sad. My 2018 (gaming G5? It’s got a 1060) still works.
Consumer trash is low quality, news at 11:00.
Their business lines (Optiplex and Latitude) are just fine, but not good for gaming.
Dude! You’re getting a
AI bloated monstrositydell!*–*Terms subject to change. Consumer has no rights. You own nothing. Operating system may insert AI against your will. Fuck you.
This is what computers feel like these days. Remember when you just BOUGHT the hardware, AND the software? So there was a reasonable expectation that the products were to do what we wanted them to do.
Now, somehow WE are the products. We own nothing. And it gets more restrictive every generation.
Even Android is becoming more closed source. And it will soon be harder to avoid AI. Android is still a google product remember. And you KNOW google wants us all using AI.
This was a big factor for me using linux for the past year, despite not knowing what I’m doing. Don’t know what I’ll do about cell phone though.
Yes. The phone is the real kicker. They’re gonna cut you off from modern life unless you buy into the Google ecosystem. More and more apps are required to do mundane things, ride a bus or train, book a ticket to an event, charge your car, split expenses with your friends or handle money in general. Gadgets and appliances have companion apps to properly make use of them. I’d have 5 authenticator apps on my phone to do paperwork. And I won’t be able to communicate with friends or find out if the shop is closed today unless I have an account and maybe the app of some platform. All of that is proprietary, part of surveillance capitalism. And it’s getting proceedingly more difficult to evade Google, because they’re slowly adding SafetyNet and device verification to many apps. And of course sprinkle some AI on top because that’s what we do and it aligns with the rest of it. Or Google just changes strategy and asserts more control over every phone user as needed for their corporate interests.
We’re not there yet. I still have GrapheneOS on my phone and I’m doing alright. It’s not very comfortable, though, and I can clearly feel which way we’re headed.
With the computer/laptop, it’s easy. Backup your data, wipe it and install Linux. It’s gonna take a while to get accustomed if you’re used to a different operating system… But I don’t think it’s more difficult to use or anything in the long run. The initial extra work is an investment that pays off later. I’m fairly sure Linux is the one platform that will resist and keep coming with default settings without AI and corporate surveillance.
Interestingly enough, it’s also used by big tech to power all the servers and AI services. But at the end of the day it empowers everyone.
I just switched to GrapheneOS myself – and yeah I’m feeling the inconvenience. Having to do workarounds curretly to get RCS working (T-Mobile, AT&T), not having an option for tap-to-pay bc “Your operating system is insecure” 🙄) and Google/Apple/SamsungPay are your only options. Haven’t tried adding any tickets or transit passes to see if they work with NFC yet.
In general I feel better finally having switched off stock android because in my friend group I’m the only digital privacy advocate and have been talking about doing it forever. However, as I continue to transfer to the new device, I notice more and more the number of apps that I use that are only available through the play store. Health and banking apps that are the only convenient way to use a service on mobile. Apps that are necessary if you travel a lot.
Basically it’s incredibly hard to de-google if you’re not in the apple ecosystem. I have one co-worker who has started “digital homesteading” (self-hosting) a lot of stuff for their family, and has discovered: it’s an incredible amount of stuff we offload into the cloud. E-mail, photos, personal documents, calendar, health, finances, streaming media instead of owning it. Transitioning all of that remote convenience to an on-prem setup at home (or a cloud VPS I guess) is very possible with self-hosted alternatives. But, it requires a high level of technical knawledge and expertise AND now you’re the IT person for all of that infrastructure.
I’ve been part of that game for a long time as well. I guess it used to be easier when things were a bit simpler, more transparent and less connected. But there’s no way this works in the modern world with the amount of complexity (and intransparency) stuffed into an average electric vehicle. Or getting a doctor’s appointment via Doctolib.
We better take care of this, though.
I wish selfhosting was a bit easier. I do that as well. My stuff is on a Nextcloud. We have all these alternatives available and it works quite well. We’d really need to make it available to everyone, though. Like a home wifi router, or a small device that people just plug in, with an unbreakable and maintanence-free selfhosting solution for home use. We have several projects aiming at that. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I think something like Home-Assistant is almost there, just for a different niche. It’s relatively easy to just buy a RaspberryPi or their box, set it up. It’s almost indestructible and by paying a few bucks a month they take care of making it available from outside and some money goes towards development and a healty community.
not having an option for tap-to-pay bc
Credit card in phone case, just saying. Also on gOS.
Welcome to capitalism, where everything is shitty so some rich white dudes can get richer.
I literally just switched to Mint over the holidays. Any advice?
Have fun and keep exploring, that’s my advice :)
If you want your apps to be up to date, use flatpak. Mint prioritizes stability over keeping up to date, so their system repos are often behind on features.
Flatpak gives the best of both worlds, the tradeoff being much higher disk space usage and some apps not liking being sandboxed.
Mint prioritizes stability over keeping up to date
That’s a side effect of being a debian distro. Debian prioritizes stability, but fuck is it stable. If you want something cutting edge use an arch based distro.
Absolutely, but that’s why I love the Mint + Flatpak combo. All the stability of Debian without the outdatedness. Arch feels too unstable for my taste
Man pages are usually pretty good if your available search engines have gotten so bad as to not find the answer as they would rather serve ads than a function.
Linux Phones and Linux Phone OS do exist, but they’re quite far behind on things, best for extending life of older ones than as your everyday
You can’t generally install Linux onto most (any?) existing phones that were not specifically made for it like the Pinephone, so I don’t know that it is helpful for extending the life of many devices.
Postmarket OS is explicitly for that
Postmarket OS
I am not aware of any phones that don’t already support running Linux (Pinephone, Librem, and maybe one or two others) that can use Postmarket OS. I’d be both impressed and shocked if that has materially changed. Also, I have actually tried out Postmarket OS and it was not ready for use as a daily driver. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t give it a try though, as it won’t ever get there if technically minded people don’t use it and feed helpful feedback.
I thought the entire point of Postmarket was to extend the life of older phones???
Edit: Yeah, it is. The list of supported phones has 3 Linux-first phones, and all the rest are just standard android phones that you then have to flash and install Linux onto
That device list is much bigger than it used to be! Good on them. Sadly, it doesn’t look like many/most of those devices are still usable except to tinker. I imagine it was just devices that devs had handy. I’m quite impressed that they got it working on the SGS III.
There was never a time, at least in my lifetime, where software wasn’t licenced and you actually owned it. The only real difference is that it was much harder to stop you from using it when, even if you went online, you weren’t online 24/7 and shit was slow, and your software came on physical media that wouldn’t change over time at the whims of the creator.
somehow
Capitalism. That’s the how.
Even Android is becoming more closed source. And it will soon be harder to avoid AI. Android is still a google product remember. And you KNOW google wants us all using AI.
Me finding out Canta and Shizuku are a thing has been a massive game changer for me because it allowed me to get rid of Gemini (as well as a lot of other bloatware) on my phone. I really wonder how long that keeps being possible…
Oh they all realize it. They just don’t care.
Many of them have invested heavily into AI and are panicking that it’s not going to pay off soon, or perhaps ever.
So they push it even harder hoping their bet will somehow turn around and they won’t have to take the hit to their stock options or reputations.
People often think CEOs and upper management attained their positions because they are experts in the field and savvy at their jobs, but many of them have just failed upwards with a high appetite for risk-taking and low ethical standards - they’re often actually shockingly unskilled idiots. ‘Trumps’, if you will.
They know it’s not going to pay off. They just don’t care. Because they will collect fat fucking checks from investors in the interim.
You mean the “first to realise after all of us”, right?
I guess they realised after microslop backlash
Perhaps first one on the big-brand manufacturer side.
Dell was probably pissed that I didn’t get a new PC after I refused to upgrade my 2018 PC.
I got that sort of clout you know
Damn, think you can convince them to make more AMD options, too?
Bro lemme tell ya, my parents had a dell since '98. I can probably convince them to switch to AMD exclusively. And maybe even Linux options.
