Are AI PCs the ones with insufficient RAM because the AI companies bought all the future production?
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
329 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
42346 readers
260 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
I think that ram hasn't been made yet for AI centers that haven't been made yet.
And also paid for with hypothetical money that doesn't exist lol
Stop using pointless slop no one gives a shit about as a selling point?
What are you, some kind of terrorist?
If terrorist now means defending the customer's right then I am a terrorist!
Always has been.
Remember John Deere?
“AI” is not a use case for a computer. Plain and simple. A real use case would be for instance to edit videos or code or create spreadsheets, and what the everloving shit does adding ✨Agentic and Conversational AI✨fix with literally any use case?
Sure, researching can be a use case for AI stuff, as well as just talking with it, but there’s no reason to sell an entire fucking class of laptops labeled “AI PCs” when the only thing it has is windows 11 copilot (lobotomised ChatGPT) and an NPU advertised as a “future compatibility” feature…
load more comments
(1 replies)
What is the average person even going to use an NPU for? There's not a whole lot of useful things that can even be run on one.
I use windows click to do all the time in work.
I’m constantly being sent screenshots of tables with data in it that I can’t copy paste. (Side note, why take a perfectly searchable .csv and send me a screenshot of it???!!)
The tool really is a game changer for my productivity.
I sure as hell wouldn’t enable it on my personal computer though.
OCR exists and performs well with older hardware.
Collecting your raw data isn’t enough for Microsoft so they might use your PC and power to process your data.
Maybe you're aware and it doesn't fit your need, but in case not: there's a snipping to ocr tool provided with PowerToys. Win+shift+T and select a zone, il ocr it and puts it in your clipboard. Good stuff. There's also NormCap that does the same : https://dynobo.github.io/normcap/
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
WTF even is a Microsoft SlopC? Something that has hardware to speed up their AI deleting important files and sending your private data to hackers? I don't think we need that fast-tracked, Windows 11 already does it well enough.
They replace the right windows key with a copilot button.
My work PC has this, and it is thankfully fully disabled by group policy. Thanks Microsoft!
We really need to stop letting Microsoft add shit to keyboards TBH.
Agreed
Is amazing Microslop is still around given have shitty their products have.
It's always baffled me how Microslop's entire business model as far back as I can remember seems to be "Make the shittiest possible version of every product imaginable, then watch it for some reason become the global standard, then make it even worse and suffer no consequences."
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
They can afford to have AI fail, almost every business in Europe and the US buys their software. That’s not going away anytime soon
If they lose all the money they have pumped into AI, then they will be relying on Windows and Office.
Good for them that both of those are currently doing fine.
load more comments
(2 replies)
That made me wonder what os china uses. Turns out they use a chinese made linux distro called kylin for most consumer desktops and 90% of govenment desktops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system)
Fucking based.
Unfortunately its propriotary ): (pretty sure that violates the gpl but I guess china doent care.) (Although there is an open source version called neokylin!)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Ive seen the AI on my partners iphone. Wont be going near that shit.
I had to correct myself from typing "iphobe" three times, and im wondering which the mistake was.
iphobe
"Being afraid of Apple"
Also known as: being a doctor.
Well that's just the predictive text... mine thinks thr is the proper spelling of the cause it 'learned' from all my typos that I like that spelling, even going to far as to autocorrect the to thr
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Always glad to hear some good news :)
I think it's just bad marketing. Microsoft, as they often are, just messed up their marketing strategy with mixing controversial and creepy stuff like Recall and actually useful things like local TTS and STT, translation, image recognition and manipulation stuff. All these ML functions offloaded to an NPU are good additions to an OS. Computers with NPU don't have to be Copilot+ branded to be useful.
Runs diagnosis tools on AI laptop.
No AI feature actually runs locally.
NPU stays idle 100% of the time.
Your entire digital life is uploaded to Microslop and used to train LLMs…
again.
Hmm, they might've scrambled to add Recall et al, because those other features you named don't particularly need to be offloaded. Except for maybe TTS, you're not gonna run these in the background all the time. And if you need the occasional translation, it's fine, if it takes a bit longer.
At least, I would've absolutely seen headlines à la "Microslop wants you to buy an expensive new PC – to do things your current PC can perfectly fine".
You aren't wrong that these functions don't NEED NPU. But it helps with performance and offloading. What they also doing is opening APIs for software developers to use NPU and built-in models. For example, Adobe and Zoom use it for background filters. Again, with no CPU/GPU load.
And for your final point - this is not anything new for a company to try selling you a product that you don't necessarily need. Their job is to make it attractive enough for you to upgrade.
Yes yeeeea, die ..trash!
Is it time to invest in Quantum grifts yet or is it still too early for the next train?
load more comments
(1 replies)
I couldn't understand Microsoft's motivation here at all, until this reminder (from the linked article):
This development doesn't bode well for Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, who saw the company miss the platform shift to mobile devices and tablets and desperately wants to avoid chalking up another failure in yet another momentous platform shift.
it makes so much sense to me now
emphasis on "desperately" for sure
I just bought a laptop; my CPU options were an AMD AI 300, and a non-AI 7040. I chose þe non-AI version and saved $200.
I really hope AMD gets it's head out of þe AI trough and keeps designing normal CPUs. Non-AI was an option today, but I worry about next year.
Same boat for me. In addition all those AI CPUs were requiring DDR5, sometimes DDR5X, soldered to the board. Same with the WiFi, only SSDs were replaceable.
view more: next ›