this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
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Fuck AI

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Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had in maybe 5 years

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[–] cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de 135 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] jinwk00@sh.itjust.works 54 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Their business and enterprise lineup has been solid however though, e.g. Latitude, PowerEdge, etc.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 42 points 5 days ago

I agree. Their business line up and support is great. It's just a shame that their consumer service is piss poor.

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[–] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 43 points 4 days ago (10 children)

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?

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Shittiest how? If you mean all the proprietary connectors and non "standard" motherboards then: OK sucks for a home user, but has a reason for being like that for assembly line and IT tasks.

But DELL is a solid brand in the Corporate world and highly dependable.

Give me some pointers in case I missed out on where DELL fell down.

[–] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtaHNUmQ7Mk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DMg6hUudHE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N7aYtkzKJc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFaJZq13tr8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8k5PCmFm7c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnvxSkqJ8ic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ulhFi5N2hc

I think you get the picture now, but there are more in depth videos of Dell performance and quality.

Note* their professional server hardware is a different company within the brand and are apparently reliable and properly functioning. I was talking about the public products.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Excellent links, thanks for sharing.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

Thanks for these links, I will take a look tonight. But yeah, maybe I'm used to their business class workstations.

[–] mean_bean279@lemmy.world 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.)

[–] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Kiernian@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] v3r4@lemmy.org 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Why shittiest? The do pretty good pcs

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[–] Sustolic@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] ArtVandelay@lemmy.world 61 points 5 days ago (5 children)

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.

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 56 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] daizelkrns@sh.itjust.works 28 points 4 days ago (3 children)

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

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[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 30 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (6 children)

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.

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[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 27 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] agent_nycto@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago

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- :|

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[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 69 points 5 days ago (12 children)

Dude! You're getting a ~~AI bloated monstrosity~~ dell!*

--*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.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 33 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Sparrow_1029@programming.dev 14 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Encephalotrocity@feddit.online 15 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I literally just switched to Mint over the holidays. Any advice?

[–] 404@lemmy.zip 19 points 5 days ago

Have fun and keep exploring, that's my advice :)

[–] YoSoySnekBoi@kbin.earth 13 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 11 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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.

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[–] Binturong@lemmy.ca 26 points 4 days ago (2 children)
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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 34 points 4 days ago

That is lovely.

…Hear that?

That’s the sound of a bubble wobbling.

[–] Zedd00@lemmy.dbzer0.com 45 points 5 days ago (5 children)

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.

[–] kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 4 days ago (6 children)

I have a 2018 XPS and its build quality is quite good.

[–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 11 points 4 days ago

Business lines are like that, see also Thinkpad.

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[–] 01189998819991197253 11 points 4 days ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 27 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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.

[–] LostWanderer@fedia.io 18 points 4 days ago

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).

[–] TomMasz@lemmy.world 36 points 5 days ago (2 children)

You mean the "first to realise after all of us", right?

[–] thesdev@feddit.org 22 points 5 days ago

Perhaps first one on the big-brand manufacturer side.

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[–] artyom@piefed.social 30 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Oh they all realize it. They just don't care.

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Ronno@feddit.nl 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

For the millionth time, nobody wants AI, because AI is not a use case. Sell me the thing I can do with it, that actually helps me on a daily basis, that is what I can then want to buy. AI for consumers is currently just slapping AI around hoping the user believes it's a solution for a problem they didn't know they had in the first place.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

I put in the effort of giving feedback whenever able. Like Outlook asks "whould you Recommend outlook to friends and colleagues?" So then I put no and talk about the AI garbage they keep adding as a deterrent to advocating for outlook"

The software we sell has AI added (not AI really.) But it "watches" your geometry selections in CAD assemblies and and suggests other geometries you most likely wanted to select next. If those are correct you accept them, otherwise ignore them and move on with your task.

For example say an engineer is working on a front grille of a car and selects a radius on one grille opening, it predicts you probably want to perform the task to every grille opening. So it might save the engineer 2 minutes of manual selections, but over an 8 hour day that 2 minutes is probably negligible anyway because most of an engineers wasted time is not in non optimized CAD selection it dealing with paperwork and changing customer requests, or badly relayed information disambiguation.

So even though it's "cool" it wasted development in my opinion. They'd have been better off using the resources to create or improve communication / collaboration tools in PLM systems.

[–] gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Because ai hardware=normal computer where the marketing put an ai sticker on the box

[–] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

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[–] lemmy_outta_here@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Can anyone explain what an AI PC is? How is it different from a regular PC? Are you running a model locally or something?

[–] IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf 25 points 4 days ago (3 children)

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.

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