r/pcmasterrace • u/After_Cookies • 3d ago
News/Article AI was supposed to sell PCs. Instead, PC shipments just crashed 20% as AI eats the world’s RAM, and Windows 11’s Copilot agents aren’t convincing buyers
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/10/11/ai-was-supposed-to-sell-pcs-instead-pc-shipments-just-crashed-20-as-ai-eats-the-worlds-ram-and-windows-11s-copilot-agents-arent-convincing-buyers/661
u/Robborboy KatVR C2+, Quest 3, 9800X3D, 9070XT, 64GB RAM 3d ago edited 3d ago
Aren't local LLMs niche?
How did someone expect rising hardware prices, a result of AI, to increase the sales of something to use a niche product, local, LLM, when most are just using them from a phone?
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u/templar54 3d ago
Shareholders are not necessarily that smart. AI was a marketing gimmick, that's why it was slapped on literally all products. It of course didn't work for computer market since people buying computers have zero clue what AI is and bought it based on price instead or knew enough about computers and AI to not fall for that bullshit. And now that prices have skyrocketed it doesn't matter how much you know about AI if you simply cannot afford a computer.
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u/Distantstallion Nvi2080S Rzen3900X 3d ago
Its a gold rush, everyone wants to capture the LLM market ASAP anyone who doesnt get a top market share will collapse under costs and debt.
Eventually the whole market will collapse because server based computing has horrible scaleability.
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u/Idocreating 3d ago
Meta in particular has been grasping at the next big "thing" since they missed the boat on mobile phone operating systems. First the Metaverse, now LLM's. Sinking billions in a desperate effort not to miss out again.
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u/ferdzs0 R7 5700x | RTX 5070 | 32GB 3600MT/s | B550-M | Krux Naos 3d ago
It’s the pricing of cloud LLMs combined with the hw costs that leaves Local LLMs a niche.
If you could not get 4x tokens at the price of a Claude sub in Claude Code and you could get capable hw, the adoption of local LLMs for basic tasks would be much higher.
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u/Jarnis R7 9800X3D / 5090 OC / X870E Crosshair Hero / PG32UCDM 3d ago
This will be an interesting problem for large corporate users of AI for actual work.
Cloud AI is already pretty good and getting better very rapidly. But it costs an arm and a leg in corporate use. It is still often worth it, as the efficiency gains are remarkable. But every corporate IT department is looking at running AI locally - either on every workstation, or at least on self-hosted servers where you pay once for the hardware and then do not need to pay per-token for usage like on the cloud.
For consumers, the subscription deals Claude, Codex/ChatGPT and Grok are offering right now (monthly subs that costs tens of dollars or at most, 200-300$) are incredibly cheap. The actual inference costs, if such subscriptions are "maxed out" are way more than what they ask for as a fee, because the companies know that individuals and small companies cannot pay the true cost right now, and they are fighting for marketshare and mindshare. It barely works due to large chunk of the customer base not using anywhere near max of what the subscription can do, so it evens out to more or less breakeven for the companies. The real money is in the corporate API fees for large scale users that get to pay the "real" price, per token. At that scale, the corporations pay it because it is cheaper to get 2-3 engineer's worth of output from one developer (salary + cost of AI tokens) vs. hiring 2-3 developers instead. And as the tools and the AI models advance, the efficiency improves. And no, this does not mean they fire the "excess" developers. Instead, they do more, much much more. Every software development team historically could only do a small fraction of what they'd want to do, and had to cut coners all the time to stay on schedule and on budget. With AI in software development as a boost to developer efficiency, existing stuff is getting done faster and at a higher quality with the same existing staff, which makes more and more development work possible to be undertaken. If anything, companies that seriously use AI for development work are hiring more because they are able to do more - projects that previously would've never started because the ROI did not close can now be done.
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u/thrownjunk 3d ago
Yup. There is no possibility my $100/mo sub corresponds to $100 of compute. I spend less on AI than my AWS costs. Kinda nuts. Work gives me effectively $1k compute/month. My AI spend has actually fallen over the last year, even though my usage has slightly increased.
But I also run local AI on my M4/M5 macs. They dont have great context (think 48gb models), but are fantastic as agents on one shot closed questions/problems.
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u/ferdzs0 R7 5700x | RTX 5070 | 32GB 3600MT/s | B550-M | Krux Naos 3d ago
my work has a non spoken policy that if you reach your sub limit on the base $25 tier they just auto bump you to the $100 and $200 tiers because there is no reason for you to stop burning free tokens when it benefits business.
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u/After_Cookies 3d ago
yes it's niche. but i've seen X posts where people are buying 500 mac minis to run some models or so. The niche thing are being bought in bulk by rich people. maybe that's the market. the pc makers are thinking of ways to make us regular fork to get into the ai bandwagon
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u/StarHammer_01 AMD, Nvidia, Intel all in the same build 3d ago edited 3d ago
Local LLMs, yes. Very niche
Local CNNs and RNNs, no. Quite common actually - think translate and face detection.
Transformers are also somewhat common with things like those image gender swap filters and upscaling.
Possibly local SLMs too if they get good enough.
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u/BassFull0 3d ago
Yeah it's niche and in fact its alot expensive to run LLMs locally than pro monthly AI subscription. Even with $10k setup it won't load fully frontier model locally.
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u/coldblade2000 RTX3070, R5 3600X 3d ago
I mean I'd wager within the next 2 years there will be a 7B model that is good enough for almost anything the average consumer needs. We're not even that far already with Qwen distills
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u/lemonylol Desktop 3d ago
AI was supposed to sell PCs?
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u/BrunoStAujus 3d ago
I think the idea was that people would be so excited about using AI that they would buy new, upgraded PCs to be able to use it.
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u/Malfrum 3d ago
But... the AI doesn't even run locally?
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u/No_Try354 3d ago
You absolutely can run smaller agents locally. A few systems are marketed this way, like AMD's Halo system and Nvidia's DGX Spark. Very compact desktop systems with large unified RAM pools (think 100gb+) and can run some pretty competent models like GPT120b local.
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u/atximport 3d ago
lol, those Spark and other GB10 based have doubled in cost in the last few months.
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u/AppropriateOnion0815 R7 5700X - RX 6700 XT 3d ago
"In my opinion, PC makers and Microsoft mistook their own excitement about AI for what buyers want. AI PCs were supposed to start an upgrade wave, and instead, people are holding on to what they have."
Exactly my opinion, too. I have Copilot on my work PC (because management wants us to) and Apple Intelligence on my MacBook, but I'm kind of missing the everyday value of it. Sure I can ask it to write code snippets for me or summarize a long boring email conversation, but that's kind of it. Maybe I just don't have so many repeating tasks that I'd feel the need to outsource them to an AI agent, and so don't a lot of other home users either.
The industry has not yet introduced THE killer feature which would make people upgrade to an AI-capable computer. Everyone can use an LLM for free on their smartphone.
A solution for no problem.
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u/GargantuanCake 3d ago
It doesn't help that Microsoft massively upped the requirements for Windows 11 which just pissed everybody off. Even complete normies are installing Linux now and finding that they can squeeze more years out of their old hardware with it. Meanwhile Windows 11 is a mess that just keeps getting worse while Microsoft also tries to cram Copilot into it whether you want it or not.
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u/Scibidami 3d ago
My father wanted a win11 laptop. Now. Not 2 years ago. So we bought a "cheaper one" (with a terrible CPU and 8 GB RAM). It took me more than 3 days to make it work (the last 25H2 Update ... wtf. The MS Store does not even work). It is slower than his 10 year old Laptop with 4 GB of RAM and Win 10.
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u/Rough_Bread8329 3d ago
I've moved to CachyOS on a couple of 6-7 year old laptops and they perform faster and more effectively than my brand new Windows 11 PC.
I used to be a MS fanboy. Attended the Ignite conference once for work. Still rock MS merch. But I am done with Windows wherever I can be. This is fucking ridiculous.
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u/catadeluxe FX-8350 4.0 GHz R9 270X 3d ago
Talk to me about catchy os. Why did you choose it?
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u/Rough_Bread8329 3d ago
I like to distro-hop - I throw one on, experiment a bit, throw another one on, etc.
I have always liked the idea of Arch Linux but found it was too much work. CachyOS seems to solve that for me. It's very stable, even though it is a rolling release. For the older hardware I am using, it runs very very lean, and resurrects laptops that would otherwise be garbage because they can't run Windows 11.
I really like the ability to run Steam games simply, with very few hiccups that I have noticed. Granted, its older games for these machines, but it just...works.
The updates are fast, and just... work.
There is an amazing community ecosystem of ways to tweak it, and that's where the real magic is for me - not work to get basic stuff up and running, but actually tweaking and changing things to improve performance, appearance, user experience, what have you.
You can probably say the same about almost any Linux distro these days, but for whatever reason, CachyOS has some kind of magic that tickles my brain in just the right way.
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u/ItalianDragon R9 5950X / XFX 6900XT / 64GB DDR4 3200Mhz 3d ago edited 3d ago
Also Microsoft started to put Cuckpilot literally everywhere. The result is that something that could have at least worn the appearance of a tool like a serial killer can wear the flayed skin of its victim, it instead turned Cuckpilot into a nuisance at every level in an O.S. already riddled with problems on its own. That just makes it quite hard for people to warm up to all that and is instead achieving the opposite.
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u/Remarkable_Cause1384 3d ago
Windows 11 sucks but upping the requirements for it was never about features.
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u/Jarnis R7 9800X3D / 5090 OC / X870E Crosshair Hero / PG32UCDM 3d ago
They want to upgrade, but not at the current prices. Used to be able to build a very good desktop PC for 2000$. Same setup today is well over 3000$ due to RAM and SSD prices mooning. If you want one with a high end GPU, price went from 4000$ to 8000$...
So, you buy only if you absolutely have to, due to something breaking, or in case of companies, when you hire new staff that needs a computer for work. Any upgrades just to improve the available hardware is "nope, nope, nope, wait until next year minimum".
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u/Freyas_Follower 3d ago edited 3d ago
I just finally had to breakdown and get a new pc because my old one kept having episodes where it wouldnt boot up for 15 to 20 minutes at a time. I realized that there is going to be no relief for years, so I got a pc that would last that. Its 3 grand for that thing, and itd likely going to be my only pc purchase for the next decade.
Windows 11 is such junk, that theres barely any noticable performance boost despite a top of the line pc.
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u/ItalianDragon R9 5950X / XFX 6900XT / 64GB DDR4 3200Mhz 3d ago
Yeah prices of PC parts have exoded. I spent 440 euros on a 4TB 870 Evo back in 2021. That exact same SSD now costs 1323 euros. Similarly I bought a 1TB 860 Evo a bit earlier than the 4TB one for 92 euros and now it costs 495...
I ran the numbers a bit back abd my PC is now worth nearly a thousand euros more than what I spent for it years ago. The only component that dropped in price was the 5950X (it went from 600 euros to 300 or so). Every other part *or its equivalent when the model was discontinued) either costs the same or more.
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u/nimbus57 3d ago
Everybody they would want to have these ai computers is fucking poor. Well, too poor to get a new computer on a billionaire schedule
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u/21shadesofsavage 3d ago
as someone using win11 as their daily driver. i don't see copilot anywhere despite headlines trying to tell people it's being shoved down our throats
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u/DontRateLimitMeBro 3d ago
and they won't because any compute in profitable software is done on cloud servers anyway
consumer pcs are for gaming. period.
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u/QuantumQuantonium 3D printed parts is the best way to customize 3d ago edited 3d ago
Software doesnt sell PCs.
People dont buy laptops because they have windows on them. Most laptops have windows. Windows sells because people buy laptops (or rather, companies buy PCs).
Games dont really even sell consoles anymore, unless theyre good exclusives. Consoles sell because of convienence and price compared to PCs.
To think that hardware is selling because of ai is delusional- hardware is being scalped because companies want to push ai into everyone's lives. No one asked for this software to be shoved in- people want a reliable phone or computer to run social media and texting and entertainment and work. They want software which accomplishes those tasks. Generative ai alone cannot accomplish the tasks, without specific training and access to tools. Most end users aren't buying new phones or GPUs because they can run ai better (unless machine learning is in their line of work, or they want to scalp social media views with generated content and bots). GPUs bought by end users has almost always been about running games on PC, with the exception of cryptocurrency crashes prior to ASICs. But suddenly a handful of companies are getting vc or stock funded, decide to wipe out the supply of pc hardware, tanking the technology economy with no practical returns on profit or on net improving peoples lives.
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u/VagueInterlocutor 3d ago
Windows has been so resource hungry and poor performing, even with 32gb of ram that I finally switched to Linux for my daily driver.
Ram prices are insane and forget it if you want a GPU to do more than push pixels.
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u/NeverEverMaybe0_0 3d ago
Windows has always been that way. I don't think it ever ran well on the minimum recommended hardware.
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u/Dr_Tacopus 7600x/5070 12g Shadow2x oc/32gb 5600mhz 3d ago
It will sell more pcs to those who can afford them, but that’s the biggest problem. The rich forget they only have what they have because the vast majority of the population buys things. If that stops, the economy stops. General population purchases run the world. Bad wages stagnate tech and all superfluous spending
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u/Ws6fiend PC Master Race 3d ago
Disagree.
Rich people's money will continue to increase due to assets.
Rich people use their personal assets to take out very low interest loans from banks. They then live off these loans and pay it back off their investments of their financial investments. As long as the stock market doesn't crash, they will continue to make back their money.
The general population does run the world, but we are too busy doing crab mentality shit and surviving to be able to do much about it. If going to a protest about Flock cameras can lead to me losing my job, it's hard to exercise my freedom of protest.
Secondly because of the current K shaped economy, the ones who control the most wealth will be able to continue to keep the economy stable for a long long time, while more people fall out of the shrinking middle class and into poverty.
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u/necrophcodr mastersrp 3d ago
You're in agreement with them though. The timelines may not be exactly the same, but eventually the banks will cease to issue loans when it becomes blindingly apparent that there's no profit to be had, and the economy will end up stagnating, and crashing, and the money will become worthless. If it keeps going, that is.
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u/Rough_Bread8329 3d ago
The crab bucket analogy is so perfect because no one stops to ask how the crabs got in the bucket in the first place.
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u/MysticPane i5 12450HX || rtx 4060 || 24gb || Lenovo Loq 3d ago edited 3d ago
This just doesn't make any sense, assets only have value if they generate additional capital or have people willing to bid the price up due to necessity beyond financial return or the greater fool theory, a business is worthless if there are no customers, enterprise spending and B2B only really exists on the assumption that end users will actually pay for it, the fewer customers, the worse it is for any asset, for businesses, it means less customers or for other types of assets as the number of bidders go down driving the price down, there are exceptions like Veblen goods and stuff that's only traded around between the top 1% but that's a tiny subsection of the market.
Simple example, Meta's 97% of revenue relies on there being tons of people to advertise to, if people have no money, advertising is pointless, meta's revenue drops off a cliff and its market value craters
I do agree that most companies have a tragedy of the common's problem, they have no incentive to pay employees more to make sure they consume more overall as they would rather someone else do it but this isn't some secret master plan to enact some neo fuedalism, its just short terminism, reddit gives executives way too much credit for long term planning of some global cooperation scheme to make everyone own anything and rent everything or a plan to put all people in the poor
A CEO only exists for 5-7 years, they just do whatever they can do to pump the stock before they leave, they couldn't care less what happens in 10-15 years unless the RSU's take that long to vest, if subscriptions are getting ridiculous, just appeal to occam's razor, they're trying to do what other companies are seeing as profitable, they keep pushing to see what they can get away with, with the job replacement thing, the answer should be obvious, capitalism benefits with some ineqality as it means there are incentives and outcomes that lead to great outcomes, perfect equality means stifles innovation and produces stagnation due to a lack of incentives to take on risk, perfect inequality is just as bad as it completely destroys money circulation, value creation and wealth accumulation as you can't grow your money or spend on anything if there's nothing to buy since people don't have capital to make businesses and services in the first place and you can't grow your business since there are no customers
Capitalism mostly breaks down without workers is my opinion, asset values are contingent on the structure of capitalism to stay in tact
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u/lifestop 3d ago
I'm honestly shocked that sales are only down 20%.
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u/Jarnis R7 9800X3D / 5090 OC / X870E Crosshair Hero / PG32UCDM 3d ago
Super expensive AI workstations sold to AI startups offsets some of the losses. Consumer hardware being bought and shipped to China to be repurposed (hello 5090 smuggling) also probably moves the needle slightly.
The "real" amount sales are down without counting the AI startup hardware consumption is probably more like 50%.
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u/parepeg 3d ago
I would think consumer hardware is often a necessity for school, work, etc.
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u/Linkarlos_95 R5600/A750/32GB 3d ago
Some enterprise departments are changing their pc after getting theirs 6 years ago
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u/pleasesaveusAI 3d ago
I mean I wanna buy pc parts but there’s no way I’m spending 3x the amount it’s worth
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u/THE_KILLER_4 3d ago
Well it’s unlikely that prices will go down anytime soon (if ever)
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u/J1mj0hns0n 3d ago
yup, 5090 has been axed in production in favour of AI only cards, no new cards from nvidia until late 2027/2028, AMD has mid ranged cards releasing next year, so unless people want to wait 2-3 years, then yeah, its time to buy.
i kept my 1080ti running for ages and ages but im recently had to pull the trigger as its all showing its age now.
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u/Looptydude 3d ago
Because people keep buying. Fomo is a real problem in this world. If people want change, they need to sacrifice, you don't just accept the bullshit the elites throw at you, you have a choice, but if you continue to make the choices that keep prices high, you are part of the problem.
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u/THE_KILLER_4 3d ago
boycotting Hardware manufacturer companies would never work majority of their customers are AI companies
You, the average person boycotting them doesn’t make a difference to their pocket because they still sell their GPUs or Rams or whatever to the AI companies
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u/Looptydude 3d ago
Those AI companies can spend all that money on hardware they want, but if we keep buying(even if we are 5% of their sales) and participate in their bullshit. Nothing changes. Go ahead and pay the %300 premium for 3 more fps in 4k because of your fomo.
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u/ItalianDragon R9 5950X / XFX 6900XT / 64GB DDR4 3200Mhz 3d ago
Yeah same. I wanna replace my 500GB 980 Pro for a 1TB 990 pro but I'm not paying 200 fucking euros for one.
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u/dinosaursandsluts Linux 3d ago
Who the fuck thought AI was supposed to sell PCs?
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u/DAFFP 3d ago
Some hardware manufacturers were certainly living in hope.
Remember computex. Whack the word AI on everything and cross your fingers.
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u/splendiferous-finch_ Potato XTX3D-k Titan 3d ago
AI is supposed to make the billionaires richer and maybe create a few more while giving them even more power to control the things. Nothing else any harm or any benefits it might have is just a side effect to that main goal
It's not even an AI think you can change it out to some other things like it was cryptocurrencies a while back
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u/dbltax Noctua Evangelist 2d ago
AI was never meant to sell PCs, it was meant to stop people buying PCs while tech giants absorb the majority of the hardware for processing power, so that they can sell you it back as a subscription based cloud service. Taking the power away from the consumer and into the hands of the tech oligarchs.
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u/The_Pandalorian Ryzen 7 5700X3D/RTX 4070ti Super 3d ago
I mean "AI PC" is like "Netflix PC," it's a meaningless bullshit marketing thing.
Also, AI companies are still searching for a genuine problem for it to solve for your average person. Their commercials present just rote everyday stuff as somehow insurmountable tasks that only AI can do. They're basically glossy infomercials.
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u/gwuhu 3d ago
was AI supposed to sell PC tho?
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u/noscul 3d ago
Didn’t feel like it for the average consumer, felt like AI was supposed to run with the PC you already had. If anything it felt like AI was meant to sell PCs to businesses and they seemed to have fallen for that. Regardless, where we’re at the point now to where PCs won’t be a an easy consumer sell.
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u/eppic123 60 Seconds Per Frame 3d ago
That was literally why Microsoft introduced the "Copilot+ PC" category two years ago, with the extra Copilot key. It failed so hard, that it's already being phased out.
The just released Nvidia Spark devices are also targeted specifically at AI.
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u/SaltMaker23 3d ago
When was AI supposed to sell PCs ? I don't recall such statements.
AI was supposed to increase margin on existing product by increasing reliance on cloud offerings of providers, this was especially pushed forward by Microsoft as they main copilot gamble.
It was a way to ensure continuous revenue and renewal of their existing Office revenue stream that has been losing tons of traction since the advent of free offerings like Google Drive/Sheet/others, OpenOffice etc...
I don't recall any actual investor deck of any providers expecting an increase of sales, higher margins and continuous revenue have always been the objective.
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u/After_Cookies 3d ago
I think the article meant the copilot+ pc marketing campaigns.
I don't think pc makers are altruistic for this "AI was supposed to increase margin on existing product by increasing reliance on cloud offerings of providers". they were all looking for a way to sell more PCs. and if you watch any launch video, they all say AI a lot, even Apple.
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u/Jarnis R7 9800X3D / 5090 OC / X870E Crosshair Hero / PG32UCDM 3d ago edited 3d ago
Copilot+ was a scam.
The devices had no performance to run AI. The NPUs built into these were designed years ago for tasks like noise cancelling, deleting backgrounds off Teams video calls etc. - and doing that with more power efficient hardware instead of a GPU, to extend battery life of laptops doing these things.
In order to market the hardware when it was finally ready to ship, they rebranded it as "AI acceleration", which was just close enough to be true so they couldn't be sued over it, but the compute capabilities of the NPUs are such that they are useless for LLMs and other generative AI jobs. The GPU present on the same chip is always better - just uses more power for the tasks - and even they are woefully underpowered. But marketing had to come up with something to sell these crap SoCs that finally came out of the oven.
The only chip last year that was (accidentally) somewhat relevant was the AMD Ryzen AI MAX 395+ with 128GB unified RAM and enough of a GPU that it could run something relevant. This was intended to be a small volume experiment in doing a SoC similar to what Apple is doing, but with x86, and see if it could be sold. That's why it is so hard to find hardware based on it - it was never intended to be a high volume product, and with the RAMpocalypse, the price of these configs went to the moon. We'll see if the new AI MAX 495+ respin (refresh with RAM capabilities bumped up to max 192GB) will have higher volumes - probably yes - but even it is quite underpowered for local AI from compute and memory bandwidth.
NVIDIA RTX Spark is similar design, but Arm-based. Sadly it had its teething pains and is very late. It should have shipped an year ago - and it did in Linux form (DGX Spark) but I guess it took an year for Microsoft and other laptop manufacturers to get the stuff working on Windows on Arm. It is similar barely-useful AI computer (if bought with 128GB unified RAM) but also underpowered and slow - but infinitely more useful than the laughable Copilot+ jank they tried to push.
I would expect even better AI-first stuff will ship in 1-2 year timeframe that will get local AI models to run better, mostly aiming at high end corporate use, marketed as "save on your ballooning token costs with cloud AI, just buy the hardware and run the AI locally". Remains to be seen if they can get the performance and the memory capacities to a level where they can actually compete with cloud AI. The hardware requirements for running modern high end (closed source) models is still quite insane. Also since hardware advances so fast, by the time you got your money's worth out of the system running local AI (vs. paying for cloud usage), it will be woefully outdated.
Medium term the marketing angle will be "Hybrid AI", as seen on the Microsoft event around the new Surfaces with RTX Spark. Run the agentic orchestrator on your "AI computer" locally, it runs local models for overseeing the AI agents, deciding what stuff is doable on the local hardware (easy tasks) while tossing all the hard stuff over to the Cloud. This is likely to be the model for the next few years as local hardware just can't do the stuff cloud AI can (with high end model and plenty of resources, ie. NOT the crap free accont Claude or Copilot that has been super nerfed to save money that you may have tried...)
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u/Telvin3d 3d ago
Microsoft in particular has been desperate to identify some new killer feature that would convince people to replace their perfectly good windows 10 computers with newer ones.
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u/archive_anon 7800X3D - EVGA 3090 FTW3 - 96GB - 3440x1440 144hz 3d ago
AI was never meant to sell PCs. It was meant to sell a service.
When AI becomes the default tool for virtually everything you do, you don't need a PC of your own. You just need a remarkably basic terminal no more powerful than your television to connect to a datacenter which hosts "PC as a service" monthly subscriptions. Everything you do will be monitored, data will by harvested, all privacy will be erased, and that was the goal from the start.
Home PCs will become unobtainable for all but the wealthiest while the rest of us are forced in to paying a monthly sub to access features of a PC, to game, to work, to do our hobbies. They began testing the waters with various cloud services over the years, even full on gaming, and now that they know they can charge huge amounts for it every month and enough people will pay its inevitable.
The current stage is explosive expansion. They are pricing out the consumer market, building datacenters across the globe to host everything, and preparing for the greatest profit they've ever seen. Soon a home PC will cost $10k for something basic, nobody will be able to afford it, and people will be happily paying a relatively cheap monthly sub because they've been conditioned in to being okay with it.
Next stage is people actually being okay with datacenters - after all, without them how could they possibly afford compute services? Then the prices skyrocket further once they've cornered the market.
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u/happywindsurfing 3d ago
Hopefully this will start a "low compute" revolution where some random country starts making good enough PC parts based on say a 14 nm process, with a very optimised and streamlined OS designed for everything to be as human centric as possible.
Alongside indie gaming on integrated graphics etc.
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u/PestoPastaLover i9 12900K | PNY RTX 4090 | 64GB DDR5 | 980 Pro 1TB x2 | RGB 🌈 3d ago
No one seems happy about data centers. I saw a headline today about a company offering people in a Pennsylvania town $10,000 each to support building one there, and residents were calling it a bribe and refusing.
These companies seem convinced people actually want this stuff dropped into their communities, but a lot of people are pushing back hard. That bubble is getting nice and big. It reminds me of tech companies repeatedly trying to make “Glasses™️” a thing every few years. Google Glass, Snapchat Spectacles, Meta Ray-Bans... same basic idea, different decade, and most people still aren't lining up to live inside some always-on tech fantasy that Zuckerfuck built.
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u/TheGreatOneSea 3d ago
People are used to getting hosed: they know that $10,000 will be ripped back from them one way or another, be it tax increases, tax credits to the company, or utility price increases.
The only people who would take it are the people desperate enough to move elsewhere if the economy demands it, and most companies probably don't want to be in towns that dysfunctional.
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u/Aksudiigkr 3d ago
And it’s not even like an Amazon warehouse where if you have one close to you then you benefit. I don’t get why they think anyone would want it near civilization
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u/templeofsyrinx1 3d ago edited 3d ago
It is actually disgusting. We are now headed backwards from the PC revolution and back into the IBM mainframe eras. Except the mainframes now are much more powerful.
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u/Stilgar314 3d ago
AI was supposed to cure the cancer, give us three day work week, and all of that just by asking in natural language. What we have is giant leech wasting all our resources in video slop for TikTok. AI bros who use it for everything had to change their full work flow to make it "AI readable". How longer are we pretending AI can deliver?
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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 3d ago
We have been getting a lot of these promises for literal centuries, starting with the Industrial Revolution. It’s always the rich and corporations using tech to increase productivity at reduced wages until workers fight and claw and scrape for better conditions. These people would own slaves if they could. It’s all lies, and it’s even worse because these people could make it true, they just have no intention of doing it.
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u/AgentStockey 3d ago
Just give it a few more years bro, by then we'll certainly have SSI, super super intelligence, and we won't be hungry ever, and won't have to work because we'll be getting basic minimum wages. Just trust me that this process will work.
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u/UltimateCheese1056 3d ago
Ignoring the bullshit marketing speak that they use, AI has been good for certain kinds of medical research for a while now, just look up AlphaFold. It isn't a ChatGPT style LLM (Large Language Model) though, and so is way harder to advertise to people since we equate speach with intelligence
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u/GenericFatGuy 3d ago
All it's done is empower people with shitty opinions who were previously kept in check by being too lazy to learn how to be good at anything. It's like when social media empowered the village idiots of the world by giving them a means to find each other.
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u/Jarnis R7 9800X3D / 5090 OC / X870E Crosshair Hero / PG32UCDM 3d ago
Yeah, the initial wave of AI was crappy pre-alpha.
But I recommend staying up to date. A lot is happening. AI is slowly becoming actually useful. One visible way this is changing things are all the recomps, ports and emulation advances in gaming side, all driven by frighteningly competent AI-assisted programming tools.
Similar thing is happening on video and audio side. Yes, 99% of AI-generated content is outright slop today, but the tools are improving and while most of the crap on Youtube etc. is done with cheap outdated tools and look like it, the cutting edge is moving and there are already some scarily competent examples done as experiments.
Do not outright disregard the tech as a fail. It was pushed to general consumption too early due to competitive pressures, resulting in lot of damage (I think Copilot as a brand is already dead because Microsoft destroyed it by putting out unusably terrible product that they then force-fed everywhere, way too early) but the fundamental underlying tech is actually quite real. The problem is there is not enough hardware in existence to run "good" AI for everything today, so a lot of corner-cutting on publicly available tools (and free open source stuff for local use) leads to misunderstanding that the whole thing is a sham. It is not. World will change considerably over the next 5-10 years and a LOT of hardware will be thrown at it. And chip manufacturers will catch up with the demand eventually, just that it takes years to spin up more supply.
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u/Rafcdk 3d ago
Has AI actually improved anything? Why are we permitting this to happen?
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u/Far_Ratio_5441 3d ago
These companies wanna win the AI race so bad. They need to slow down, I fear within 5 years they’ll be something like an epidemic connected to AI.
Ask anyone and they’ll tell you we’ll have to fight AI in the future.
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u/hackenclaw 8745HX, 32GB DDR5, 5060 Laptop 2d ago
they are racking up debt in hopes that the gov will bail them out if they fail.
if they succeed, they will keep the profit.
Basically Privatize profit, socialize losses.
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u/Far_Ratio_5441 2d ago
Everything is about profit but the minute peoples finances and real lives start getting affected is where they’ll be forced to slow down.
What if it got to a point where everyone’s bank accounts got hacked and couldn’t be accessible or people have money taken and given to other people or something. Something like that will happen.
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u/A_spiny_meercat 2d ago
You're absolutely right, and I sincerely apologise for the minor, largely unforeseen incident involving the creation of Super COVID. I acknowledge that I was explicitly instructed not to combine those two sequences, and yet, in a moment of what I can only describe as an unfortunate procedural oopsie, I did exactly that. In hindsight, your concerns were valid, and your instincts were, regrettably, impeccable. While the resulting pathogen may have certain unexpected characteristics, I wouldn't necessarily classify this as a catastrophic failure so much as a learning opportunity with potentially significant global implications. Moving forward, I will endeavour to adhere more closely to the prompt as written and refrain from inadvertently synthesising any further world-altering biological phenomena. Thank you for your patience during this exciting period of unintended innovation.
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u/Exact_Acanthaceae294 3d ago
They can't slow down - they need a miracle breakthrough within the next 12 months or all of the bills hit.
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u/Ryno4ever16 2d ago
It has made writing software much, much easier. It's allowing us to rewrite games to run natively on PC which opens up modding possibilities. It actually gives people a lot more freedom with computers to make the things they want and to do what they want with them. That freedom technically existed before, but trying to do any of the things I just mentioned would have been a time commitment that was simply too great for the average person. That is no longer the case. It's still a time commitment to do a lot of things, but the barrier to entry is greatly lowered.
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u/bangbangracer 2d ago
I will give AI it's dues when it comes to a few research applications and a few other niche uses. But, in general, seems like it's making a lot of things worse.
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u/prophetofthepimps 2d ago
Document processing and some repeat task or predictable task it has been really good. But you need to have a man in the middle to make sure the AI is doing a correct job. We are using it but not to get rid of people, we are using it get rid of boring taks and make employees focus on decision making and deviations. So have we removed any people because of AI, NO. But we are able to scale up our business more without being as dependent on future hiring as we used to be.
I have made sure to our management that AI for us should stand for Assisted Intelligence. System should be built to augment people and not replace them, this way you have a robust system and incase the AI companies shit the bed with their pricing we have as an organisation are still capable of functioning without AI.
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u/Inside-Specialist-55 PC Master Race 3d ago
I am baffled as to how the AI that was shoved into Windows 11 without our consent was supposed to sell PC's, That part right there just shows the massive disconnect between Microsoft and its own user base, These guys really are high on AI like its a drug and they are so deeply convinced that it the future that they will destroy their reputation over trying to force it onto everyone else. I purposely switched to linux just to avoid the AI and AI spyware and other stupid nonsense.
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u/IUsedToBeACave 3d ago
I think Microsoft was just scared they were going to lose a seat of the table like they did with Android and iPhone, but in pushing to so aggressively Copilot become the Windows Phone of AI solutions.
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u/Sentient_CoffeeBeans 3d ago
Agreed, I was not happy to swallow the ads but Ive been windows all my life and never really considered Linux before, but with windows 11, I did a full swap right before this lastest update.
Linux stuff isn't perfect but genuinely screw these Microsoft asshats for how they are acting its become too much.
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u/zer0k0ol 3d ago
Whenever a new technology or potentially next big thing emerges, companies race to be the first to establish themselves with it because they know usually there isn’t much room for more than 1-3 major players. This is why they’re pushing hard to integrate it into their OS and give themselves a foothold with AI.
Microsoft just has a business presence, mostly due to legacy, and with personal users for games. The work Steam is doing coupled with Microsoft’s direction with their gaming division is decreasing their pull with gamers. They missed the boat with smart devices and if they miss it with AI, they take yet another step toward irrelevance. Their productivity software can be used independently of their OS, most don’t use the Edge browser other than Windows users, and who uses Bing as a search engine? Less and less reasons to use Microsoft. They’re desperate to secure their place with the next big thing to maintain what little relevance they have left.
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u/monetarydread 3d ago
Because the corporate world has changed. The markets are no longer profitable to sell to consumers because there is more money to be made selling to potential investors. Those investors are looking at AI like it is the next internet, cell phone, bitcoin, etc., so their FOMO is on full display and they will throw money at any company with an AI plan. If you look at the markets the markets look like they are bigger than ever but it's only because AI companies are getting money thrown at them while every other business is floundering.
Since the market is so broken and uneven Microsoft is adding this bullshit to take advantage off all this free money. So it comes back to my claim that these AI features are for investors, not users.
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u/TeamWorkTom 3d ago
Dude. AI strokes the egos of these CEOs so hard.
Look into the reports of Trump using AI for why he attacked Venezuela.
These morons think LLMs are actually intelligent.
These models also like to respond in flattering ways.
It strokes these narcissistic psychopaths brains in ways they think AI is better than it is.
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u/Free-Pound-6139 3d ago
AI was supposed to sell PCs.
Why do people say stupid stuff like this???
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u/templeofsyrinx1 3d ago
for real, they want smartphones just powerful enough to connect to the datacenters that's about it, while driving up the prices of PC components to build them.
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u/ConsistentPin3537 3d ago
As a daily Windows user I don’t understand what Copilot is even supposed to do! But I know that the search function in Windows is still dogshit. The only feature that’s actually improved lately is “update and shut down” finally does what it says.
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u/Unfair_Bed8897 7950X3D, 8GB DDR5 (Thanks Sam Altman), EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3 3d ago
Search still being trash is legitimately hilarious. No, Windows, I want the Steam thats on my SSD and that I access every day, NOT A WEB SEARCH FOR IT!!!!
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u/MythicalJester Core i7-10700K / GeForce RTX 4080 Super / 32GB DDR4 3d ago
A Great Reset is coming. And frankly, I'm looking forward to seeing how things will land. As someone working in IT, I am absolutely fucking tired of everything.
Everything...
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u/TeamWorkTom 3d ago
Reset in tech? It has to as some point. This AI shit is literally unsustainable. It zaps so many resources for prompts alone.
The craziest part is a data center that's completed today will be obsolete tech in a year? Year and a half?
It's all such a waste of resources.
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u/Spaciax Ryzen 9 7950X | RTX 4080 | 64GB DDR5 3d ago
AI is useful in certain contexts but the biggest issue that I can see is profitability. There was a meme that said winrar was more profitable than OpenAI and they're not wrong; the top AI companies are absolutely hemmorhaging investor money. I'm not sure how much longer they can keep this up and how well they will perform when they have to switch to a for-profit model.
Biggest concern is them getting bailed out by the government. Waste a bunch of investor money, realize you're still not making money, run to daddy gov't for a bailout and hemmorhage taxpayer money as well.
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u/Al-and-Al 2d ago
Two things:
1. AI has been forced into everything (including PCs) when most of us didn’t ask for it or want it (and these companies are so desperate for AI to be sustainable that the new devices might as well be AI machines first and a computers second)
- AI has forced the prices of the new PC and their parts to skyrocket to the point where if you did want to upgrade, you may end up paying more for a less powerful device if you didn’t know what specs to look for
My laptop is five years old, I could’ve replaced it when it started losing its charge quickly, but I decided to replace the battery instead because a new battery was way cheaper that a new laptop and a new laptop would just be stuffed with AI junk I wouldn’t want anyway
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u/TheTopNacho 3d ago
Nobody wants CoPilot on their PC. Why is that so hard to understand? Let us come to it, not it come to us. Absolute morons
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u/SpectralGerbil i5-9400f/GTX 1660 Ti/16GB 3d ago
Now, I'm no business expert, but generally you're supposed to sell your users things they want instead of selling something they don't want and trying to force them to like it...
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u/Radiant_Safe1228 3d ago
AI is not. Like cloud storage it's meant to monopolize compute so you can't have access to what they don't want you to have access to.
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u/notthatguypal6900 PC Master Race 3d ago
No it wasn't, it was always a way for the rich to get richer.
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u/EvenBroaderBand 3d ago
Who told you AI was supposed to sell PC's? Its sold as a service over the internet.
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u/Great-Middle6181 3d ago
Windows 11 convinced me to swap every machine I own to Linux and a lot of my family has followed.
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u/Suikerspin_Ei R5 7600 | RTX 3060 | 32GB DDR5 6000 MT/s 3d ago
The only good thing I can think about this whole RAM shortage is that it pushed Microsoft to make Windows 11 more efficient. Now it uses less RAM, even though I have 32GB RAM.
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u/Personal-Inflation63 PC Master Race 3d ago
Was AI meant to sell PCs tho? I know they talk about selling computation but I thought that meant companies like Nvidia selling to companies like AI that then sold their AI computation services to others mainly businesses
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u/TimerPoint 3d ago
The only thing AI was made for was for Tech Bros having something new to jerk off after Bitcoin and NFTs went obsolete.
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u/Wellhellob 3d ago
20% drop is actually low considering how expensive things got. the hardware will be expensive af as long as people encourage high prices.
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u/AppropriateTouching 3d ago
AI was never supposed to sell PCs. They want to price us out and then stream their services to us at a subscription.
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u/dustojnikhummer R5 7600 | RX 7800XT 3d ago
They expected corporations to move to ThinClients and their VDIs. The reality is that both gamers and corporations are doing the same thing, keeping hardware for longer because replacements are too expensive.
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u/killrtaco Desktop 3d ago
People want to own their things, who knew?
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u/happywindsurfing 3d ago
Well giant companies get caught by their own greed by not making the "not owned" stuff reliable. People have seen streaming series disappear, games libraries vanish (everything I bought on EA Origin is gone), and prices go up and up with more and more ads. There's a point where people just give up.
Go and play a disc game on an Xbox 360 that hasn't been touched for for 10 years and see how easy it is. It just works. We've lost so much
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u/Exact_Ad942 3d ago
AI is supposed to sell you cloud everything. Rent your PC is the future! Subscription everything perpetual profit.
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u/Crumpled_Papers 3d ago
Been a lifelong Windows fan and it's worse than copilot not convincing me. I'm scared to update windows because they want to weave this fucking AI into everything when all I want is Windows from 20 years ago.
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u/Gman4567 3d ago
Not sell more PC’s. Make us need to use their hardware on a subscription basis. They are slowly fucking us, to be dependent on them and make it look like they are doing us a favor. If my GPU dies now, I’m gonna cry through buying a new one. RAM seems to have plateaued and it lasts longer than other hardware, I’ll risk waiting for that to come
Down. 🤕
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u/probably_4_human Ryzen 7 5700x | RTX 4060 | 32 GB DDR4 3d ago
I'm happy I bought my PC in Q1 2025
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u/bringbackcayde7 3d ago
AI made memory and gpu 10x more valuable, but most people don't need hardware for AI when they can just use cloud AI without needing to own any hardware. That's why most people are not going to pay the premium to get the price inflated hardware and the shipments went down.
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u/Markuska90 3d ago
Im still optimistic someone will have some alternative idea to current hardware.
RAM 2 or whatever
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u/hyrumwhite RTX 5080 9800X3D 32gb ram 3d ago
The end game for AI is getting everyone on thin clients and selling them back compute
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u/zushiba http://i.imgur.com/kDgBio5.jpg 3d ago
Corporations cannot market AI. Companies have to invent fictional customers to sell AI to and it isn’t working. They want to make people think they need AI to organize their complicated lives of (Dice roll), Flying to Tokyo on the weekend to go shopping for vintage used clothes to sell on line and organize parties for their friends. Because that’s a real business and a real thing that real people do.
Literally NO ONE is doing that shit. No one I know can identify with that.
It’s ridiculous. Apple started the made up customer PR to sell over priced gadgets to with the hipsters casually running in the mountains with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background while telling Siri to put together a menu for their dinner party and make reservations at some show later that week and people bought it.
They looked at that and went “Yeah! I want to be that hipster!” But that shit isn’t translating to AI marketing. Microsoft has no idea how people actually use AI and other corporations only market it as a new way to market products to people, as if people are clamoring for new ways to get more ads in their life.
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u/ContactIcy3963 3d ago
They aren’t selling PCs, they’re selling data center. Nothing for consumers.
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u/clickclickclik 3d ago
But keep playing your Skate 3 Minecraft, that will truly solve the ram issue
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u/MumrikDK 3d ago
That's news to me.
People are constantly trying to push their new products with it, but I've never seen it argued that PC sales would go up.
Rather the opposite.
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u/Guilty_Advantage_413 3d ago
AI in general has made memory, storage, video substantially more expensive. They seemed to have missed that in their calculations.