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

[u/After_Cookies]

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/

[u/After_Cookies]

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.

[u/Jarnis → u/After_Cookies]

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...)

[u/tracer_ca → u/Jarnis]

they are useless for LLMs and other generative AI jobs.

I have a Surface Pro with an X-Elite and am using stable diffusion to render high quality 1500x1500 images in 4 seconds. Incredibly useful for my use case.

Yes, my PC is useless for running general purpose LLMs, but that's not because of the CPU/NPUs, but because the system only having 32GB of RAM and that's not enough for any reasonable context. I can run a small coding specific LLM, but the context window is so small that it's not very usable. If I had 128GB of RAM then it would be significantly more useful.

[u/SaltMaker23 → u/After_Cookies]

Everyone knows that it's impossible to make money on the initial product, it's the predatory subscriptions that lands all the butter, the insurance, antivirus and all of the other things that put butter on their bread.

They are pushing AI forward not because they are altruistic but because margins on computers are very poor, if all of the people buying cheapest PC with <5% margins starts being cornered into 29$ per month subscriptions with close to zero marginal costs: they can now even sell computers at a loss and will make a LOT more money.

It's basic math if you've ever owned a business. HP has been doing this for years with their printers sold at massive loss and their predatory cartridges, business cofee makers also, they give you 2k$ machines for 100$ selling behind overpriced consumables.

[u/After_Cookies → u/SaltMaker23]

these are different things. the IDC and Omdia reports have more details.