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/Jarnis]

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.

[u/thrownjunk → u/Jarnis]

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.

[u/ferdzs0 → u/thrownjunk]

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.

[u/atkinson137 → u/Jarnis]

Seconding this. I've been maxing out my Claude sub and I easily get 10x the cost compared to API pricing. It might even approach 100x.

There is no way this will continue. Sub plans will be kneecapped at some point, and API prices will rise imo. I've been keeping tabs on LocalLLM, but for right now, it's so much cheaper to simply use the sub.

[u/anapoe → u/Jarnis]

I work in workplace that cannot use cloud services like this (air-gapped networks). I'm watching our leadership with great interest to see what's done with regards to local AI. BTW we're understaffed on software devs by about a factor of three.