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Comment by Morromist | Hacker News Reader

I was in the market for a laptop this month. Many new laptops now advertise AI features like this "HP OmniBook 5 Next Gen AI PC" which advertises:

"SNAPDRAGON X PLUS PROCESSOR - Achieve more everyday with responsive performance for seamless multitasking with AI tools that enhance productivity and connectivity while providing long battery life"

I don't want this garbage on my laptop, especially when its running of its battery! Running AI on your laptop is like playing Starcraft Remastered on the Xbox or Factorio on your steamdeck. I hear you can play DOOM on a pregnancy test too. Sure, you can, but its just going to be a tedious inferior experiance.

Really, this is just a fine example of how overhyped AI is right now.

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Laptop manufacturers are too desperate to cash on the AI craze. There's nothing special about an 'AI PC'. It's just a regular PC with Windows Copilot... which is a standard Windows feature anyway.

>I don't want this garbage on my laptop, especially when its running of its battery!

The one bit of good news is it's not going to impact your battery life because it doesn't do any on-device processing. It's just calling an LLM in the cloud.

AI PCs also have NPUs which I guess provide accelerated matmuls, albeit less accelerated than a good discrete GPU.

Even collecting and sending all that data to the cloud is going to drain battery life. I'd really rather my devices only do what I ask them to than have AI running the background all the time trying to be helpful or just silently collecting data.

>> I'd really rather my devices only do what I ask them to

Linux hears your cry. You have a choice. Make it.

Part of me is starting to think Valve is going to be the best thing to happen to Linux (in this regard) since Ubuntu.

Unfortunately still loads of hurdles for most people.

AAA Games with anti-cheat that don't support Linux.

Video editing (DaVinci Resolve exists but is a pain to get up and running on many distros, KDenLive/OpenShot don't really cut it for most)

Adobe Suite (Photoshop/Lightroom specifically, and Premiere for Video Editing) - would like to see Affinity support Linux but hasn't happened so far. GIMP and DarkTable aren't really substitutions unless you pour a lot of time into them.

Tried moving to Linux on my laptop this past month, made it a month before a reinstall of Windows 11. Had issues with WiFi chip (managed to fix but had to edit config files deep in the system, not ideal), Fedora with LUKS encryption after a kernel update the keyboard wouldn't work to input the encryption key, no Windows Hello-like support (face ID). Had the most success with EndeavourOS but running Arch is a chore for most.

It's getting there, best it's ever been, but there's still hurdles.

According to my friends, Arc Raders works well on linux. So it's very much, just a small selection of AAA games, so they can run anti-cheat, that probably doesn't even work. Can you name a triple a you want to play, that proton says is incompatible?

Gimp isn't a solution, sure but it works for what I need. Darktable does way more than I've ever wanted, so I can forgive it for the one time it crashed. Inkscape and blender both exceed my needs as well.

And Adobe is so user hostile, that I feel I need to call you a mean name to prove how I feel.... dummy!

Yes, I already feel bad, and I'm sorry. But trolling aside, listing applications that treat users like shit, aren't reasons to stay on the platform that also treats you like shit.

I get it, sometimes, being treated like shit is worth it because it's easier now that you're used to being disrespected. But an aversion to the effort it'd take for you to climb the learning curve of something different, isn't valid reason to help the disrespectful trash companies making the world worse, recruit more people for them to treat like trash.

Just because you use it, doesn't make it worth recommending.

I don't really PC game anymore, use my Xbox or a few older games my laptop's iGPU can handle, not at the moment anyway. Battlefield 6 is a big one recently that if I had a gaming PC set-up I'd probably want to play.

I know Adobe are... c-words, but their software is industry standard for a reason.

> Battlefield 6 is a big one recently that if I had a gaming PC set-up I'd probably want to play.

We definitely play very different games, I wouldn't touch it if you paid me. So I'm sure we both have a bit of sample bias in our expected rates of linux compatibility. Especially since EA is another company like Adobe. Also, the internet seems to think they have a cheating problem. I wonder how bad it really is, and if it's worth the cost of the anti-cheat.

They're industry standard because they were first. Not necessarily because they were better. They do have a feature set that's near impossible to beat, not even I can pretend like they don't. I'm just saying, respect and fairness is more important to me, than content aware fill ever will be.

Also, doesn't the Adobe suite work on Linux?

I think older versions do, like CS6 through WINE.

Photoshop CC 2024 apparently works somewhat, but no GPU support and the removal tool doesn't work apparently.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

Basically, no.

> AAA Games with anti-cheat that don't support Linux.

I really don't understand people that want to play games so badly that they are willing to install a literal rootkit on their devices. I can understand if you're a pro gamer but it feels stupid to do it otherwise.

Most of the time they're not really informed that they are. I know Valorant does (Riot Games), one I've avoided in the past because of it.

But a lot of the time it's peer-pressure for wanting to play with friends who couldn't care less.

Riot Vanguard is a popular rootkit.

Copilot is just ChatGPT as an app.

If you don't use it, it will have no impact on your device. And it's not sending your data to the cloud except for anything you paste into it.

So, the new AI features like recall don’t exist?

Windows is going more and more into AI and embedding it into the core of the OS as much as it can. It’s not “an app”, even if that was true now it wouldn't be true for very long. The strategy is well communicated.

Doesn't this lead to a lot of tension between the hardware makers and Microsoft?

MS wants everyone to run Copilot on their shiny new data centre, so they can collect the data on the way.

Laptop manufacturers are making laptops that can run an LLM locally, but there's no point in that unless there's a local LLM to run (and Windows won't have that because Copilot). Are they going to be pre-installing Llama on new laptops?

Are we going to see a new power user / normal user split? Where power users buy laptops with LLMs installed, that can run them, and normal folks buy something that can call Copilot?

Any ideas?

> MS wants everyone to run Copilot on their shiny new data centre, so they can collect the data on the way.

MS doesn't care where your data is, they're happy to go digging through your C drive to collect/mine whatever they want, assuming you can avoid all the dark patterns they use to push you to save everything on OneDrive anyway and they'll record all your interactions with any other AI using Recall

I had assumed that they needed the usage to justify the investment in the data centre, but you could be right and they don't care.

MS doesn't want your data in the first place. Nobody cares about or wants your data. You are not special.

It isn't just copilot that these laptops come with; manufacturers are already putting their own AI chat apps as well.

For example, the LG gram I recently got came with just such an app named Chat, though the "ai button" on the keyboard (really just right alt or control, I forget which) defaults to copilot.

If there's any tension at all, it's just who gets to be the default app for the "ai button" on the keyboard that I assume almost nobody actually uses.

Interesting. Yeah, that'll be the argument

It's just marketing. The laptop makers will market it as if your laptop power makes a difference knowing full well that it's offloaded to the cloud.

For a slightly more charitable perspective, agentic AI means that there is still a bunch of stuff happening on the local machine, it's just not the inference itself.

Copilot is a local LLM (well SLM). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/phi-silica

> It's just a regular PC with Windows Copilot... which is a standard Windows feature anyway.

"AI PC" branded devices get "Copilot+" and additional crap that comes with that due to the NPU. Despite desktops having GPUs with up to 50x more TOPs than the requirement, they don't get all that for some reason https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/copilot-pc/323616/microsoft-...

Is Microsoft trying to help NPU chip makers?

When is Wintel going to finally happen?

Microsoft has roughly $102 billion in cash (+ short-term investments). Intel’s market value is approximately $176 billion.

I've never really understood why Microsoft helped Intel's bottom line over decades.

With Azure, Microsoft has even more reason to buy Intel.

There's nothing special with what Intel has lowered the bar as an AI PC so vendors can market it. Ollama can run a 4b model plenty fine on Tiger Lake with 8gb classic RAM.

But unified memory IS truly what makes an AI ready PC. The Apple Silicon proves that. People are willing to pay the premium, and I suspect unified memory will still be around and bringing us benefits even if no one cares about LLMs in 5 years.

That's not quite correct. Snapdragon chips that are advertised as being good for "AI" also come with the Hexagon DSP, which is now used for (or targeted at) AI applications. It's essentially a separate vector processor with large vector sizes.

I have a Snapdragon laptop and it is the best I've ever had. But the NPU is really almost useless.

This is a nice companion to the article: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2965927/the-great-npu-failur...

Agreed, I have the ARM based T14s for work.

The thing is nowhere near the performance as a macbook, but its silent and the battery lasts ages, which is a far cry from the same laptop with an Intel CPU, which is what many are running.

Company removes a lot of the AI bloat though.

> Running AI on your laptop is like playing Starcraft Remastered on the Xbox

A great analogy because there is Starcraft for a console - Nintendo 64 - and it is quite awkward. Split-screen multiplayer included.

It’s true that the AI marketing is largely nonsense, but the NPUs also don’t hurt, and you don’t have to make use of them.

Factorio runs really well on the deck though...

But yeah, fresh install of OS is a must for any new computer.

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