Over the past couple of years, the world of IT support, both at home and for businesses, has been dominated by reports about AI-first initiatives which would integrate large language models into the technology that we rely on.
However, despite the prevalence of AI-focused news and announcements at the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), possibly the biggest announcement and most remarkable admission came from Dell, a familiar name for both businesses and consumers.
Following a year where Dell focused as much on AI integration as Nvidia and Microsoft, the latter of which has weathered significant reputational damage and become known as “Microslop” due to its dogmatic integration of features such as Copilot.
This might be justifiable if this happens to be what consumers want, but Dell’s head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, noted rather frankly that people are not choosing their IT hardware based on IT, and in fact, relying on AI in marketing IT products “probably confuses them” more than assists them in making the right choice for them.
Ultimately, what matters to consumers and their tech support partners are the fundamentals that have always mattered: performance, display quality, battery life for laptops and durability.
The questions IT shoppers will ask are the same ones they have always asked:
- How fast is the processor?
- How much memory does it have?
- How much hard disk space is available?
- How many hours will the battery last before it needs charging?
Whilst many of the showcased machines still qualify under the Microsoft Copilot Plus initiative and still contain neural processing units, these features are barely mentioned, simply because customers do not care about AI enough to buy them, whether they are tech-savvy or not.
As well as this, as noted by The Verge, the performance benefits found in Copilot Plus computers have been credited to the use of more powerful central processing units rather than any AI features.
