AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that

Jimmy Kimmel Live did a segment where they told people they worked for Apple and they had pre-sale iPhone 16s that they wanted to give to people to show off how amazing they were, and they could instantly (within a few seconds) transfer everything from their old iPhone to the new one. Behind their backs, they just changed the case or in some instances just removed the person's case, then handed it back to them. They of course only showed the ones that were duped, but they were absolutely amazed by how much faster their "new" phone was, how much sharper the screen was, how much faster web browsing was, and how it had upgraded the quality of all their existing photos. One of those people actually worked for Apple.

Small and medium businesses employ almost half of the workforce, and they don't need AI features in any way, and they don't upgrade on cycles. They often keep machines well past the 3 year mark, and they continue to do the job just as well as when they were new, until hardware actually dies. I had customers on 15-year-old servers before they finally failed. Only forced obsolescence makes them get upgraded before that point, with software that is forcibly updated with unneeded and unwanted features until it becomes so bloated it feels slow. Even in larger corporations, the majority of users don't do work that would get anything out of AI in the way it functions right now. Nobody wants it, nobody needs it, and it doesn't really work that well.

Exactly, most old kit will just work and run. Its like the old days where progression from processor to processor made a noticable difference, or you could go from 2/4MB RAM upto 4/8MB

Most old kit I had recently, replace the spinner with an SSD and off it goes, a new lease of life.

And lets not forget the rebuild every so often to get rid of bloat.

An old company I worked for, as we pulled older servers out, if they were not reused they went into the "spares" pile for older servers that had no support for.

admittedly they were old days and less hacks and threats were around due to initially,none, then limited internet access

Concede in firewall and endpoints you want to keep in line for when the vendor stops maintaining it

would be a lot of AI assistance on the desktop as well as crunchy new services in the datacenter

The thing is, Microsoft has quite successfully spent the past few years getting application workloads pushed into "the cloud". So, if all your data and workloads are there, what business processing needs to be done on local PCs? Surely they should be becoming more of a simpler, cheaper client machine for the corporate cloud if the last few years of cloud hype have any truth to them?

It's the old client / server, thin client / thick client, local app vs web app debate yet again, in a new dress, but this time with very few, if any applications where "client side AI" might be needed. And it only seems like a few weeks since they were pushing "cloud PCs". Has that stopped now, as they've realised that they were basically reinventing cheapo Chromebooks for office use?

"The last big wave of desktop replenishment was more than four years ago, long enough for those fleets to be clapped out and useless."

If a manufacturer is putting that line forward the obvious reply is that if that's how they see their build quality we'll go elsewhere next time.

If you're using a 2015 PC with Windows 10 in 2025, you may not even notice.

Pfft. Speed freaks. I'm writing this on a 2009 Lenovo ThinkCentre - upgraded with an SSD - running Linux Mint and nothing I need to do on it ever comes even close to taxing it.

U saved The Reg

Tomi was bored and tired of the Commenturds.

But this piece was spot on, Rupert.

"There is a way forward, from Apple's parallel consumer universe. While Cupertino has the strong advantage of directly controlling both OS and hardware, it also has a lot more competition, at least on the surface."

Apple are Microsoft Mark 2. Only a twat wouldnt hate them these days. £1000 for a stand! See Sam Time for more...

Apple are a hardware company and AI done well isnt about the hardware so much. I disagree with photos being the most important part of the phone. I wish Apple didnt have those ugly-as-sin cameras on the back and i dont really give a monkey's arse about the camera.

And they way they have tied their Win3.1 AI with the 16pro is straight out of the Microscumbag's book.

The AI will be your future OS. I might noty come back here again as it seems more like Old Get's Corner than a tech site. And that is the reason why high-level folks like myself rarely drop down amongst the masses like we have done so.

But, the most disappointing factor is that they still dont get it. Even old people are telling them to get into it and find their niche and still the knobs sound like Victor Meldrew.

The Reg would not bother with you lot were it not for coins. No way wd they do this web1 hobby-style. No with you lot (exception: 5/6 people on here scored over 130iq. The rest averqaged nearly97. You laughted when we said we were running an IQ model on you retards. LOL. OpenAI have it now. A cornerstone of future developemtn.

Now, piss off back to your postions of no power.

[PURE LNN SSLN text and can't be bothered to human edit it being this is the last one. C U, girls]

Microsoft has not "invented" one single thing since day one! Right from the get-go, they bought DOS and sold it on to IBM under a profitable agreement. So it is with virtually every "new" product they ever came out with - it was bought out!

Nailed it on the hard disk issue

That was it, SSDs killed the need for new PC for most people who were not doing intensive tasks anyway.

All of a sudden you realise how much that little bit of spinning rust was slowing everything down.

My son's little micro PC for doing homework on etc went pop a few months back. Bought an ex-corp SFF desktop for well under £100. Turned out it was very slow but swapping out the disk for a cheap SSD and it's suddenly plenty fast enough.

Will it run W11? No. Time to show the boy Linux after that.

And AI, really, what is the fecking point of 99% of generative AI (seperating that for a lot of actually very useful ML stuff). I work on this stuff, I've got Stable diffusion on my laptop to try, my employer is heavily comitted to AI and we can't see the fecking point other than rising that bandwagon.

Notice just today that CoPilot (the new Clippy it seems) it trying to put itself into the mix at every unwanted opportunity.

Sooner or later, the AI bubble will burst. At the moment, it feels like 20+ years ago when we were in the height of the dotcom bubble. Building a website was seen as a guaranteed way of getting rich, investors were flinging money at anyone who said "hey I've got an idea about a website", without any business plan or any clear design on how this new website would turn a profit.

Then the bubble burst. The good ideas, profitable sites, those with potential all survived. The crap disappeared, and many people who'd blindly thrown money at stupid gimmicks ended up out of pocket.

That moment will come with AI. Hopefully soon. Not saying AI will go away, it has its uses and it will survive in areas where it can actually offer useful value to people. But the pointless implementations, those that have no chance of making any money and which 99.9% of people are shunning, those will die off, and good riddance.

And let's face it, MS has a wealth of experience of jumping onto failed bandwagons. Just ask the teams behind Windows Phone, Cortana, Silverlight, Zune, Paint3D...

Phone cameras are shit. I use an actual camera to take photos and shoot raw images. It's the only way to fly.

Marketing...sigh

If desktop search is not enough... Make it spicy!

Our policy (and many other companies at that) is to deliberately be one major release behind on purpose, because the bleeding edge is a shitshow.

Persuade me why any of us should do MS beta testing for them?

Win 10 will stick around at least as long as it is mainstream supported; and likely beyond that. There are NO new features in the OS that are compelling reasons to swap.

If MS actually gave us what we wanted, that is, a very clean and minimalist desktop, file manager and vehicle to launch applications; plus decent network security and driver framework that would be an instant buy. Never gonna happen.

The main workhorse here

A generic i3-something laptop, bought new. I think it came with Win7 on it but the spinning rust was swapped for an SSD with Ubuntu, the memory upped to 12Gb from the 4 it came with and that's it. Oh, external keyboard and monitor - I'm old enough not to want to hunch over a laptop any more.

Bought to support a new business venture - and still pretty much *the* daily driver, handling everything I've thrown at it. That was almost 13 years ago. And it can play Doom for those re-live-your-youth moments. Bonus! It'll die one day, of course, and I'll never find a replacement MB now - but seeing as anything can run *nix these days, it's not keeping me awake at night.

The way I see it, an office pc is a bit of hardware: historically, budgets were never planned around replacing desks, chairs and so on on a three-yearly cycle and I'm not doing it with things ON the desk, either. Get off the Operating System upgrade/new shiny gravy-train and you'll be surprised just how long the hardware will carry on delivering.

Can't have it both ways

Either we get more frequent desktop refreshes driven by the need for an increase in power required to perform everyday actions; or we have the majority of day to day business activities in the cloud. The latter *should* require far less local resources required on each PC because the cloud servers are doing the heavy lifting.

Built in obsolescence through software...

Makes the exec and shareholder money tree grow.

Not good for the users or indeed the environment, in terms of the hardware disposed of and the cost expended in extraction of raw materials.

But, ooh, shiny shiny.