Am I missing something or is this as big of a disaster as I think? This is terrible news right?
The Qualcomm Oryon SoC is about half the price of an Intel CPU.
It's a brand new device family. OEM price competition should improve as more devices ship in Aug/Sep.
Oryon should run Linux with good performance-per-watt. Hopefully the NPU can be disabled to save energy.
Most users buy a cheap HP from Costco for $300. Businesses will buy the same standard line OptiPlex they bought last year. Very, very few people will magically end up with Windows Recall who didn't intend to.
i.e. PC hardware for AI inference will not be limited to Windows.
> Most users buy a cheap HP from Costco for $300. Businesses will buy the same standard line OptiPlex they bought last year.
Both Intel and AMD announced upcoming chips with NPUs. Mediatek and Nvidia will likely join the Arm AI PC competition in 2025. Apple's 2024 OS updates are focused on AI features, both on-device and cloud partnership with OpenAI. Intel's Computex tagline a few weeks ago was literally "AI Everywhere".
In a few years, silicon for on-device AI inference will likely be pervasive in retail PCs, including Costco, HP and Dell Optiplex. It has been shipping in Apple Silicon Macbooks and iPads since 2020, mostly unused by software until now.
I also wonder how "knowledge transfer" will happen when you get a new machine in the future? What about backups, do they sit in the cloud already? These all sounds like ways that this "local" AI PC will share data with the MS cloud in one form or another. With Apple doing similar things already on iPhones (I know there are differences, but its still analyzing your data etc), I wonder if Linux might actually become a more mainstream OS in the future.
Could also be that people stop using computers as much and just use tablets with docking stations + keyboard & monitors (again, there is work to be done, but its a possibility from a HW level). That would leave us with MacOS & Windows for business desktops (with some Chromebook & Linux sprinkled in there). Education would probably be more Tablet & Chromebook style compute, and gaming is already moving to the cloud (I guess the positive here is that we might finally be able to get rid of AntiCheat software:) ).
> I also wonder how "knowledge transfer" will happen when you get a new machine in the future? What about backups, do they sit in the cloud already?
Honestly, I guess this will become very expensive for Microsoft, and they won't find a good business case what to do with the collected data. So Microsoft is wasting a huge load of money, and additionally their AI spyware causes a huge reputation damage for Microsoft: a lose-lose situation. :-(
Nevetheless I still have difficulties seeing how this is supposed to make money for Microsoft.
No idea about this specific feature, but billions are being spent to train models in the cloud (including Azure), with the expectation that some models will be used for on-device inference. It remains to be seen whether those investments will return dividends. In the meantime, cloud and GPU vendors are making money on model training.
ads.
they've been clear about windows becoming more ads oriented.
guess they are testing the water to try and get a competitive edge over google in a few years with this new data trove.
Considering the global market share of Windows, there would be a need to roll out such a grandiose service slowly, too.