As memory chip shortages inflate PC prices, vendors are shifting product lines to AI-enabled models. PC shipments were up year over year in Q1 despite chip shortages, according to Gartner.
AI PCs are helping fuel the growth, said Oliver Blanchard, research director at Futurum Group, but most aren’t yet able to handle AI workloads on their own.
Customers hoping to access tools like ChatGPT or Gemini directly on their devices have been unimpressed by the latest AI PCs, Blanchard added.
“Everybody was a little bit disappointed with what the AI PC vendors and the chip manufacturers that drive this technology promised versus what was delivered,” Blanchard told Channel Dive. “There’s also been a lot of disappointment from PC vendors who feel they’ve been perhaps betrayed by the ISVs that just haven’t kept up with the hardware. They really bought into it, and realized after six months that though these are AI PCs, they don’t work like AI PCs yet.”
Some experts say “AI PC” is a misnomer.
“They shouldn't be called AI PCs,” Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, told Channel Dive. “They need to be called something else, because AI PCs are not doing anything really AI-ish. It's just a PC.”
Despite the shortcomings, many organizations are opting for the premium units.
“It isn't so much that enterprises are buying AI PCs primarily because of the AI,” Blanchard said. “They're buying AI PCs because they're just the best version of PCs that exist today.”
Blanchard added there are multiple reasons companies are upgrading. The new devices have better battery life, faster processors and more secure hardware. They are also set up to run Windows 11.
For some enterprises, AI PCs are a future-proofing strategy, according to Blanchard.
“Even if AI software hasn’t caught up with the AI hardware, enterprises know that buying AI PCs insulates them from having to accelerate their next purchase or refresh cycle, if and when those bits of on-device AI software start hitting the market,” he said.
Long-term PC market projections should be treated cautiously, according to Atwal, because the PC industry is notoriously slow to introduce changes. OEMs and distributors are also grappling with a component shortage that's driving prices up on even baseline units and is expected to continue through next year.
Blanchard said that Nvidia’s AI PCs, including the DGX Spark and RTX spark systems, could revolutionize the market. Nvidia announced that RTX Spark laptops and compact desktops, which the company calls the first Windows PCs purpose-built for personal agents, will be available this fall.
“What Nvidia is bringing to the market in terms of AI capabilities, especially with Nvidia’s existing developer ecosystem, could accelerate AI solutions moving directly onto the PC,” Blanchard said. “I think that there is going to be a new surge in demand for highly specialized, very high-performance inference machines that don't really exist yet today in the market.”
