Dell is Wrong About PCs, AI, and Consumers ⭐

Dell, a company that doesn’t understand PCs, AI, or consumers, certainly has a lot to say about all three. The problem? It’s wrong. Dead wrong.

A Dell executive infamously said out loud what AI deniers need to hear: Consumers are not buying PCs “based on AI.” This was widely reported because of course it was, my industry is terrible. But left unsaid is that Dell doesn’t sell that many PCs to consumers, doesn’t have an AI strategy for PCs (commercial or consumer), and is such a savvy marketer that it killed off its only solid consumer brand, XPS, last year only to bring it limping back to a market that had lost interest in Dell a decade ago or more anyway. Yeah, we should listen to these people.

Let’s look at some numbers.

We’re on the cusp of a new round of quarterly earnings reports, but here’s what the most recent information about the top PC makers shows us.

Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group (IDG) is responsible for its PCs, tablets, and phones, and it earned $15.1 billion in the quarter ending September 30, 2025, up 12 percent year-over-year (YOY). Lenovo is decisively in first place in the PC market with a record 25.6 percent market share (unit sales), and it claimed “industry-leading profitability” with over 33 percent of its unit sales now AI PCs. Lenovo is also the world’s biggest maker of AI PCs, with 31.1 percent market share. So that seems to be working out pretty well for the company.

HP’s PC business earned $10.4 billion in the quarter ending October 31, 2025. Revenues from consumer PC sales were up 10 percent YOY, and HP touted that 30 percent of the PCs it sells now are AI PCs. Looking at its earnings report, I see that net revenues from consumer PC sales were $11 billion, and HP is marketing the hell out of AI. HP, like Lenovo, is building out its own AI chatbot, the HP AI Companion, which is free for customers to use.

Apple reported Mac revenues of $8.7 billion in the quarter ending September 27, a gain of 13 percent YOY. That’s pocket change compared to what it earns from the iPhone, but everyone is familiar with how Apple Intelligence is key to Apple’s core hardware products, and that it has struggled to get conversational Siri up to its standards. And the reason we know all that is because AI is so important to Apple and its future. Apple doesn’t break down consumer and commercial sales, but it’s fair to assume the vast majority is consumer-based, or what I could call sales to individuals, not businesses.

So what about Dell? Where does Dell, the sudden genius about consumer PC buying habits and AI, land in all this?

Rock bottom, that’s where.

Dell made just $1.9 billion in revenues selling PCs to consumers in the quarter ending October 31, 2025, a decline of 7 percent. Most of Dell’s PC revenues come from commercial customers, who want boring, easily locked-down PCs no human being could love. And most of Dell’s revenues overall come from servers and networking, a business no human being could love or even care about in the slightest. Yes, let’s listen to what these people have to say about PCs, consumers, and AI.

Kidding. Let’s ignore them.

Dell does not understand this market, and the most accurate view of its stance is sour grapes. It sees the successes of its rivals and it’s jealous. Maybe it should simply make better products. And hire a new marketing team for crying out loud.

Who should we listen to? I would start with the companies that are actually successful in this space. For example, Lenovo.

When Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing was asked last week what he would say to AI skeptics, his answer was concise and correct. “Nobody can avoid it,” he answered.

And when Lenovo CTO Tolga Kurtoglu was asked the same question, he expanded on Yang’s answer.

“I don’t see a world without AI,” he said. “Nobody can avoid it. But AI will not replace you. It will only empower you, empower each of us, so that is why we think utilization will help you so that you can do more, be more creative. So that will be the trend that you cannot avoid.”

The problem with PCs, AI, and consumers, of course, all comes down to over-marketing something as it evolves. We’ve experienced three years of the industry marketing AI PCs and 18 months of Microsoft marketing Copilot+ PCs during a time when AI hype exploded and the reality didn’t live up to that hype. But PCs, like phones and tablets, are the obvious place for local AI and the orchestration between local and cloud AI, and this shift is inevitable. The capabilities we see today on the PC are not a non-starter, they’re just nascent. The issue is the marketing, not the capabilities. There are very real advantages to Copilot+ PCs today, especially, and that only gets more impressive with time.

Lenovo sees this. HP sees this. Apple sees this. Only Dell doesn’t see this. But its inability to sell PCs to consumers speaks volumes.

Put simply, we can safely ignore anything Dell has to say about PCs, AI, and consumers. Dell is out of its depth here. It should shut the f#$k up and stop giving oxygen to the dullards still denying AI against all reason. The world is moving forward and Dell is just getting in the way.