I was reading the coverage coming out of CES 2026 this week, and the silence was deafening. Just a year ago, the industry was shouting about the “AI PC” as the inevitable successor to the computing throne. Every laptop lid, keyboard deck, and press release was plastered with the promise of Neural Processing Units (NPUs) and local intelligence.
But looking at the tepid market reaction—and Dell explicitly dialing back the “AI sermon” this year—I can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. It reminds me of the “3D Ready” stickers that adorned every television set circa 2011.
There is a distinct pattern in consumer technology where the hardware cart gets placed miles ahead of the software horse. We saw it with 3D televisions, a technology that demanded we wear goofy glasses to watch a limited library of content, offering a friction-heavy solution to a problem nobody really had. We saw it, more tragically, with Apple’s Vision Pro. Despite being a marvel of engineering, it stalled because it asked too much of us (financial and physical weight) for too little return in our daily lives.
The “AI PC” seems to be falling into a similar, albeit subtler, trap.
The issue isn’t that AI is a fad—far from it. Agentic AI and local models are transforming how we work. The issue is the marketing category. Consumers are realizing that an “AI PC” is just… a PC. The magic of AI isn’t in the hardware badge or a dedicated Copilot key; it’s in the software that runs anywhere. We are realizing that we don’t buy “Internet PCs” anymore, we just buy computers. The utility is ubiquitous, not proprietary to a specific chassis.
When technology truly succeeds, it disappears. It becomes boring. The “flop” of the AI PC isn’t a failure of technology, but a failure of hype. It is the market collectively shrugging and saying, “Show me the value, not the specs.” Until the software experiences are so undeniable that we can’t live without that local NPU, the “AI PC” will remain a marketing sticker, destined to peel off and fade away, much like 3D glasses or Vision Pros gathering dust for those few who bought them.
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