HP Chief Throws About AI Fairy Dust in Hopes of Reviving Slumbering PC Giant (theregister.com) 45
HP CEO Enrique Lores is betting a sprinkle of AI dust can regenerate the flagging PC market -- and with shipments still in decline across the industry, he can't afford to tease Wall Street. From a report: The world's second largest seller of desktop computing hardware has reported a 15 percent year-on-year decline in revenue to $53.7 billion for fiscal 2023 ended 31 October. Profit before tax was $2.93 billion versus $4.32 billion in the prior year.
[...] Orders picked up in recent months. Analyst data indicates the rate of decline is slowing after resellers began clearing inventory they'd amassed in the latter stage of the pandemic, when the frenzied buying patterns seen in prior years vanished. For Q4, HP reported revenue of $13.8 billion, down 6.5 percent year-on-year. Personal Systems was down 8 percent to $9.4 billion and Printing was down 3 percent to $4.4 billion. Profit before tax was $852 million, better than the $647 million brought in a year earlier, helped by a reduction in structural costs. HP expects business PC refresh cycles to kick in next year, with more corporate customers shifting their estate to Windows 11 -- yet it is the advent of the AI PC that Lores thinks signal better times.
[...] Orders picked up in recent months. Analyst data indicates the rate of decline is slowing after resellers began clearing inventory they'd amassed in the latter stage of the pandemic, when the frenzied buying patterns seen in prior years vanished. For Q4, HP reported revenue of $13.8 billion, down 6.5 percent year-on-year. Personal Systems was down 8 percent to $9.4 billion and Printing was down 3 percent to $4.4 billion. Profit before tax was $852 million, better than the $647 million brought in a year earlier, helped by a reduction in structural costs. HP expects business PC refresh cycles to kick in next year, with more corporate customers shifting their estate to Windows 11 -- yet it is the advent of the AI PC that Lores thinks signal better times.
HP is anti-consumer (Score:3)
AI isn't going to help that his company is anti-consumer and does everything in its power to control every aspect of its products to the detriment of its users. I have no desire to buy anything from HP; AI isn't going to fix that.
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HP Inc makes nice Chromebooks, but the margins have to be miniscule on them. Honestly they should merge with Lenovo and charge 20% more across the board for computers while also cutting redundant staff. The real issue is that the two CEOs wouldn't be able run one company and one would have to leave, and it wouldn't be Yang Yuanqing.
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I don't see a merger between a very large American company and a very large Chinese company would be allowed (also, the issue with China being what it is today, probably not the best for the company, either).
I don't buy from Lenovo for different reasons (the Chinese government is my main concern there) but them merging would definitely make me want to not buy from them in the future. At least right now HP as a company could potentially turn around their public image if they stopped being so anti-competitive
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Well it would not be so much of a merge as it would be a brand purchase, such as what famously occurred with the IBM ThinkPad.
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I hope they don't merge with Lenovo - Lenovo laptops are Ok currently - I stopped buying HP because they were bug infested pieces of crap that overheated due to software glitches that they never released patches for. My last HP laptop had an audio driver issue that kept one core thrashing at 100% the entire time.
Despite numerous attempts to get updates, and support requests that uselessly just suggested updating the drivers, nothing fixed it, and killing the errant driver process was futile - it would just
Re:HP is anti-consumer (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no desire to buy anything from HP; AI isn't going to fix that.
Given their anti-consumer history, AI makes me far, far less likely to buy any of their products (and I wasn't going to buy anything from them to begin with), because they see AI as nothing more than a way to exert more control over their users, in order to extract ever more money from them.
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I thought it was because they suck.
Now the printers... yeah, those things are so anti-consumer, it makes me question how they have consumers.
Re:HP is anti-consumer (Score:4, Informative)
Is anti-consumer the reason people dont buy desktops/laptops/servers from them?
I thought it was because they suck.
How are those not the same thing?
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How are those not the same thing?
One is a subset of the other.
Their printers suck because they do shit like refusing to scan without ink, or refusing to print B&W with no colour ink. They ALSO suck because the piece of shit won't reliably connect to wifi.
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'anti-consumer' is a sub-set of 'suck'.
I suppose it's possible to have a very good attitude/intention towards your customers and still produce [some] products that suck.
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The last good generation was the Laserjet 4000 series.
Bad business strategy (Score:2)
All the big computer companies went hard on being boring as fuck. HP used to do interesting things. Dell was always just some guy selling computers and now how is their brand any different than Dell.
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I really had to double-check the TV ads on at the moment where someone's having problems with their printer, and it ends with "HP - made to be less hated". Less hated than what? Death in a burning tank? Contracting a skin eating disease? Being forced to watch youtube for 10 hours every day?
One thing is clear - their printers definitely aren't made to be less hated than their printers.
How about making cool stuff? (Score:2)
How about adding some value added stuff onto the bare hardware? On the enterprise level, focus on having non-sucking support on all tiers of products, so one doesn't have to wait three hours on hold while Peggy in Lower Elbonia finishes their awesome hydro joint, and reaches over to pick up and hang up on the next call in the ACD queue. Throwing good support across the board would be a competitive advantage. Apple got into first place because their CS used to be jaw-dropping.
After getting support up to p
Re:How about making cool stuff? (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong company. You're talking about Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, not HP Inc. These have been two totally separate corporations since 2015.
So, bigger GPUs? (Score:2)
After reading the article (weird, right?) it seems Lores is promising more GPU power.
OK, sure, in this case I agree with the headline that this is "fairy dust."
HP AI PC = Bloatware Clippy style assistants (Score:4, Interesting)
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And being an AI, will burn through your ink cleaning the print heads even faster, plus automatically reorder more even if you told it not to?
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Preinstalled and require a HP Account, which will be tied to your printer subscription too.
And your credit card https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/... [hp.com] https://mybroadband.co.za/news... [mybroadband.co.za]
I thought ... (Score:2)
They still make computers? (Score:2)
I had honestly kind of forgotten HP was even still, technically, a thing. It's been years, I think, since I've seen anything HP for sale. The last news I recall about was about the DRM-encumbered ink cartridges, so maybe if I find an Office Depot and check the printer section?
But they haven't done much that I could call interesting since they abandoned their R&D and instrumentation divisions and spun them off into Agilent. Then came Carly. And the less said about that, the better.
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I had honestly kind of forgotten HP was even still, technically, a thing. It's been years, I think, since I've seen anything HP for sale.
Considering they consistently rank as the #1 or #2 seller of printers worldwide [statista.com], that's surprising.
The answer is simple (Score:3)
Quit the extreme, aggressive anti-customer behavior
Eliminate upgrades that brick printers
Sell ink and toner at reasonable prices
Remove all software/hardware that limits customer choice
Make good stuff at a fair price
Avoid subscriptions unless they are good for customers
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They would prefer to lose money and market share.
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I can actually accept a printer that costs a bit more and then be able to use whatever ink/toner I like.
H-Who? (Score:2)
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I thought all the HP printers had been recycled by now.
I'd wish HP a slow and painful death (Score:3)
Except for the harm it would cause innocent workers, if I held the button that ended HP, I'd keep pushing it until I was sure the company was dead and could never be revived.
Then again, the number of companies of which I would say the same thing seems to be increasing at a dizzying rate.
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Except for the harm it would cause innocent workers, if I held the button that ended HP, I'd keep pushing it until I was sure the company was dead and could never be revived.
Then again, the number of companies of which I would say the same thing seems to be increasing at a dizzying rate.
I dunno, workers have to admit some responsibility for working for them in the first place.
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Except for the harm it would cause innocent workers
HPe employees should have seen the bow of the ship going underwater for a few years now; if they're not headed to the lifeboats yet, it's almost their fault.
HP still makes PCs? (Score:2)
Do people still buy them?
Carly (Score:3)
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And that was a period when HP still was decent. Now it's all about pushing products in a way that actually makes Dell look like a super-professional company.
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Heh. (Score:2)
I did not know that HP still exists :-) (Score:1)
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Calling this now! (Score:2)
I'm calling this now. "AI Fairy Dust" needs to become an ongoing taunt to all these AI day-dreams people have been throwing around. It's basically an entire category of "never gonna happen" creating swirls and eddies of stupid wafting throughout the tech sector right now. And referring to it as "AI Fairy Dust" is the most appropriate term I've heard for it.
Yeah, sure, cause (Score:2)
Burn in Hell, HP! (Score:2)
I paraphrase the line from "What about Bob?".
I loved HP for their RPN calculators. Later, I was unhappy with their oscilloscopes that had flaky triggers (compared with the excellent Tektronics.) Then I bought two well-used laserjets and was happy for years. So far, so good?
Their business behavior in the last decade* has been unacceptable. Reprehensible. "Burn in Hell, HP!"
* I don't know the exact dates. But at some point, HP went from customer friendly to customer antagonistic.
Peak PC (Score:2)
What do people actually use their pc's for? At this point, no one needs a new pc unless their motherboard or cpu dies. Only expanding businesses or expaniding families might need one if they can't do it on their phone or tablet.
HP chief clueless? (Score:2)
Every exciting AI model is gigabytes in size, does one particular thing (llm, diffusion,...) and even with a bank of neural networking processors, each with 8GB or more of HBM3, the cloud will be faster.