The problem is that there are virtually no off-the-shelf local AI applications. So they're trying to sell us expensive hardware with no software that takes advantage of it.

Yes it's a surprising marketing angle. What are they expecting people to run on these machines? Do they expect your average joe to pop into the terminal and boot up ollama?

Anyone technical enough to jump into local AI usage can probably see through the hardware fluff, and will just get whatever laptop has the right amount of VRAM.

They are just hoping to catch the trend chasers out, selling them hardware they won't use, confusing it as a requirement for using ChatGPT in the browser.