For a brief moment, the big PC brands turned away from shoving needless AI into everything and remembered that people use computers to do and build things. Artificial intelligence is for businesses; computers are for the rest of us. At least that was the general idea we can glean from the 2026 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which is held annually in Las Vegas and serves as the spiritual renewal of the technology journalists’ vows.
First among them (the vows) is not to report on vapourware — concept products that will never reach consumer shelves — but it’s a cardinal rule that often gets overwhelmed by the sheer awesome of the wares placed on display. The show floor was dominated by clever components, but what truly stood out was a pivot back to human-centric products, with Dell leading the retreat from AI everything, everywhere, all at once. And most of it is coming to SA.
Dell’s head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, had this to say about the company’s direction: “One thing you’ll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first. So, a bit of a shift from a year ago, where we were all about the AI PC. “We’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device — in fact, everything that we’re announcing has an NPU [neural processing unit] in it — but what we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI.
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In fact, I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.” And then they backtracked on the nomenclature of the flagship laptop line with the return of the XPS branding for the XPS 14 and 16 laptops. This renewed focus, plus the efficiency gains from the new Intel and Qualcomm processors, should see the PC makers close the gap on the MacBook’s success. Unfortunately, the other PC makers didn’t read the room and continued to preach the Microsoft, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm AI PC gospel — still managing to deliver real solutions to problems that face humans.
But, to their credit, Asus and Lenovo corrected the physical experience of their hardware, proving that even enterprise devices don’t have to be boring. Asus, in particular, has raised the bar. The ExpertBook has long been a staple of the mobile workforce — in fact, last year’s model was my favourite laptop for its sheer utility.
But with the new ExpertBook Ultra, the Taiwan-based company has blurred the line between business tool and lifestyle object. A magnesium-aluminium blend body should address the tactile flimsiness of the previous generation, which will matter far more to the daily handling than a slightly faster chatbot. However, if there was a clear winner of CES 2026, it wasn’t a computer manufacturer at all. It was a company that remembered that the original building block of creativity isn’t a microchip.
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