There is recourse offered:

From Dell's statement:
>HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store

If customer cares, the solution is offered:

From Dell's statement:
>HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store

There's about a million of similar "please license our software" outlets out there, with similar pricing demands.

Rejecting overwhelming majority of such licensing demands is why laptops don't have an extra zero at the end of their price tag.

This is standard issue shit tier clickbait that answers the question begged in the topic and the beginning of the article at the very end of the article:

Quoting from the last part of the article:

While HP’s and Dell’s reps didn’t explain the companies’ motives, it’s possible that the OEMs are looking to minimize costs, since OEMs may pay some or all of the licensing fees associated with HEVC hardware decoding and encoding support, as well as some or all of the royalties per the number of devices that they sell with HEVC hardware decoding and encoding support [PDF]. Chipmakers may take some of this burden off of OEMs, but companies don’t typically publicly disclose these terms.

The OEMs disabling codec hardware also comes as associated costs for the international video compression standard are set to increase in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States. To put that into perspective, in Q3 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops, per Gartner.

Last year, NAS company Synology announced that it was ending support for HEVC, as well as H.264/AVC and VCI, transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread on end devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs.”

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So in summary, the license for the codec is getting more and more expensive, and so support is simply axed to avoid paying the license.

This after all the butthurt when chart topper on spotify was an AI country music artist?

"Why do people prefer AI".
"No one wants AI".

Choose one.

P.S. Covers have never been a thing. Ever. No one wants them.

Unlike phones, which pretty much every child has at this point.

Most people are very impressed with AI. That's why adoption for performing so many things is as rapid as it is.

Operating systems is one of the few places where direct AI integration makes little sense. The sole job of operating system is the function as something that connects hardware you have to software you are running. It needs to be maximally predictable by both, so things you actually need running, software that runs on top of the operating system is as stable and as fast as possible.

Agentic OS is the opposite of that. It's a permanent moving target. So it may be better at whatever features you want to push as the OS maker, but it's strictly worse as an OS because it's inherently less stable.

This was actually very visible in one of the removed MS demos, where they ask agentic part of OS to resize text, and instead get instructions on how to resize the UI.

Now imagine the same thing, but with OS doing it for you. Suddenly a lot of things become unusable because UI is either massive or tiny instead of just resizing text.

Now imagine the same but with addressing hardware. You'll be lucky if the whole thing just crashes and restores itself on reboot.

This is daft. Any criminal advertising their criminality on their PUBLIC PROFILE is asking for it.

"Vulnerability" here is that it could be publicly accessed.

So yeah. This is a feature, not a "vulnerability".

"I'm so uncomfortable with myself".

Elites posturing about their victimhood taken to yet another level.

They're not trying to sell it. They're selling it.

They already did engineering, and probably most of the production run, and they are putting it on sale.

No one is shitting where "we" eat because there's no "we" in this case.

We're in different rooms. I get my configuration, you get yours, and whoever wants AI browsing gets his or hers. What they do in their room is their business.

Get out of other people's homes and stop telling them what browser configuration they should be using there. You make google and microsoft looks positively nice in comparison.

No one is forcing you to use AI browsing. It's an opt in option. Don't opt in. You have a choice. Use it.

This desire to tell people "fuck you, I got mine" is incredibly damaging.

You and me are fine with current browsing. A lot of people would like AI assist. Let them have it. Freedom to choose what you want is good.

This isn't fair to Chinese government. Their entire societal model is built on low consumption high production mass transfers from people to industry. This has been reinforced for decades, and they already saw with Evergrande what happens if government tries even the tiniest deflation of the bubble this produced.

So they're naturally excessively cautious about changing flows of wealth within the system as to avoid crashing it entirely.