Yep. As if denial would make their predicament any less bad.

The always have been. Unfortunately, most of their customers are too. It just has gotten more concrete with LLMs now.

I get the driver behind this. Also trade-secrets, etc.

But is this really a local model and is no data transferred? There is some fuzzy language in "use an on-device AI model to power some of its features". What bout other features? What about if it "powers" the features, bit the data is still sent home? The whole thing looks like a lie by misdirection to me.

Difficult to say. I have no idea how much power an "NPU" draws.

Except that nobody who buys one of their machines is going to think, "I could pay an extra $100 and my machine would work better." They're going to think, "This piece of s**t can't even do things that my cell phone from eight years ago can do. Why did I buy this, and why should I ever buy anything from this manufacturer in the future?"

This level of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior is a sure way to permanently lose customers.

...or decoding...

You mean like... anyone who wants to watch Netflix or YouTube or any other streaming service's high-res content?

And I read RPG as rocket propelled grenades first.

It means fewer cats died.

hard to dispute

I see that you haven't worked with/against corporate purchasing decision.

If a corporation buys 5 it doesn't matter, but when they purchase 5000 it matters.

A lot less.

works for spammers & scammers

Wow, you trust the Trump administrations values so much you want to pass those along to kids?

That's certainly a choice.

Even a broken horse shits correctly twice a month. (Or something like that.)

I don't think a better Constitutional can protect a democracy against conflicts like the culture wars. Cultish demagogues will always exist.