Memorial Day tech deals are here, and I'm not sure what any of this has to do with robotics

So let's talk about what's actually happening with these Memorial Day deals, because I think it's more interesting than the press releases suggest.

The desktops going on sale right now are, for the most part, perfectly adequate machines for running local AI models if you're into that sort of thing. Some of them have GPUs that can handle Stable Diffusion or local LLMs without catching fire. That's genuinely new, that's genuinely useful, and the prices have come down enough that a mid-range desktop can do things that would have required a small server farm five years ago. Progress! Real progress!

The laptops are a different story. Most of the deals I'm seeing are on machines with integrated graphics and enough RAM to run Chrome without crying, which is fine, that's what most people need, but let's not pretend these are AI workstations. They're web browsers with keyboards attached. And again, that's fine! Most people don't need to run Llama locally! But the marketing copy keeps talking about "AI-ready" this and "neural processing" that, and I'm not sure the kids writing these product descriptions actually know what any of those words mean.

Here's where I'm going to get a little grumpy, and regular readers know this is where I live, so bear with me.

The robotics and AI industry has a hardware problem that these consumer deals sort of, in a sideways way, illuminate. The compute you need to do interesting things with robots, real robots, not chatbots, actual physical machines that move through space, is still expensive and specialized. You're not running a humanoid's perception stack on a $600 laptop from Best Buy. You're not training manipulation models on a desktop you bought because it was 30% off.

And yet! And yet. The gap is closing faster than I expected. I've talked to researchers running surprisingly capable systems on hardware that would have been consumer-grade three years ago. The M-series Macs, which are included in some of these deals, can do neural network inference at speeds that would have seemed like science fiction when I started this beat. The RTX 4060 cards showing up in some of these discounted desktops are legitimate tools for development work, not just gaming.

So what's my point? I'm not sure I have one, exactly, which is maybe the most honest thing I can say.

If you need a computer, buy a computer. The deals are real. The savings are real. You'll probably be happy with whatever you get, because the baseline quality of consumer hardware has gotten genuinely good, even the cheap stuff is fine now, which is sort of miraculous if you remember what cheap computers were like in 2005.

But if you're buying a computer because you want to "get into AI" or "experiment with robotics," I'd encourage you to think a little harder about what that actually means. Do you want to run inference on pre-trained models? A decent laptop with 16GB of RAM will get you pretty far. Do you want to train your own models? You probably need more GPU than these deals are offering, or you need to learn to use cloud compute, which is a different skill entirely. Do you want to build actual robots? The computer is the least of your problems, trust me, the mechanical engineering will humble you faster than any software ever could.

I've been doing this long enough to know that the best tool is the one you actually use. The best computer is the one that fits your budget and does what you need. The Memorial Day deals are fine. Go buy something if you need something.

But don't let the marketing convince you that a new laptop is going to make you an AI expert. That's not how any of this works. It's never been how any of this works. The tools matter less than the time you put into learning them, and that's been true since I was debugging BASIC on a Commodore 64, which, yes, I'm old enough to have done, thanks for noticing.

Anyway. If you want to argue about any of this, my email's on the about page. I'll be here, using my perfectly adequate three-year-old laptop, which works fine and will continue to work fine until it doesn't, at which point I'll probably wait for a holiday sale like everyone else.

The cycle continues. It always does.

Aisha Patel · 3 hours ago · 6 min