Yes, and they intentionally want those lines to be as blurry as possible.

I think still too many people missed the turning point when Microsoft suddenly stopped releasing products/software that were superior in basically all areas to their previous versions. I think that turning point was Windows 8 already, for many who consider Windows 8 a single-time mistake like ME or Vista it was Windows 10, for others it took until Windows 11 until they noticed the decline of Windows as a whole.

And it’s not just MS, but a lot of consumer tech is growing anti-consumer and gets enshittified to the point of where you really have to think hard whether or not you even want the new stuff they’re spewing out. My consumer habits have certainly changed to be much more rigorous than, say, 10-20 years ago. I read a lot more reviews these days and from many more different sources bevore I even think of buying something new.

“AI PCs” will increase your dependency on MS’ online services (which is probably the main thing that MS wants), decrease your privacy even more (also what MS wants - that’s a lot of data for sale), consume even more energy (on a planet with limited resources), sometimes increase your productivity (which is probably the most advantage you’re ever getting out of it) and other times royally screw you over (due to faulty and insecure AI behavior). Furthermore, LLMs are non-deterministic, meaning that the output (or what they’re doing) changes slightly every time you repeat even the same request. It’s just not a great idea to use that for anything where you need to TRUST its output.

I don’t think it will be a particularly good deal. And nothing MS or these other companies that are in the AI business say can ever be taken at face value or as truthful information. They’ve bullshitted their customers way too much already, way more than is usual for advertisements. If this was still the '90s or before 2010 or so - maybe they’d have a point. But this is 2026. Unless proven otherwise, we should assume bullshit by default.

I think we’re currently in a post-factual hype-only era where they are trying to sell you things that won’t ever exist in the way they describe them, but they’ll claim it will always happen “in the near future”. CEO brains probably extrapolate “Generative AI somewhat works now for some use cases so it will surely work well for all use cases within a couple of years”, so they might believe the stories they tell all day themselves, but it might just as well never happen. And even if it DID happen, you’d still suffer many drawbacks like insane vendor dependencies/lock-ins, zero privacy whatsoever, sometimes faulty and randomly changing AI behavior, and probably impossible-to-fix security holes (prompt injection and so on - LLMs have no clear boundary between data and instructions and it’s not that hard to get them to reveal secret data or do things they shouldn’t be doing in the first place. If your AI agent interprets a malicious instruction as valid, and it can act on your behalf on your system, you have a major problem).

Linux Mint

Just for reference, this is what the Google Play services app transmits roughly every 20 minutes to Google if it has network access:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

And that is when you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount this app is always gathering from every Android user using the Google Play services app, no matter what you selected. Other Google apps (like the Play store app) could then contain additional telemetry on top, this is just the common base of all Google proprietary apps. Or the minimum amount of privacy violations you get when using proprietary Google apps on your phone, no matter what.

If you use GrapheneOS, I’d recommend not installing/using ANY Google apps at all (not even Play store or Play services). To get apps, you should use (roughly in this order of priority): 1.) GrapheneOS’s app store for the built-in apps 2.) Accrescent app store (has several good open source apps, is intended to be more secure than F-Droid) 3.) Obtainium (for getting open source apps directly from their source repos) or if you really can’t get into Obtainium, use F-Droid instead 4.) Aurora Store (for getting apps from the Google Play store without sending too much data to Google. Only do this if there is no open source app available for doing the same thing).

To fully mitigate the removal of the Play services app, you also should probably install/configure a UnifiedPush client like ntfy to get battery efficient push notifications and ideally use apps which also make use of that, e.g. the Molly fork instead of Signal. It’s quite easy to do, just something to be aware of. Then you’re also independent from Google’s push notification infrastructure (which is called “Firebase Cloud Messaging” (FCM)). But you need a UnifiedPush server to go along with it, either self-hosted or use a public one. There are some privacy friendly ones public ones out there. If you don’t use Google’s FCM and also no alternative like UnifiedPush, then app notifications will most of the time still work but will put an additional strain on your battery.

Some time ago I would have recommended Mullvad and Proton, but after Proton’s CEO publicly mentioned Trump favorably in some way I’d say just use Mullvad.