Walk into any Best Buy in America and you'll be greeted by a wall of laptops with a shiny sticker that says "Copilot Plus." It's the tech equivalent of a restaurant slapping "artisanal" on the menu and hoping you don't ask follow-up questions.
The pitch, as far as anyone can tell, is that these machines have a special chip called an NPU that does AI stuff locally instead of in the cloud.
And it is, because you're paying a few hundred bucks extra for a feature set that currently amounts to a button that opens a chatbot you could already access for free in a browser tab.
Remember when Microsoft promised Recall, the feature that would screenshot literally everything you do and let you search it later?
That got delayed, then relaunched with security holes the size of a garage door.
Nothing says "premium AI experience" like a feature that cybersecurity researchers describe using words normally reserved for horror movies.
The NPU on these chips is measured in TOPS, which stands for trillions of operations per second.
Companies love throwing that number around because it sounds impressive.
What they don't mention is that most of the "AI features" you'll actually use are still running in the cloud, because local models on a laptop are about as capable as a golden retriever doing your taxes.
The promised "AI Explorer" that would organize your entire digital life is basically vaporware with a marketing budget.
Meanwhile, Apple is out here calling its stuff "Apple Intelligence" and somehow being even vaguer about what it does.
These laptops generally come with decent RAM, solid batteries, and the new Snapdragon or Intel chips that run cooler than the space heaters we called laptops in 2019.
But don't let a sticker convince you that you're buying the future.
What you're really buying is a beta test.
You're the guinea pig for Microsoft's grand vision of an AI-powered Windows, except the AI is half-baked and the vision changes every Patch Tuesday.
The software is doing that thing where it shows up to the group project with a bag of chips and no slides.
If your current laptop still turns on and doesn't sound like a jet engine during a Zoom call, wait.
The NPU arms race is just getting started, and next year's models will make this batch look like early adopters paying full price to be disappointed.
Let the influencers with free review units sort out which ones are actually good, then buy the one that's on sale at Costco.
Final Thoughts
Besides, by the time the truly useful AI features arrive, today's Copilot Plus laptop will be sitting in a drawer next to your old Meta Quest and that smart toaster you never plugged in.