Intel just dropped a fresh batch of Core Ultra laptops stamped with the Copilot Plus badge, joining the Snapdragon X machines that kicked off this whole party last year.
AMD's in on it too, because of course they are.
Every Best Buy endcap from here to Boise now screams about AI PCs, and yet the average shopper still can't tell you what the dang thing actually does.
Here's the pitch, as best anyone can decode it: these laptops have a Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, a dedicated chip that handles AI tasks on-device instead of shipping your data to a server farm in Oregon.
In practice, it mostly means your webcam background blur runs a little smoother and Windows can transcribe your meetings without phoning home.
The marquee feature was supposed to be Recall, which snapshots everything you do on your PC so you can search it later like a stalker with a search bar.
Privacy researchers had a collective aneurysm, Microsoft hit pause, then relaunched it behind Windows Hello and encryption.
It's now opt-in, which is corporate speak for "please forget we ever shipped this the first time." What do you actually get for the premium?
Battery life on the Snapdragon models is genuinely excellent, no shade there.
Some photo and video editing apps run faster.
Windows Studio Effects does a decent job of making you look slightly less like a hostage on Zoom.
That's the real list, and it's shorter than the marketing deck wants you to believe.
The dirty secret is that most of the AI features you'd actually use run fine in the cloud.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and every other chatbot don't care about your NPU.
They're happy to do the work on a server and bill somebody else for the electricity.
Your shiny new "AI PC" is often just a regular laptop with a fancy sticker and a TOPS number that sounds like a crypto token.
Retailers keep discounting these machines within months of launch, which tells you everything about how badly people wanted them at full price.
A laptop is a laptop until proven otherwise, and "it has an NPU" ranks somewhere between "it has a USB-C port" and "it has a backlit keyboard" on the list of things that make normal humans open their wallets.
Faster chips and better battery life are always welcome, and on-device AI will probably matter more in a couple of years once developers figure out what to do with it.
Right now, though, you're paying an early adopter tax for features that are either half-baked, buried in settings, or quietly disabled by your IT department.
If you need a new laptop and a Copilot Plus model happens to be on sale, sure, grab it.
Just don't buy one because the box promised you a personal AI assistant.
Final Thoughts
What you're getting is a decent computer and a marketing department's fever dream, and only one of those will still be relevant in 2027.