When Microsoft unveiled Copilot Plus PCs in 2024, the pitch was irresistible: laptops with neural processing units built for on-device AI, exclusive features you couldn't get anywhere else.
The tagline practically begged you to upgrade.
Eighteen months later, the fine print is doing more talking than the silicon.
Start with Recall, the flagship feature that was supposed to define the category.
It screenshots your activity every few seconds so you can search your digital past.
Security researchers found the original implementation stored data in ways that made it trivially accessible to malware.
Microsoft delayed it, rebuilt it with encryption and Windows Hello gating, and finally shipped it — only for users to discover it still doesn't work on many Copilot Plus machines, including some AMD and Intel models that were sold with the branding front and center.
A feature that was the entire reason to buy the hardware now runs on a fraction of it.
Features marketed as Copilot Plus-only keep trickling down to regular PCs, or getting killed outright.
Microsoft's own support pages have quietly noted that some AI capabilities require specific NPU thresholds, while others work fine on older chips.
If the AI runs on hardware you already own, what exactly did you pay the premium for?
Independent testing has shown that many Copilot Plus tasks are slower on-device than simply querying the cloud, and that battery gains from NPU offloading are marginal in real-world use.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite laptops impressed on efficiency but stumbled on app compatibility, a rerun of the Windows on ARM growing pains from a decade ago.
Intel's Lunar Lake and AMD's Strix Point arrived later, fragmenting the "Copilot Plus" label into three different chip architectures with wildly different capabilities under one sticker.
Meanwhile, Microsoft keeps signaling that the real future is cloud-side.
Copilot's most impressive tricks — the ones people actually use — run in data centers, not on your lap.
That's fine, but it makes the NPU arms race look less like a revolution and more like a marketing department's answer to a problem nobody had.
Modern Windows laptops are genuinely excellent, with better battery life and thermals than anything from five years ago.
But "Copilot Plus" has become a sticker you pay extra for, not a capability you feel.
The features that were supposed to justify the badge are delayed, gated, fragmented, or quietly available on machines without the badge at all.
The pattern is familiar: Microsoft announces a category-defining feature, ships it half-finished, walks it back, and lets the branding outlive the substance.
Copilot Plus PCs may eventually earn their name.
Right now, buyers are paying a premium for a promise that Microsoft keeps rewriting after the sale.
Our take: don't buy a laptop because of the Copilot Plus badge.
Buy it for the screen, the keyboard, the battery, and the price.
Final Thoughts
If the AI features matter to you, wait until they actually work on the specific machine you're considering — and check whether they run on non-Copilot hardware too.