Walk into any Best Buy this weekend and you'll be met with a wall of laptops stamped with a little badge: Copilot+.
These machines have a dedicated chip that runs AI right on your device, no cloud required.
Microsoft said this was the biggest change to Windows in decades.
Then a lot of them got home and wondered what, exactly, they'd paid extra for.
The centerpiece feature was supposed to be Recall, a tool that quietly snapshots everything you do on your screen so you can search your own digital life later.
The problem: it's basically a surveillance camera pointed at your most private moments.
Security researchers found the data wasn't locked down well.
Microsoft delayed it, then relaunched it as opt-in.
That's the right call, but it also means the marquee feature nobody can quite trust is the one they built the marketing around.
Live captions that work fine but aren't magic.
These are nice, and some people genuinely use them.
But none of it justifies the price premium slapping onto these machines at a moment when families are already stretched thin.
Here's the part that should bother us more than it does.
We keep letting tech companies sell us a vision of the future and then quietly downgrade it after we've paid.
First it's "revolutionary." Then it's "a foundation for what's coming." Then, a year later, it's just the keyboard you forgot you had.
The gadget industry has gotten very good at charging today for promises it delivers tomorrow, if ever.
Americans are carrying record credit card balances, and a laptop is often one of the biggest non-rent purchases a household makes.
When a company says "this one is future-proof," that's not a small claim.
It's a nudge to spend more than you planned, on the theory that you won't need to upgrade again soon.
If you're buying a laptop right now, treat the Copilot+ badge as a bonus, not a reason.
Buy for the screen, the battery, the keyboard, the price.
Those are the things you'll live with every day.
If the AI features improve over the next two years, great.
If they don't, you still got a good machine.
That's the only way to shop that doesn't leave you feeling played.
There's a bigger worry here, and it's not really about chips.
It's about a culture that has learned to sell anticipation instead of results, and a public that keeps paying for the promise.
We can admire the ambition and still refuse to fund the hype.
The next time a box says "AI inside," ask what it does today, in your actual life, for the money in your actual pocket.
The badge on the lid won't get you through a workday.
Final Thoughts
The machine underneath it will, or it won't, and that's the only question that ever mattered.