Microsoft and a parade of laptop makers just flooded the market with "Copilot Plus" machines, and the pitch is simple: your next computer has a neural processing unit baked in so it can run AI tricks locally instead of shipping every thought to the cloud.
Also sounds like the exact reason your three-year-old laptop suddenly feels like a potato.
The headline feature is Recall, which takes screenshots of basically everything you do and lets you search it later.
Privacy advocates screamed, Microsoft delayed it, then shipped it in a slightly less terrifying form.
Nothing says "trust us" like a feature that photographs your screen all day and pinky-promises not to tell anyone.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips run x86 apps through emulation, and for the most part it works, until it doesn't.
Your favorite obscure video editor or that one accounting plugin from 2014 may throw a tantrum.
Meanwhile the NPU is sitting there, glowing, waiting for a killer app that hasn't really arrived yet.
These laptops start around $999 and climb fast, which is a lot of scratch for features you might use twice.
Live Captions are genuinely nice, and Cocreator in Paint is a fun party trick.
But "AI-powered" is doing a lot of heavy lifting on the spec sheet right now.
If you're due for an upgrade anyway and live in Office and a browser, sure, the battery gains alone are tempting.
The second and third waves of these chips are coming, and they'll be cheaper and less weird.
The Verdict Buying an AI PC today is like buying the first iPhone in 2007: brave, pricey, and guaranteed to be outclassed by next Tuesday.
Final Thoughts
Wait a year, let the apps and prices sort themselves out, and you'll get a smarter machine for less.