Microsoft and every laptop maker on the planet have spent the past year screaming about "Copilot Plus PCs," a label slapped on machines with a special neural processing unit that's supposed to unlock a glorious future of on-device AI.
The pitch sounds incredible until you actually ask what it does.
The answer, delivered with the confidence of a guy who just discovered ChatGPT last Tuesday, is usually a vague hand-wave toward "AI experiences." Here's the deal.
A Copilot Plus PC needs a chip with an NPU capable of at least 45 trillion operations per second, plus 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
Buy one and you get access to features like Live Captions, which translates audio in real time, and Cocreator, which turns your terrible stick-figure doodles into slightly less terrible AI art.
There's also Recall, the feature that screenshots literally everything you do so you can search your own digital life later, which privacy researchers treated like a housewarming gift from a burglar.
The laptop aisle has fully committed to this bit.
Walk into any Best Buy and you'll find rows of shiny machines with a little sticker promising AI, priced a hundred bucks above the same hardware from last year.
Meanwhile, the most popular AI features people actually use are still just a browser tab pointing at a chatbot.
Your $1,200 ultrabook is running the same apps it ran in 2019, just with a smug NPU sitting there, unemployed, waiting for software that may or may not show up.
To be fair, the hardware itself is genuinely good.
These chips are efficient, the batteries last longer, and if you were buying a laptop anyway, a Copilot Plus machine isn't a bad choice.
But that's the whole con: you're not buying AI, you're buying a normal laptop with a marketing department that got a budget increase.
The uncomfortable truth is that nobody has nailed the killer app yet.
Microsoft keeps shipping AI features that feel like demos, brands them like revolutions, and then quietly deprecates them when nobody bites.
It's the same playbook as 3D TVs, curved phones, and the metaverse, except this time the sticker is on literally every laptop on the shelf, so you can't even opt out.
If you need a new computer right now, buy one, and don't stress about whether it's "AI ready." If your current laptop works fine, a Copilot Plus PC is not the upgrade that will change your life.
It's the upgrade that will change your sticker collection.
My take: the AI PC era is real, but we're in the awkward phase where companies sell the future and ship the beta.
Wait a year, let the software catch up, and let some other sucker fund the experiment.
Final Thoughts
Your wallet will thank you, and your NPU won't even notice it's unemployed.