Microsoft and every laptop maker on the planet have spent the last year screaming about "Copilot Plus PCs," a category defined by a special neural processing unit (NPU) that's supposed to usher in the age of on-device AI.
The pitch: your laptop becomes a genius sidekick that summarizes meetings, generates images, and remembers everything you've ever looked at.
The reality, as usual, is a little more "meh." The NPU is the headline spec here, a dedicated chip that handles AI tasks locally instead of shipping your data to the cloud.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite kicked things off, and now Intel's Lunar Lake and AMD's Ryzen AI chips are piling in.
The promise is faster, more private, battery-friendly AI.
The catch is that almost nothing you actually want to do runs on it yet.
Take Recall, the flagship feature that screenshots everything on your screen so you can search it later.
It was so obviously a privacy nightmare that Microsoft yanked it, delayed it, and re-launched it as an opt-in feature buried in settings.
Nothing says "revolutionary" like a feature that arrives six months late and requires a permission slip to use.
Then there's the Copilot key, which laptop makers dutifully bolted onto keyboards like a participation trophy.
Press it and you get... essentially a chatbot in a browser window.
The key is a shortcut to a web app, which is a bit like installing a "Turbo" button that just opens Google.
Meanwhile, actual on-device tasks like live translation and image generation work, but they're novelties you'll try once and forget.
The battery life angle is the one genuine win.
These chips sip power, and a Snapdragon-based laptop can genuinely run for 15-plus hours.
But you could've gotten most of that from a good MacBook or a decent ultrabook two years ago, and you wouldn't have paid the "AI premium" tacked onto these machines.
Here's the part the marketing deck skips: for most people, cloud AI is fine.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini run in a browser tab and do more than any NPU feature shipping today.
The whole point of local AI is privacy and offline capability, which matters for a niche slice of users, not the average person buying a laptop for Zoom calls and spreadsheets.
If you need a new laptop right now and the price is right, sure, the hardware is solid and efficient.
You're paying for a promise that's still under construction, and by the time the killer app arrives, you'll probably be due for another upgrade anyway.
The Copilot Plus branding is a solution in search of a problem, and the problem is that nobody asked for a dedicated AI button.
Give it another year, maybe two, and this stuff might actually be worth the sticker price.
Final Thoughts
Until then, you're basically beta-testing Microsoft's roadmap with your own wallet.