Microsoft and every laptop maker on Earth have spent the past year screaming about "Copilot Plus PCs," a marketing label that basically means the machine has a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) inside.
The pitch is simple: artificial intelligence runs on your device instead of the cloud, so it's faster, more private, and somehow worth replacing the laptop you bought eighteen months ago.
The NPU is the star of this show, and it is also the most over-hyped chip since 3D TVs.
These units are measured in TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, and the current Copilot Plus badge requires a minimum of 40.
That number sounds enormous until you learn it mostly handles background tasks like blurring your webcam and live-captioning videos, jobs your CPU was already stumbling through without complaint.
Windows Studio Effects makes your video calls look slightly less like a hostage tape.
Live Captions translates audio in real time.
And then there's Recall, the feature that quietly screenshots everything you do so you can search your own digital life later, which privacy researchers described as a burglary kit for anyone who borrows your couch.
The good news is that Copilot Plus laptops are genuinely decent computers.
Battery life has improved, the chips from Qualcomm, Intel, and AMD are competent, and the prices have crept down from "are you kidding" to "merely painful." If you were already shopping for a new machine, buying one with an NPU is a reasonable hedge against the future.
The bad news is that the future keeps getting delayed.
Several flagship AI features shipped late, some arrived broken, and a few got pulled for security reasons.
Meanwhile, the same AI tasks often work just fine on older hardware or in the cloud, which raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly did you pay extra for?
Walk into any big-box store and you'll see Copilot Plus stickers slapped on machines like they're nutritional labels.
Salespeople will tell you it's "AI-powered," which is the modern equivalent of saying "digital" in 2005.
It means almost nothing and costs you real money.
If your current laptop still opens Chrome without wheezing, you can skip this generation and lose absolutely nothing.
If you need a new machine anyway, buy the one with the best screen, keyboard, and battery, and treat the NPU as a free bonus rather than the reason you swiped your card.
The AI PC era is real, but it's arriving at dial-up speed while being sold at fiber prices.
Early adopters are basically unpaid beta testers with nicer receipts.
Wait a year, and the same features will be cheaper, more polished, and running on hardware that doesn't need a marketing department to justify its existence.
Final Thoughts
Our take: the technology is promising, the timing is premature, and the stickers are doing way more work than the silicon.