Microsoft's Copilot Plus label has been slapped onto a wave of new laptops this year, promising on-device AI, marathon battery life, and a dedicated neural processing unit that supposedly does the heavy lifting without phoning home to a server.
Best Buy endcaps, Costco bundles, back-to-school displays — the pitch is everywhere.
The question is whether any of it changes your actual day.
The headline feature is Recall, which takes periodic snapshots of your screen so you can search everything you've ever looked at.
Microsoft delayed it after security researchers demonstrated how easily the data could be harvested.
It's now opt-in and encrypted, but the rollout has been so cautious that many buyers don't even know it shipped.
That's the pattern here: big promises, hushed delivery.
Then there's the Copilot key, a dedicated button that summons Microsoft's assistant.
In practice, it opens a chat window that often works just as well in a browser tab.
Live Captions translate audio in real time, which is genuinely useful.
But nothing here is the kind of feature you'd rearrange your budget for.
What's actually happening is subtler and more consequential.
The AI PC push is accelerating the death of the $500 laptop.
Manufacturers have largely stopped refreshing budget lines, steering shoppers toward $900-and-up machines with NPUs they may never use.
Meanwhile, the average American household is already stretched thin, and a computer that lasts five years is a necessity, not a luxury.
Chips built for AI workloads demand more power and more rare materials, and the upgrade cycle this marketing depends on means perfectly functional machines getting retired early.
We're being sold intelligence as a reason to throw things away.
For most people, the honest advice hasn't changed: buy the laptop that fits your budget and your actual tasks.
If a Copilot Plus machine happens to be on sale and the specs line up, fine.
But don't let a sticker convince you your current computer is obsolete.
The real story isn't that AI PCs are bad.
It's that we've stopped asking what a device does for us and started asking what it says about us.
Final Thoughts
That's a habit the tech industry is counting on, and it's one worth breaking.