Microsoft and its partners have spent the past year rolling out "Copilot Plus" laptops, a new class of Windows machines with dedicated AI chips and a feature called Recall that takes periodic snapshots of your screen.
The pitch is simple: your computer becomes a helpful assistant that remembers what you saw, finds what you forgot, and answers questions about your own digital life.
Recall was supposed to launch last summer.
Security researchers found that the snapshot database, which stores images of everything on your screen, wasn't encrypted by default and could be accessed by malware.
Microsoft delayed it, added encryption and Windows Hello requirements, and shipped it anyway.
It's now opt-in on new Copilot Plus devices, which means most buyers will never turn it on.
That tells you something about how badly people want this.
Meanwhile, the actual AI features that did ship are underwhelming.
Live Captions translates audio in real time, which is genuinely useful.
Cocreator generates images in Paint, which is a toy.
Windows Studio Effects blurs your background.
None of this justifies the premium you're paying for a laptop with a neural processing unit, or NPU, that most software still ignores.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips finally deliver the battery life Windows users have envied from MacBooks for years, and the new Intel and AMD chips are catching up.
But "fine hardware with a confused software story" describes every Windows laptop of the past decade.
Copilot Plus machines start around $1,000 and climb fast, and the AI features are being used to justify that number.
Here's the part that should bother you more than benchmarks.
Recall is a surveillance tool you install on yourself.
It's a searchable, indexed record of your banking statements, your medical portals, your private messages, and whatever else crosses your screen.
But local doesn't mean safe, and encrypted doesn't mean nobody will ever find a way in.
We spent a decade telling people to cover their webcams, and now we're being sold a machine that screenshots everything on purpose.
The broader pattern is that tech companies have run out of genuinely new things to sell us, so they've started selling us our own data back with a friendly interface.
Now your laptop wants to remember what you typed, read, and looked at.
Each step gets normalized because the last one did.
None of this means Copilot Plus laptops are bad computers.
If you need a new Windows machine and the battery life matters to you, they're a reasonable buy.
The AI is mostly marketing, and the one feature that's actually novel is the one you should probably leave switched off.
The uncomfortable truth is that we keep accepting convenience as payment for privacy, and the bill never stops coming.
Final Thoughts
A laptop that watches you work is not a feature.