Walk into any Best Buy this weekend and you'll be hit with a wall of shiny laptops screaming about artificial intelligence.
The "Copilot Plus PC" badge is plastered on machines from every major brand, promising a smarter, faster, more magical computing experience.
But here's the million-dollar question nobody at the demo table wants to answer directly: do you actually need one?
A Copilot Plus PC is basically a Windows laptop with a special chip called an NPU — a Neural Processing Unit — that's built to handle AI tasks right on the device instead of shipping your data off to some distant server.
Microsoft set the bar at 40 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, for a machine to earn that badge.
So what does that fancy chip actually DO for you right now?
The headline feature, Recall, which snapshots your screen so you can search your entire digital history, got delayed after security researchers screamed bloody murder.
Live Captions can translate audio in real time, and Cocreator can turn your rough sketches into images inside Paint.
Meanwhile, the prices tell their own story.
These machines often run $100 to $300 more than nearly identical laptops without the AI badge.
That's real money for features you might open twice and forget about.
Battery life has been a genuine bright spot, though — the new chips from Qualcomm, Intel, and AMD sip power instead of chugging it.
There's also a nasty little gotcha lurking in the fine print.
Some of the most hyped AI features have rolled out slowly, and a chunk of them still aren't available on every model.
Buy the wrong Copilot Plus PC and you're essentially paying a premium for a sticker.
Always check which features actually work on the specific machine in your cart.
If your current laptop handles your daily grind of email, streaming, and spreadsheets without wheezing, you're fine.
The software simply hasn't caught up to the hardware yet, and that gap usually closes with better deals and more polished tools.
That said, if you're already in the market for a new laptop because your old one is on life support, a Copilot Plus machine isn't a bad pick.
You get modern efficiency, decent performance, and a chip that's future-proofed for when the AI features finally mature.
Just don't let a blue badge bully you into spending more than you planned.
Our take: the AI PC era is real, but it's still in its awkward toddler phase.
Buy one because you need a great laptop, not because a salesperson whispered "artificial intelligence" in your ear.
Final Thoughts
Wait a year and these features will likely feel indispensable — or quietly vanish like so many tech gimmicks before them.