Walk into any Best Buy this weekend and you'll see the same glossy signage: a laptop glowing on a pedestal, a Microsoft Copilot+ badge slapped on the lid, and a promise that this machine is "built for AI." The pitch is everywhere.
Copilot+ PCs were supposed to be the biggest laptop refresh in a decade.
New chips, dedicated neural processing units, and a Microsoft feature set that would live on-device instead of the cloud.
Six months in, the flagship feature, Recall, has been delayed, reworked, and buried behind security warnings after researchers showed it could screenshot your banking session and store it in plain sight.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips run cool and sip battery, and the new Surface Laptop finally feels like a premium machine.
But the "AI" in AI PC is doing almost all the marketing work and very little of the actual work.
Most Copilot features still ping Microsoft's servers, which means your "on-device intelligence" quietly depends on a data center you don't control.
Anyone who's tried running older work software, a niche printer driver, or a favorite indie game on an ARM-based Copilot+ laptop has met the same wall: it just doesn't launch.
Retailers rarely mention this at the register.
These machines run $200 to $400 more than comparable last-gen laptops with nearly identical screens, keyboards, and ports.
You are paying extra for a feature set that is still shipping in pieces, on a timeline Microsoft keeps revising.
The smarter move right now is boring: buy last year's model at a discount, or wait.
The chips will get faster, the software will stabilize, and the prices will fall.
That's how every PC transition has worked, from dual-core to SSDs to Thunderbolt.
Early adopters pay the tax so everyone else gets the discount.
What's genuinely troubling isn't the hardware.
It's the habit the industry is training into us: accept the marketing label, assume the software will arrive later, and pay now anyway.
If that becomes the norm, every gadget on the shelf becomes a promise you can't return.
Final Thoughts
It just isn't here yet, and pretending otherwise is how a $1,200 purchase becomes a $1,200 regret.