Microsoft spent the past year telling Americans that their next laptop needs a dedicated AI chip, a feature called Copilot Plus.
The pitch sounded futuristic: instant transcription, live translation, and a built-in assistant that could search your files, summarize your meetings, and edit your photos without sending anything to the cloud.
Then the laptops actually arrived, and the reception was less than rapturous.
Best Buy shelves are stacked with shiny machines from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung carrying the badge, often priced $100 to $200 above their non-AI twins.
The question is whether anyone in the checkout line can explain what that premium buys them.
The answer, for most shoppers, is: not much yet.
The headline feature, Recall, was supposed to snap screenshots of everything you do and let you search them later.
Security researchers found it captured passwords and financial data, and Microsoft pulled it from the launch.
It returned months later, still switched off by default, buried in settings like a family secret.
Live translation and auto-generated captions work, and they work well for people who join a lot of video calls.
Photo editing tools like Cocreator are genuinely fun for a weekend.
But none of it is essential, and most of it overlaps with free apps people already have on their phones.
Google and Apple are racing to bolt similar features onto their own devices, which means the "exclusive" window is closing fast.
The AI features run on a neural processing unit that only matters when software uses it.
Developers are slow to rewrite code for a chip that lives in a fraction of the laptops people own, so the fancy hardware often sits idle, sipping power and adding cost.
Consumers are effectively paying a toll for a bridge that hasn't been built.
The marketing has gotten ahead of the reality, and shoppers are noticing.
Reddit threads and YouTube reviews keep hitting the same note: buy the machine if it's a good laptop on its own merits, screen, keyboard, battery, price, and treat the AI badge as a bonus that may or may not mature.
That's sensible advice, but it's also an indictment.
A feature that requires this much hedging isn't a feature yet.
This is the pattern of American tech consumption in 2025: buy the future now, at a markup, and hope the future shows up before the warranty expires.
Laptops are supposed to be tools, not betas.
Final Thoughts
If Microsoft wants people to care about Copilot Plus, it needs to ship something a person can point to and say, "That changed how I work." Until then, the smartest purchase is the boring one without the badge.