Microsoft and its laptop partners have spent the past year shouting about "Copilot+ PCs," a category of computers with dedicated AI chips that promise to change how you use a computer forever.
Retailers are tripping over themselves to slap the label on everything short of a toaster.
Best Buy shelves now feature more AI branding than a crypto conference in 2021.
The pitch sounds incredible until you ask a simple question: what does it do?
There's a Recall feature that takes screenshots of everything you do, which privacy researchers described as a nightmare and which Microsoft delayed, then re-delayed, then launched quietly.
There's "Cocreator" in Paint, because nothing says technological revolution like MS Paint.
Then there's Windows Studio Effects, which blurs your background on video calls.
And Live Captions, which translates audio in real time, assuming you speak one of the select supported languages and don't mind the occasional hallucinated word.
The hardware itself is legitimately fine.
These machines run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips, and the battery life is genuinely impressive — we're talking all-day-plus territory that makes Intel laptops look like they're running on a dying AA battery.
They're thin, they're quiet, they run cool.
If you just want a good ultrabook, you could do a lot worse.
But here's the thing: you can buy the same laptop without the AI branding, and it works basically the same for 95% of what you do.
Spreadsheets don't care about your neural processing unit.
Neither does Chrome, which is where you actually spend your day.
The AI features that do exist feel like demos that escaped the lab.
They fail in ways that are hard to predict.
And crucially, most of them either run fine in the cloud on a regular laptop, or they're things you never asked for in the first place.
Analysts keep insisting this is the future and that we just need to be patient.
But the last time the industry tried to sell consumers on a paradigm shift they didn't ask for, we got 3D TVs, and those are now landfill.
The difference is that AI PCs are actually useful computers — just not for the reason the marketing claims.
If you need a new laptop right now, buy one of these for the battery life and build quality, not the Copilot button that nobody presses.
Let the software catch up to the silicon.
Or don't, and enjoy explaining to your friends why your $1,200 laptop has a dedicated key for a chatbot that keeps getting the weather wrong. **Our take:** The AI PC is a real product wrapped in fake urgency.
The chips are good, the features are half-baked, and the "revolution" is mostly a sticker.
Final Thoughts
Buy the hardware, ignore the hype, and revisit in 2026 when the software has something worth showing off.