Walk into any Best Buy in America this weekend and you'll be greeted by a wall of laptops stamped with a shiny new badge: Copilot Plus PC.
The stickers promise artificial intelligence built right into the machine.
The salesperson will nod enthusiastically.
The price tag will be several hundred dollars higher than the model sitting next to it without the badge.
Most buyers walking out with these machines cannot name a single thing the AI does that their old laptop couldn't already handle through a browser tab.
There's background blur on video calls, which Zoom figured out years ago.
There's a setting that generates an image of a cartoon cat, assuming you needed one.
And there's Recall, the flagship feature that snapshots everything on your screen so you can search your digital past, which arrived wrapped in so many privacy caveats that Microsoft buried it for months before letting it ship.
That's the grand pitch: a $1,200 machine that remembers what you were doing.
Meanwhile, the average American is trying to figure out why their grocery bill went up again and whether they can afford to replace the laptop that's already working fine.
This is the pattern of modern consumer tech.
Companies need a reason for you to upgrade, so they invent a category, slap a label on it, and let the marketing do the heavy lifting.
The hardware underneath is genuinely faster.
But the same was true five years ago, and nobody needed a chatbot key to sell it.
What makes this moment feel different is the honesty gap.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all racing to convince you that AI is the reason to spend money right now, even as their own engineers quietly admit the useful stuff is years away.
In the meantime, you're the beta tester, paying full price for unfinished software that phones home constantly.
Every Recall snapshot, every cloud-synced prompt, every "helpful" assistant that reads your screen is another stream of personal data flowing into corporate servers.
We've spent two decades learning that convenience and surveillance arrive in the same box.
This is that lesson with a new coat of paint.
Some are genuinely excellent laptops that happen to have AI features bolted on.
But buying one because of the badge is like buying a truck because it has a wireless charger.
The charger isn't the point, and neither is the chatbot.
If you need a new computer, buy a good one.
The AI will catch up eventually, and when it does, it'll run on whatever you already own.
Our take: the AI PC is a solution in search of a problem, sold to people who already have enough problems.
Final Thoughts
Treat the badge as decoration, not a reason to open your wallet.