Microsoft and its hardware partners have spent the past year telling Americans that their next laptop needs a Copilot Plus PC.
The pitch is seductive: a machine with a dedicated neural processing unit that runs AI features locally, keeps your data private, and anticipates what you need before you ask.
Retail shelves are now crowded with these machines from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, most priced between $900 and $1,600.
Best Buy's laptop aisle has effectively become an AI showroom, whether shoppers asked for one or not.
The problem is what happens after the unboxing.
Recall, the flagship feature that periodically screenshots your activity so you can search your own past, arrived late, then arrived again after security researchers gutted it.
Click to Do, which lets you highlight anything on screen for instant AI analysis, works, but mostly feels like a solution hunting for a problem.
Live Captions translate audio in real time, which is genuinely useful, until you realize your phone has done that for years.
Meanwhile, the actual benefits of the neural processor remain invisible to most buyers.
Photo editing tools like Cocreator in Paint generate strange, uncanny images that few people use twice.
Windows Studio Effects smooths your webcam feed, a feature your colleagues will never notice.
The NPU sits idle through most of a workday, draining battery life and adding cost while the AI workloads it was built for mostly run in the cloud anyway.
You paid a premium for hardware that spends its time waiting.
There is a deeper unease here that the industry would rather not discuss.
These laptops are designed to watch, listen, and remember on your behalf.
A machine that continuously catalogs your screen is a machine that can be subpoenaed, breached, or simply misconfigured.
Microsoft learned this the hard way when it delayed Recall over exactly these concerns.
Trusting a device with a running memory of your banking tabs, medical portals, and private messages is not a feature upgrade.
It is a new category of exposure that most Americans have not consented to in any meaningful sense.
The marketing machinery, however, rolls on.
Every back-to-school ad and holiday circular now implies that a laptop without an NPU is obsolete.
That framing is doing real damage to household budgets.
Families replacing a perfectly capable three-year-old machine are being nudged toward spending hundreds more for silicon that changes almost nothing about daily use.
The pressure is social as much as technical: nobody wants to buy the laptop that is already behind.
None of this means the technology is worthless.
On-device AI will eventually matter, particularly for privacy-sensitive tasks and offline translation.
But right now, Copilot Plus is a bet placed with your money on a future that has not arrived, wrapped in urgency that does not exist.
Our take: buy the laptop that fits your actual work, not the one with the loudest AI sticker.
If a Copilot Plus machine happens to be the best screen, keyboard, and battery for your budget, fine.
Final Thoughts
Just do not let a marketing department decide that your three-year-old computer suddenly stopped working.