Walk through any Best Buy in America right now and you'll see them: shiny laptops with a small badge that reads "Copilot Plus PC." The sticker promises artificial intelligence built right in.
The price tag promises you'll pay a few hundred dollars more than the same machine without the badge.
Here's what almost nobody explains at checkout: most of the marquee AI features that justified that premium either arrived late, arrived crippled, or haven't arrived at all.
The most hyped one, Recall, takes screenshots of nearly everything you do so you can search your past activity later.
Microsoft delayed it after security researchers showed how easily that archive of your life could be scooped up by malware.
It eventually shipped, but switched off by default, buried in settings most owners will never open.
The other flagship pitch, a live AI assistant that watches your screen and talks you through problems, launched in a limited preview exclusive to a handful of laptop models.
If you bought a different brand, you paid for the same chip and got a demo reel instead of the feature.
This is the pattern of American tech consumption in 2025.
Then we spend a year waiting for software updates to make the purchase make sense.
To be fair, the hardware underneath is genuinely better.
These machines run on newer processors with dedicated neural engines, and they do handle video calls, photo editing, and battery life more efficiently than the laptops they replaced.
If you needed a new computer anyway, you probably didn't get robbed.
But that's the trick of the upsell, isn't it?
The AI badge isn't selling you a capability.
It's selling you reassurance that you won't be left behind.
Meanwhile, the same AI features are quietly rolling out to older machines through software updates, meaning the exclusivity window was mostly marketing theater.
There's a real societal cost hiding in all this.
Every household that stretched its budget for an AI laptop it can't fully use is a household that didn't spend that money on something tangible.
Every sales floor that leans on buzzwords instead of honest answers erodes a little more trust.
We are training an entire generation of shoppers to expect that the box will lie to them, just a little, on purpose.
New badges, new acronyms, new reasons your two-year-old device is suddenly obsolete.
So here's the uncomfortable question: if the AI features are the last thing you'd actually miss, why are they the first thing on the price tag? **The takeaway:** Buy the laptop you need at the price you can defend, and treat every AI promise as a maybe until it's actually on your machine doing something useful.
Final Thoughts
It's a bet that you won't read the fine print.