Microsoft and its partners have spent the past year telling Americans that their next laptop must be a "Copilot Plus PC," a machine with a dedicated neural processing unit that runs AI features locally.
The reality, for most buyers, is a $1,200 device that does many of the same things their old laptop did, just with a Recall button that screenshots everything you do.
The numbers tell a quieter story than the marketing.
Analysts have noted that AI PC shipments are rising, but that's largely because chipmakers and manufacturers are simply building the NPU into every new machine.
Consumers aren't demanding these features.
They're being handed them, the same way bloatware used to arrive preinstalled.
When you walk into a Best Buy this fall, the "AI" label will be on nearly everything, which means it will soon mean almost nothing.
The flagship feature, Recall, is a case study in how tech companies confuse capability with wisdom.
It takes continuous snapshots of your screen so you can search your past activity later.
After security researchers flagged it as a privacy nightmare, Microsoft delayed it, then reworked it with encryption and opt-in controls.
That's progress, but it also reveals the pattern: ship first, apologize second, patch third, and let the public absorb the risk.
Meanwhile, the features that do work are modest.
Live Captions translate audio in real time.
Windows Studio Effects smooths your webcam.
These are pleasant conveniences, not a new era of computing.
Reviewers who have spent months with Copilot Plus laptops keep reaching the same conclusion: the hardware is fine, the battery life is often good, but the AI is a garnish, not the meal.
There is a real cost buried here, and it isn't just monetary.
Every "smart" feature that phones home, every assistant that summarizes your documents, every system that watches your screen normalizes a relationship with technology where you are the product being observed.
Americans have already accepted doorbell cameras, always-on speakers, and phones that track their location.
The AI PC asks them to accept a machine that watches their work too.
What's striking is how little anyone pushed back.
There were no mass protests, no consumer revolt.
There was a delay, a blog post, and a shrug.
We have become a country that treats surveillance as a feature update and calls it convenience.
The smarter move for most buyers right now is patience.
Buy a solid laptop with good battery life and a decent screen, and skip paying a premium for AI features you won't use.
The privacy questions, unfortunately, will not answer themselves.
The uncomfortable truth is that we keep trading away the last shreds of digital privacy for features we barely touch.
A laptop should serve you, not study you.
Final Thoughts
Until these machines earn that trust, the honest label isn't "AI PC." It's "watchful PC," and that's not something to celebrate.