If you walked into a Best Buy this month and felt a strange new energy radiating off the laptop aisle, that's the smell of marketing.
Microsoft and basically every PC maker on Earth have slapped a "Copilot+ PC" badge on a fresh wave of machines, and they'd very much like you to believe your current laptop is now a glorified abacus.
Here's the pitch: these Copilot+ PCs pack a dedicated neural processing unit, or NPU, which is a tiny chip that does AI math so your main processor doesn't have to.
That means on-device features like instant translation, AI image editing in Paint, and the infamous Recall tool that snapshots everything you do so you can search it later.
Sounds great until you remember that "searchable history of everything" is also how at least four horror movies start.
The sticker situation is where it gets funny.
Some laptops advertise big AI numbers but ship with chips that don't actually hit Microsoft's 40 TOPS threshold, the performance bar required for the official Copilot+ features.
So you get the badge, you get the vibes, and you get a machine that can't run half the stuff on the box.
Recall, meanwhile, has been the gift that keeps on giving.
Security researchers poked holes in it almost immediately, Microsoft delayed it, reworked it, and now it ships turned off by default with Windows Hello required to use it.
Translation: the flagship AI feature of the entire product line launches as a thing most people will never bother to switch on.
Live Captions translating audio in real time is genuinely neat.
Cocreator in Paint is a fun party trick for about eleven minutes.
But none of it justifies tossing a perfectly good two-year-old laptop, especially when the AI features mostly need specific apps, specific chips, and a specific amount of patience.
The pricing doesn't help the case either.
Many Copilot+ machines landed at premium prices for hardware that, benchmark-wise, isn't dramatically faster than last year's models for everyday stuff like Chrome tabs, Zoom calls, and pretending to work.
You're paying an AI tax for capabilities that are still, generously, in beta.
The real tell is how the industry talks about it.
Every launch event sounds less like a product reveal and more like a hostage video from the marketing department. "AI PC" is now a category the way "smart fridge" was a category — technically true, broadly meaningless, and mostly a way to move units.
Some of these laptops have excellent screens, great battery life, and keyboards you can actually type on.
It just means the AI angle is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a fairly modest upgrade.
If you're buying one specifically for Copilot+, maybe wait until the features stop shipping as easter eggs.
Our take: the NPU is real technology with a real future, but right now it's a solution shopping for a problem.
Buy the laptop you need, not the sticker they printed on it.
Final Thoughts
And if anyone tries to sell you an "AI PC" as a personality, run.