Microsoft spent the past year telling Americans that the "Copilot Plus PC" was the biggest leap in personal computing since the mouse.
The pitch was simple: buy a new laptop with a dedicated neural processing unit, and a smarter, faster, on-device assistant would change how you work.
Millions of people went out and did exactly that.
But the devices have largely failed to deliver on the hype.
The flagship feature, a "Recall" tool that promised to snap a searchable photo of everything you do on screen, was pulled from launch over privacy nightmares and still feels radioactive.
Other headlining tricks, like live caption translation and AI image editing, are neat parlor games, not reasons to spend $1,200.
The one thing people actually wanted from a new laptop was speed and battery life, and the AI silicon often just sits there, idle, waiting for software that never quite arrives.
What's really happening is a bait-and-switch that's become a pattern in American tech.
Companies ship a device on the promise of future capability, then quietly let the marketing do the selling while the "revolution" gets pushed to a software update that may or may not come.
Meanwhile, the fine print is where the ethics get ugly.
To get the most out of these machines, you're nudged toward signing into a Microsoft account, syncing your files to the cloud, and letting an assistant read your screen, your documents, and your messages.
We are training ourselves, one "allow" tap at a time, to hand a corporation a running transcript of our private lives in exchange for features that mostly underwhelm.
This is the quiet part of the AI boom nobody wants to say out loud: the technology is being sold faster than it can mature, and consumers are the beta testers paying full price.
Retailers stack these laptops in endcaps with glowing labels.
Reviewers soft-pedal the shortcomings because the whole industry is financially invested in the story.
And the buyer, standing in a Best Buy aisle with a budget, is left to decode which "AI" claims are real and which are a spec sheet dressed up as destiny.
Every upgrade cycle framed as an obligation, every device nudged toward obsolescence because it lacks the newest chip, pushes more working Americans to spend money they didn't plan to spend.
It trains us to treat a functional three-year-old laptop as junk, not because it stopped working, but because a marketing team decided it was behind.
The honest verdict on Copilot Plus PCs so far is not that they're bad.
Many are genuinely nice machines with great keyboards and long battery life.
It's that the AI is the least important part of them, and the least honest part of the sales pitch.
If you're buying a new laptop this year, buy it for the screen, the keyboard, and the price.
Let the software prove itself before you let it prove anything about you.
Our take: the industry has turned "AI" into a sticker it slaps on hardware to justify a markup, and we've stopped asking for proof.
Final Thoughts
Until these features earn their place on the box, the smartest thing a shopper can do is treat the hype as exactly that and keep their money.