Copilot+ PCs Have Great Potential But Will Businesses Care?

Microsoft on Monday announced Copilot+ PCs alongside six of the best-known Windows PC makers, setting the stage for what could be the biggest change to the PC landscape in years.

The new machines—initially powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite platform, but soon to be joined by systems with AMD or Intel chips—include big changes to Windows itself and the applications that run on top of the OS. This combination presages what could be big performance and battery life improvements, along with some intriguing new ways of working.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Credit: Michael Miller/PCMag)

Introducing the concept at a pre-Build press event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted, “If you go all the way back to the start of modern computing 70 years ago, the pursuit has always been about how to make computers that understand us instead of us having to understand computers. I feel like we really are close to that real great view.”

He went on to describe “the new user interface,” which he argues is multimodal and can support text, images, and video for input and output. It has memory that maintains important context and recalls our personal knowledge, data across all of the applications and devices, and new reasoning capabilities that help us complete complex tasks. 

“We’re entering this new era where computers not only understand us but can actually anticipate what we want and our intents,” he said. 

(Credit: Brian Westover/PCMag)

While the vision sounds great, it always takes a while for the products to catch up. Indeed, I’ve seen multiple introductions of Qualcomm-based PCs, and they’ve often fallen short of expectations. After the first “AI PCs” were announced a few months ago, I tested a bunch of them and was disappointed. 

Nadella did recognize that some AI promises have yet to be realized, but said that AI capabilities are growing rapidly. “Just like saying Moore’s Law helped drive the Information Revolution, the scaling laws of deep neural networks are going to drive the Intelligence Revolution. [But] it’s pretty early still on this platform shift.”

The specifics here matter. Copilot+ PCs will require at least 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, an integrated NPU with 40 TOPs (trillions of operations per second) or more, Microsoft’s Pluton security chip,  and of course, a dedicated CoPilot key. The NPU performance number is important because it means the AI PCs that AMD and Intel have introduced to date do NOT qualify; presumably future machines based on AMD’s “Strix Point” and Intel’s “Lunar Lake” will.  

Microsoft and partners put a great deal of stock into performance and battery life numbers, saying the new machines will allow for up to 15 hours of web browsing and up to 22 hours of video playback. (Some OEMs were even more aggressive). In particular, many of the demos were based on comparison with the MacBook Air with Apple’s M3 processors.

I was more interested in the new software. Microsoft Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi said Windows itself was “rearchitected” to be faster and offer better battery life—up to 53% faster than the M3-based Macbook Air, he said—with the Copilot app redesigned so you can now resize, snap, or maximize it, and drag and drop things (like photos) into it.

Other demos showed new photo features (including simple AI-based editing from within Explorer and notifications and summarizations). One of the more interesting applications was using it while running Minecraft and conversing with it via voice as it understood what was happening on screen and gave you hints. If it works that well in the real world, I’ll be very impressed.

Perhaps the biggest new feature is Recall, which lets you more easily find anything you’ve seen or done on your computer, including closed browser tabs, even if there is no text that exactly matches your prompt. The demos included finding a dress from a series of previous browser searches or finding a specific slide with a comment in purple writing. These looked quite useful, more so than the Windows Timeline feature introduced a few years back.

Microsoft says the Recall index is completely private, local, and secure, with safety features that allow you to edit or delete anything that has been captured. I’m sure many people will be looking at it with a focus on privacy.

Live Captions, meanwhile, can automatically provide on-device captions to streamed videos or video conferencing. I particularly liked the demo of a video call with speakers in four different languages with real-time translation.  

Real-time translation and Recall were probably the two biggest standout demos for business users, although I’m sure the other features of Microsoft 365 Copilot will work as well.

Other demos seemed more aimed at creators. Within Windows Paint and Image Creator, you can now sketch and enter text descriptions to get it to create new images for you. The Windows Photos app will include more AI features and upscaling. Third-party applications looked good as well, including Adobe Photoshop running its Firefly AI applications faster than on a MacBook and DaVinci Resolve doing quick color changes in one part of a video. They looked quite good. 

PC Makers Embrace Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite

In addition to Microsoft, which introduced new versions of its Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, Acer, Asus, Dell, HP,  Lenovo, and Samsung all introduced new Snapdragon-based machines. I’m particularly interested to note that this includes not only consumer laptops but also business-focused machines with the three major players.  

Dell introduced five new laptops, including the Latitude 7455, which it said is the thinnest Latitude ever, and the slightly lower-end Latitude 5455. The test units on display included Arm-specific versions of Dell’s enterprise suite, including Dell Command Center and Dell Optimizer.

First Look: HP Takes on Snapdragon X Elite With an AI-Led OmniBook Brand Revival

HP showed off the Elitebook Ultra G1g (Ultra will be HP’s new name for what used to be its high-end Dragonfly line), with features like its Poly camera app and SureSense (although other parts of the Wolf security line are slated for later this year).

Lenovo showed its ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, with features like the TrackPoint QuickMenu and its Commercial Vantage software working.

Hands On: Lenovo Embraces Snapdragon X Elite CPU in New Yoga, ThinkPad AI PCs

This is a big step up from previous Qualcomm-based machines, which really didn’t have the features enterprises are looking for. I was told that most enterprise management apps are available, but things for out-of-band management are not quite ready.  

Still, the consensus among the vendors I talked to at Monday’s event was that the early business customers for Qualcomm-based machines will be enterprises that have fully migrated to Windows 11, use modern management, and probably have Arm-based Macs in their fleet. 

Note that Microsoft Office 365 and Edge apps and many third-party apps (including Google Chrome, WhatsApp, Zoom, Adobe, Photoshop, Disney+, and Spotify) now have Arm-based native applications for the new Qualcomm-based machines; and Windows now has a new “Prism” emulator for running x86 software. Again, the proof will be in the final machines due next month, but it sounds good.

All in all, it was a very impressive launch. It sure looks like Qualcomm may become a third CPU provider for Windows machines in a real way. But more importantly, it could mean a real change to the way we interact with software. I’m excited to test some of this out.