Anika Begay
You’re not alone in your confusion about these new laptop specs, which have been the biggest news in the PC industry in a while. First, you may notice that almost all new Windows laptops have a Copilot button to the right of the space bar, which tapping it opens Microsoft’s “everyday AI companion,” Copilot. Surprise! This doesn’t mean you’re using a Copilot+ PC.
Copilot+ PC isn’t a button, but rather an AI-focused Microsoft specification that manufacturers can get by equipping their laptops with an AI processor capable of 40 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) and pairing it with “all-day battery life.” Ironically, neither Intel nor AMD can claim either of those things, which has allowed Qualcomm’s brand-new Snapdragon CPU to emerge as the only chip available on Anyone Copilot+ PC is out today (which, of course, was the plan from the beginning).
What can Copilot+ PC do? Three things: It can run Cocreator inside Microsoft Paint, where you draw something and the AI finishes it for you (or at least tries to). Windows Studio Effects can clean up video calls and provide creative filters. And Live Captions can translate 44 languages into English in real time from a streaming source or your laptop’s microphone. The most talked-about feature in Copilot+ PC is Recall, which lets you find that piece of information you know you saw three days ago but can’t remember where, but it was delayed due to (very valid) privacy concerns.
All good, right? Well, the problem is that the Snapdragon CPU can’t exactly do everything that bigger CPUs can do because the CPU architecture is ARM, not x86. While it does have a built-in emulation system to translate apps from x86 to ARM, there are a lot of apps that the Copilot+ PCs crash on. The Snapdragon chip’s graphics performance is also the worst of any major CPU. The good news is that the promise of “all-day” battery life is no joke. It’s the one place where the Copilot+ PCs live up to its promise.
So, do you need a PC Copilot+? Well, do you want to be able to sketch a rough image of a leprechaun you dreamed about last night and have Windows fill in the details for you with the power of artificial intelligence? Maybe don’t answer that question.
