Just a PC (Premium)

Microsoft and its PC maker partners are curiously quiet, one might say purposefully quiet, about Copilot+ PC and how AI is changing the PC market. But there are reasons, as always. And while some of it is technical, much of it is about corporate partnerships, shared needs, and individual strategies. Put simply, the entire PC market is positioning itself for an inevitable shift, and it's going to get weird in the short term. And then it will be fine.

We've experienced this type of change before. There were profound changes like the shift to portable computing with laptops and then Ultrabooks, though we rarely use that term anymore. (That bit is important, hold, please.) There were attempts to shift the market broadly that failed, though the resulting form factors stuck around, as with Tablet PC morphing into today's 2-in-1s and convertible/x360-style PCs. And other shifts that were outright failures, like Media Center, in that case because the PC is too complex for that type of product. And so on.

But Copilot+ PC is different. This is about the future of the PC, broadly.

It's starting with an architectural shift, with what we'll call the third major push to make Windows make sense on Arm. (The first two were Windows RT and Snapdragon 850/8cx.)

It's coincidentally timed to Microsoft's AI awakening, with on-device, NPU-accelerated AI capabilities taking precedence over the original rationale for this platform, which is best described as "always on," with thin, light, highly portable PCs with integrated 5G capabilities: It's interesting that none of the Copilot+ PCs announced so far have 5G. We're just moving past that bit, I guess.

But Copilot+ PC shares a lot with its predecessors, whether they succeeded or not: This is nothing less than an attempt by Microsoft and its hardware partners to goose PC sales at a time in which the market is finally starting to recover from its post-COVID sales shortfalls. The PC market had experienced 7 straight years of decline, two years of heady rebirth, and then a sad though predictable return to its previous doldrums. And every company involved would like to not just ride this upgrade wave, but ensure that it's as big as possible.

Here, I will agree with the AI cynics: This is a tough sell.

That is, when I look at a Copilot+ PC like Surface Laptop 7th generation, I'm not really thinking about AI all that much. I'm thinking about the experience I had with the Apple MacBook Air 15-inch M3, a magical device that delivers on what I would have thought was an impossible combination of thinness, lightness, battery life, performance, stability, reliability, and more. Basically everything that a Windows laptop is not.

What I want, of course, is something like the MacBook Air, but running Windows 11. And we'll see: HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, and several other PC makers will soon ship first-generation Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PCs into the market, and the chips will fall where they may. I hope that...