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 this set of devices will at least partially accomplish that matrix of magic that the MacBook Air provides, but running the platform I prefer. All the available evidence suggests that it will.

But this isn’t really how Microsoft is selling Copilot+ PC. Indeed, while Copilot+ PC as a brand or specification is today limited to these first Snapdragon X-based PCs, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and others have all confirmed that new PCs based on other architectures will get these capabilities too. And these capabilities are very much not about thinness, lightness, battery life, performance, stability, reliability, or whatever, though different PCs running on different platforms will deliver on parts of all that. No, these capabilities are about AI. And not just AI, but local AI. Local AI running on an NPU that meets a very specific TOPS performance target.

I’ve written about why this target isn’t arbitrary, like the original Windows 11 hardware requirements. But it is a curious fact that, as I write this, there is only one Windows 11 AI feature–Windows Studio Effects, a set of virtual meeting video enhancements–that requires an NPU. When you look at the full list of AI features in Windows 11 today, from Copilot to Image Creator to background blur and removal to the text actions in Snipping Tool to whatever else, none of it–none of it–requires an NPU.

That’s about to change. And things are going to get messy in the short term.

When Microsoft announced Copilot+ PC, we got caught up in Recall and the ridiculous over-reaction to Microsoft taking “screenshots” of a user’s activity all day long and storing them locally. But the real drama here, to me, is that Recall and the other Copilot+ PC features will be limited to a tiny subset of computers, starting with the Snapdragon X-based PCs that are shipping next week, bifurcating the market. At some point–and this is where things get vague–these capabilities will come to other PCs running the just-announced AMD, Intel, and Nvidia silicon. But we don’t know when. Microsoft will not say, and neither will any of its partners.

Clearly, Microsoft and its hardware and PC makers partners are colluding, for lack of a better term, on a generational market shift that will bring PCs into the AI era. This shift will change the architectural dynamic from integrated CPUs and GPUs on a single SoC (system on a chip) to an Arm (or Arm-like) SoC with integrated CPU, GPU, NPU, and RAM. (Intel’s Lunar Lake is the first mainstream x86 design to deliver on this packaging.) There are pros and cons to this design: These chips are more expensive and can’t get RAM upgrades after purchase time, similar to how phones work. And there are somewhat cynical reasons for this shift too: These companies are trying to shift units, now and in the future. A less upgradeable device means users will have to buy new devices, not components, to upgrade later.

As always, I want to be clear on this point: We may not like it, but this is their right and their prerogative. Microsoft and its partners are businesses, not charities, and they’ve improved their respective products so much that customers no longer need to upgrade so often. And so they are betting a lot on what they hope will be an exaggerated upgrade cycle over the next few years that spans consumers and businesses. And getting either side of this market to open the wallet is difficult.

But AI, as noted, is a tough sell.

Why would anyone pay for a standalone image generation solution like Midjourney when there are free services that do the same thing? Worse, why would anyone use an online service for this capability when it’s built-in to the phone, tablet, or PC they’re already using? Extrapolate that to every AI-based feature you’ve seen–help with writing, whatever–and you can see a looming AI Bust to match the Dot Com Bust.

Microsoft’s plan–the industry’s plan–is to “pull an Apple” and subsidize the AI capabilities it will provide in Windows–that hardware makers and PC makers will provide in-house and with third-parties–by making these capabilities a hardware requirement. That is, to get the best AI features in Windows 11, you’ll need a new PC. (Ditto with Apple and its Apple Intelligence features, though recent Apple Silicon-based hardware qualifies too.) And while the marketing of these features, to date, has been somewhat lacking–does anyone really need most of these capabilities?–Microsoft does have one advantage. The PC market is overdue for an upgrade cycle.

What this means is that consumers and businesses alike will at some point in the near future be looking to upgrade. And where they might have gone with a traditional upgrade otherwise, this new generation of Copilot+ PCs, first with Qualcomm and then with other architectures, each with its own unique advantages, might trigger more spending. This is human nature: You go into the car dealership for the cheap starter model, but then future-proof your purchase when you get there out of a just-in-case mentality. I may never need background blur, you think. But if I do, it will just be there.

Today, these features just work. But in the future, they will require specific hardware. A new PC purchase.

In Windows 11 today, for example, I can open Microsoft Paint and use its integrated Image Creator feature to create images of any kind using a text prompt. This capability works off the Copilot-based Designer service in the cloud and is free, and it won’t use an NPU in your PC even if it’s there.

But a coming version of this app will also offer a Cocreator feature that requires a Copilot+ PC and its NPU. This works like Image Creator–indeed, the two features are side-by-side in the Paint ribbon–but it uses hybrid AI–your PC’s NPU and Copilot/Designer in the sky–to create an image as you draw and type, on the fly. As you change your description or add to your fingerpaint-like image, Cocreator makes a professional version to its side. (See the hero graphic at the top.)

If you run Paint six months from now on a non-Copilot+ PC, you won’t even know Cocreator exists. Which is itself a bit of a problem: How will Microsoft advertise this functionality to customers? Given its annoying interruptions in Windows 11 today, we’re right to be worried.

But even those who do pay for a Copilot+ PC will need to make some concessions to Microsoft’s strategic needs, and a Microsoft support document highlights the compromises needed to use this specific feature. In addition to requiring a new Copilot+ PC, you have to sign in with your Microsoft account (MSA), a growing requirement on Windows that some find irksome. This is why Paint now supports in-app sign-in, but most people will sign in to Windows, and that will simply pass through to the app. But in purchasing this expensive new PC, you can now use this feature forever, for free and with no limits: “There are no restrictions on how many images you can generate,” Microsoft notes. Deal with the devil complete.

In time, Copilot+ PC capabilities like this won’t just come to AMD-, Intel-, and Nvidia-based PCs, they’ll come to all PCs. Some of this will just require time, as the user base shifts to NPU-based hardware broadly. But however it happens, these capabilities, like Media Center and Tablet PC capabilities, will just be in Windows. And just as we would have had a conversation 20 years ago one having to buy a Tablet PC to get stylus-based handwriting recognition or whatever, today, we’re having that conversation about AI. And then in time, we won’t have this conversation. Those features will be everywhere.

But I still care less about AI than I do about those thin, light, portable, and reliable capabilities. Obviously, that matters to me, but as obviously, AI will just be everywhere. I won’t need to worry about it: I will just buy a PC, a tablet, and/or a phone at any time in the future, as one does, and those capabilities will just be there. And just as Microsoft brought multimedia, networking, web browsing, and whatever else to Windows, AI, this thing that used to be separate and perhaps a paid product, will just be there. Part of the platform. Copilot+ PCs, or AI PCs, will no longer be a thing. They will just be PCs.

The problem is, we’re in stage two of this journey, stage one being the introduction of AI-based features to Windows 11 and stage two being NPU-powered AI PCs/Copilot+ PCs. And like democracy, the AI transition will be messy. And it’s not clear when it ends.

But it will end. And when the dust settles, when AI PCs and Copilot+ PCs seem as antiquated as the Multimedia PCs of the 1990s, we’ll still be using a PC. And that’s all it will be. Just a PC.