When Microsoft and Qualcomm teamed up last year to take another shot at Windows on Arm, the pair introduced a new generation of Windows laptops based on Qualcomm Snapdragon X mobile processors. Dubbed Copilot Plus PCs, these new laptops promised all-day battery life and came equipped with AI features and a neural processing unit (NPU) designed to tackle those AI tasks on-device instead of relying solely on servers in the cloud.
Microsoft defines a Copilot Plus PC as a laptop that has an NPU capable of more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), 16GB or more of RAM and at least 256GB of storage. The memory and especially the storage requirements are fairly basic specs for a modern laptop, making the 40-TOPS NPU the real dividing line between a Copilot Plus PC and one that’s not. Since the introduction of the first Snapdragon X-based Copilot Plus PCs, Intel and AMD have released chips that meet the 40-TOPS threshold; Intel with its “Lunar Lake” Core Ultra 200V series and AMD with its “Strix Point” Ryzen AI 300 series. Now, you have a choice of Arm or x86 chip architecture for this new class of AI-focused laptops.
I have my doubts about Microsoft’s Copilot Plus PC branding catching on — I’ve yet to hear someone say, “Hold on, let me grab my Copilot Plus PC and get to work on that.” — but the era of the AI PC is here. Your next Windows laptop will almost assuredly have an NPU of 40 TOPS or more and AI tools to go along with it, whether you call it a Copilot Plus PC or not.
The AI features built into today’s Copilot Plus PCs, however, feel very first-generation. Some seem to have been added more as demonstrations to back up Microsoft’s marketing claims of the wonderful AI-ness of its new Copilot Plus PCs. However, there are a handful of AI tools that I find useful with the Copilot Plus PCs I’ve reviewed. On the flip side, there are a few ingredients I’d like to see added to the Copilot Plus PC soup.
The 3 Best Things About Copilot Plus PCs
You’ll notice I didn’t say the three best AI things about Copliot Plus PCs. That’s because the very best part of a Copilot Plus PC isn’t AI-related but has to do with the efficiency of this new generation of mobile CPUs.
1. All-day battery life
The Copilot Plus PCs we’ve tested with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X processors have not only closed the battery life gap that Apple’s MacBooks have enjoyed ever since it introduced its own Arm-based M-series processors but have surged past the them and taken the lead.
Powered by a Snapdragon X Elite processor, HP’s OmniBook X 14 can run for more than 25 hours on a single charge.
Matt Elliott/CNET
Take a look at the best battery-life laptops we’ve tested, and you’ll see a group of Snapdragon X laptops at the top. The longest-running of the bunch at this moment is the HP OmniBook X 14, which can literally run around the clock, running for more than 25 hours on our battery drain test. The excellent Asus Zenbook A14 is also capable of running for more hours than there are in a day.
And it’s not just Snapdragon X-based Copilot Plus PCs that are besting Apple MacBooks on battery. The Acer Swift 14 AI has a Lunar Lake chip from Intel and ran for more than 22 hours — a few more minutes than the M4-based MacBook Pro 14. This Intel-based Swift 14 AI model shows that the Arm architecture isn’t the sole reason for the battery longevity we saw from the first Copilot Plus PCs we tested. The presence of an NPU also helps extend battery life because it can handle workloads more efficiently than a laptop’s CPU or GPU.
Online streaming battery drain test
Note: Longer bars indicate better performance
The Copilot logo shows up in a variety of places on a Copilot Plus PC.
Microsoft
You can also use Copilot to generate images with text prompts. It uses the latest DALL-E 3 version of OpenAI’s image generator, which can handle long and detailed prompts to create imaginative and engaging images.
Many Copilot Plus PCs have a dedicated key to launch Copilot, but you’ll also find an icon for it in the Windows taskbar and Edge browser. You can type in your question or command, and you can also click the microphone icon to speak to Copilot.
The free version of Copilot uses the ChatGPT-4 Turbo large language model, which is the same OpenAI model that powers Copilot Pro, which costs $20 a month. The paid version gets you better access to ChatGPT-4 Turbo during peak times, but it’s great to be able to use such an advanced LLM with the free Copilot version. Copilot Pro has other advantages, which I’ll cover in more detail below.
3. Live Captions with live translation
Copilot Plus PCs come with a Live Captions feature built into Windows that offers real-time translation of more than 40 languages into English. I found it impressive, even if — with my high-school knowledge of Spanish — I admittedly can’t tell you if the Spanish-to-English translation of the YouTube video I was watching about the coastal city of Alicante in Spain was 100% accurate. But if it wasn’t 100% correct, it was very close and provided me with the ability to understand what to see in Alicante. Live Captions is useful for foreign-language videos, and I’m sure it’s even more useful if you need to converse with a non-English speaker over Zoom.
Super resolution uses AI to add pixels to photos to make them sharper and more detailed.
Matt Elliott/CNET
Available in both the Photos and Paint apps, Restyle lets you apply a style — Anime, Cyberpunk, Watercolor, Papercraft and so on — to photos and adjust the effect with a Creativity slider, but I didn’t find many of the results all too compelling. A large part of the underwhelming results is that Microsoft’s safety controls limit what you can create. You can’t, for example, apply one of the styles to people in a photo, only the background. When I asked Copilot about this restriction, it replied, “Restyle doesn’t support effects to people and faces to ensure privacy and ethical considerations are upheld. Processing facial features can raise privacy and consent issues, especially when images are shared publicly or used without permission.”
That’s all well and good, but I was just trying to make an anime version of myself. I understand the tool doesn’t allow me to change the look of a celebrity or public figure, but the AI should be smart enough to recognize that I’m applying the effect to a selfie of myself and, thus, consent is therefore inherently granted.
Image Creator and Cocreator: There’s a new Image Creator tool in the Photos and Paint apps that lets you use text prompts to create AI images in various styles. And the Cocreator tool in Paint lets you combine a rough sketch with a text prompt to create an AI image. Similar to the results I got with the Restyle tool, I didn’t find any of the effects or styles with either tool to be terribly engaging. My results just looked like generic AI art that turned into abstract colors and shapes when I pushed the Creativity slider too far.
Windows Studio Effects: Found in the Camera app, these AI-assisted effects let you blur the background, automatically frame your face as you move to keep you in the middle of the picture, or make it appear as though you’re looking at your webcam and not down at your notes when speaking. Some Copilot Plus PCs add two newer effects, Portrait Light and Creative filters, but neither is all that impressive.
The Portrait Light effect is so subtle that it’s hardly noticeable, and the Creative filters don’t live up to their billing as Illustrated, Watercolor or Animated. Each filter looks similar to the others, and all three just apply some smoothing to the image that isn’t useful for work calls or that is interesting when chatting with friends or family.
The automatic framing and background blur effects are still the only two Windows Studio Effects worth using. Video-conferencing apps offer these effects, too, so they’re mostly superfluous.
The 3 biggest things missing from Copilot Plus PCs
It’s been less than a year since Microsoft and Qualcomm introduced the first Copilot Plus PCs with the excellent Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11, so this is still a relatively new category that’s growing and evolving. It’s not surprising there are a few features that you won’t find yet on a Copilot Plus PC.
1. Windows Recall
Recall was meant to be the headlining AI feature of the Copilot Plus PC launch to show off the power of the NPU, using it to track everything you do on your computer without bogging down the CPU or GPU. The idea is that you could then return to one of the thousands of snapshots that Recall took — via AI and natural-language queries — to return to something you were working on or shopping for previously. The feature was shelved after an outcry of privacy and security concerns and has yet to be rolled out to the official release of Windows. It remains in preview for Windows Insiders.
2. System-wide, offline Copilot
Copilot is a great brainstorming companion and research tool, but Microsoft’s AI chatbot operates separately from its Windows OS. You can’t ask Copilot to enable dark mode, change the power mode or check for Windows updates. Well, you can ask, but Copilot can’t change any Windows system settings. Sometimes finding a setting in Windows is more difficult than finding an answer to a question online, so giving Copilot system-wide functionality would be highly convenient.
Along with Windows settings, Copilot also can’t work without an Internet connection. While Copilot Plus PCs use the NPU for fast and secure on-device processing for many tasks, such as Windows Studio Effects, the Copilot chatbot relies on more powerful cloud-based servers for natural language processing to generate its responses.
