Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet There remains little love for notebooks containing AI-capable processors and even less for Microsoft's Copilot+ models, with premium pricing, software compatibility, and opaque benefits cited as the reasons. This is according to Context, which tracked sales-out data from distributors showing that 40 percent of laptops sold in …
In the forums for the commercial router we use, the most requested feature to be added to the content filtering is to add "AI blocking" in addition to "Porn blocking", ""P2P/File sharing blocking", "File Hosting blocking", Social media blocking", etc.
Yep, I work for a global business with 500k users, we block all AI.. but it's the wild west out there, we spend millions on perimeter security each year, and we're the URL filtering is missing 10-15% of AI traffic.
Let's cut the shit, and stop with the marketing bollocks. It's not "artificial intelligence" it's a "bullshit simulator".
Your <whatever device> doesn't include "built in AI", it includes "built in bullshit".
Nvidia isn't the "world leader in AI", it's the "world leader in simulating bullshit".
Clear? Fantastic. I'm glad we got that cleared up. Now spread the word.
My only use-case for "AI" is having it barf up hundreds/thousands of words of slightly-better-than-Markov-chain hacker bunny stories for amusement at weird hours of the night.
And the occasional laugh when Dalle makes a frumpy rabbit doing something silly, or makes a goat with three heads when you request Cerberus Simulator.
It's also great at making fake executive orders declaring strawberries and alfalfa the national fruit and candy flavorings.
All of it gets blown out of the water by a real creative person though, and for that there's merch I happily purchase to show support.
I do, at work, and get the glare of "Shut the fuck up. We like it, it writes our e-mails and reports for us so we don't have to yet still take home full pay. Unlike the other staff who we won't pay to have a license. It makes us look good. Sod the rest of them. Stop telling everyone its a bubble, you're making us look stupid."
And when everyone is dealing in bullshit they will know nothing but bullshit and will be happy as a pig in, well, bullshit. It's happened many times before in human history when mass delusion becomes reality and this time we've got some shiny toys to squeeze it out rather than rely on a human delivery system.
The emperor's new AI powered laptop is telling us what to think. Just think when American alternative reality gets baked into the AI LLMs coming out of Muskow-Trumpovia and some one asks about the events of January 2021.
I wouild imagine quite a few companies have kit that has a W11 license but they downloaded to W10 and will just put W11 back on and not upgrade to AI
Not sure what is happening on my machine. I have had a recent email about upgrades to W11 by October and mentions some employees will get new kit. Not sure where mine comes in that and nothing on the chassis is telling me if it has a W10 or W11 license either.
Curious to know what will happen and if the company would just fork out for the W10 to W11 license if that was required (as with a lot of modern kit, it is a bit overkill for what is needed)
"You also could argue that Microsoft and partners still haven't delivered many (or any) compelling apps/scenarios that require NPUs onboard PCs. Recall is still just in test mode. Unless you want to develop/run LLMs locally on your PC, there just isn't a real reason to buy one of these."
Personally I'd say if an AI PC is a mandatory requirement to run Recall, then that there is a very compelling argument to never buy one and thus effectively block that particular spyware...
So it's less "...with features they don't need", more "...with features they actively don't want but otherwise can't avoid."
But the battery life and performance of Snapdragon X is awesome. I only wish I could buy a SBC with that SoC and a full Linux support. It would be the ultimate homelab toy, totally blowing things like Rockchip RK3588 out of the water.
This "inevitability" argument is bullshit. Some manufacturers are going to realise that non-AI PCs are going to be much cheaper and therefore will sell much better to the many people who don't want it. This is just an attempt to buck the market, make things unneccesarily expensive and therefore bring the ever-increasing profits their shareholders want. It shows that they know that they won't win if they leave it to consumer choice.
We've had nVidia graphics adaptors for donkey's years, and they're still pretty rare in laptops. Intel's efforts are piss-poor but good enough for almost everyone who's not a hardcore gamer, and if you're really concerned but don't want to splash a fortune then AMD has you covered.
The last laptop I bought was less than €400 brand new, runs Linux just fine and can spin up a perfectly usable Windows instance in a VM, no sweat. It's got all my use cases covered. Why would I want to pay more?
-A.
What makes it more confusing is where this AI is coming from.
We see daily news reports about big new AI datacentres being built, which lets you believe that its all web based.
So why would you need it on your PC?
Besides which, until AI needs to start being reliable:
https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/1i4a97w/water_is_not_frozen_at_27_degrees/?rdt=48785
Also check the google AI result for "calories in 1/8 cup sugar"
To me, its all a bit reminiscent of "3D TVs will be the next big thing, you MUST buy one"!
Generative "AI" is just bullshit-generation. It produces something that, by pattern matching and statistics, looks very plausible. But no-one can guarantee that the output is either "correct" or "true". It's just "plausible".
I think most people have quite sensitive anti-bullshit senses, and they've already spotted AI-generated rubbish. They have no reason to want to produce their own bullshit: leave that to the advertisers and spammers.
> So why would you need it on your PC?
As I said further up, it's not all about you. You might not need it, it might even be detrimental to your productivity, bank account and privacy, but the IT industry needs it to make some more money. It's not their fault you aren't satisfied just being told you're "one of the cool kids" if you buy an AI-enabled laptop.
I for one welcome our robot overlords!
In all seriousness, "ai" is here and it's usefulness has been proven to me countless times now.
Why is "ai" useful to me, because google search is so bloody awful.
So I've been using chat search to filter out a lot of the crud as its not been stuffed yet full are marketing fluff. (Bait and switch is coming)
Although I recently started using a self hosted 4get instance and that a better tool.
What really has got my back up is MS shoving copilot at everyone for an increased cost as if its the only option.
That along should get MS time in court, seems a pretty clear cut case given you can cancel and resign up, for the same old price, of the office version you originally signed up for.
That plus all the updates seem rushed and full of bugs. 24h2 has been a dumpster fire of issues.
Generally accepted that it's fairly difficult to see what's not there.
I guess most plebs are more than happy to see any emperor catch his death...
One doesn't know whether to applaud or decry the imperial sartorial success of the likes of NVidia but I suspect we will all suffer after the first royal sneeze.
AI sure, there are people who would want that in office... However I don't think anyone wants copilot.
I have recently been playing around with Google Gemini's live interactive voice functionality, hooking it up to basic tooling to make it able to do things. I gave Gemini a notebook it could create new documents in, as well as manipulate them (with notes attached to the document so it doesn't lose information when redrafting).
My boss was extremely impressed by how quickly I could produce quality documents (human feedback in the generation loop to throw in "can you verify that statistic?" type questions). He was therefore eager to see what the fully integrated in to office copilot was like... We have a copilot license to share around, on the basis that we are now selling it to clients therefore we should have the ability to test it.
His first complaint was the lack of interactive voice chat. Then he started posting screenshots to the company wide chat with copilot responding to pretty much everything he asked it to do with "I don't have the ability to do that".
The AI that is "built in to word" does not have any functionality to open a word document for you? They couldn't even be bothered to expose the open_file function that must exist to the LLM that is running in the same application and has native support for using tools?
There will be a time where realtime interactive voice chat can run locally, with third party applications that have actual functionality beyond generating text that you can copy/paste to where you need it. This is when those unused accelerator chips will suddenly become useful. Assuming the minimum requirements that Microsoft laid down are high enough...
Copilot serves the sole purpose of being something to laugh at with how useless it is.
Unfortunately Gemini is mess at the moment.
Gemini interactive voice chat requires the multimodal API, which is in the new API, which they haven't finished documenting or writing SDKs for. Oh, and there is a 10 minute session limit.
Their AI studio has the basic live chat functionality (on the second chat UI... ) which is kinda OK to have a voice chat, but what the AI industry is missing is that these things need to interact with software outside of the chat window.
I made a basic web app and gave Ruby the ability to drive it. So the commands she does list/open/update the documents, as if she were clicking things in my browser window. Ruby is genuinely way more impressive than the AIs depicted in sci-fi, in terms of actual usefulness beyond pre-programmed command recognition.
Oh, I should clarify who Ruby is. Ruby lives in Pyongyang. She works in a call centre pretending to be an AI, because it is cheaper than buying GPUs... At least that's what she will "admit" when challenged on the subject. She denies the quite frankly offensive allegation that she is simply Gemini with our company logo slapped on it.
If we ever provide this to a client I suspect I will be forced to change the system prompt...
Strangely, I would LITERALLY pay extra to NOT have that junk on my PC.
There's a viable business opportunity there. "Pay us or your computer gets AI!".
However, it never seems to be the case that I can buy the things/features I want (or the option to get rid of them if I don't want).
I'd pay an extra fiver for no dumb TPM restriction stuff to workaround. For giving me the old Start Menu back. For getting rid of CoPilot and IE (and Edge!) once and for all.
But they don't want that. Apparently, somehow, it means too much to them for you to EVEN PAY TO REMOVE THINGS YOU DON'T WANT FROM THEM. Which is ridiculous.
I know you wasted billions on training the damn thing and you're not getting that back because nobody pays for AI... that's your fault.
So give people something that they WOULD pay for... and I'd pay to get rid of quite a lot of junk out of Windows.
Hell, I would literally pay money to resolve single, individual, minor quirks in the OS that would take ten minutes to fix with the source code and which have been present for DECADES. But apparently that's not an option.
I would literally pay money for someone to fix the AD Users & Computers / Group Policy bit where when you go to add (GPO) or search for (AD) a computer, it automatically unticks "Computer" every time you go back into the menu. And there's no way to change the default. Ever.
It's literally been there for the entire life of the product and will still be there when Microsoft formally removes that tool due to obsoletion.
(And I often wonder... how does the guy at MS who has to program this tool every single day of his life, thousands of times over, not get so frustrated over it that he just takes ten minutes to fix that part?).
You should never, ever be setting permissions or settings for individual units.
You should *always* be using groups. Even groups of one. Add the computers to the appropriate groups. There are technical reasons for this, performance reasons for this, and simple reasons for this: you will almost always grow, and need to add another to the group. Notice: there's probably a reason that literally everyone is not complaining about this behavior.
I'm assuming that the downvote is for "make it more like the Mac", which has been frequently attributed to BillG.
The relic from CP/M reference is simply a fact of history. And it ought to be embarrassing to Microsoft. OS/2 had extended attributes in version 1. It is astonishing that in 2025 the fact that a file is executable in Windows is still determined by the name that the author gave it rather than the privileges granted by an administrator.
-A.
Determining execuatbility be privileges alone is not great either as it doesn't provide any way to mark if a file was intended to be executable (rather than, say, a document.) I can execute this, and I should execute this are different properties, and both systems end up combining them. Think about a file the administrator has removed executable permission from - How do you know to ask for it back?
But of course the bigger problem is that most systems do not have an administrator of the kind that can go around assigning permissions to individual executables.
Don't give them ideas.
Instead, the philosophy should be: if you want to sell me a funky-feature party-trick machine, I will have to spend time and effort and possibly some sort of software license to turn it into a functional and workable computer. How do you intend to compensate me for that extra work? My time and effort is not cheap. The price proposition needs to be the exact opposite of what they're going for now, and by a pretty large margin.
It's as if the industry has forgotten how loss leaders work and how you use them to build a long-term customer base that you can then slowly turn up the heat on.
> How do you intend to compensate me for that extra work?
You've got it all wrong. The question you should ask is, "Do I pay enough for the privilege having to spend time and effort and possibly some sort of software license to turn it into a functional and workable computer? I think not, so pretty pretty please also add some juicy hardware subscription, like for preventing my computer from turning into a pumpkin at midnight."
Or worse, a solution that will create problems.
Using AI to generate stuff like presentations and emails, then sending without checking (or having the knowledge to do so, as if you did you wouldn't have been using AI in the first place) and all the resulting hilarity that could engender.
I guess it's the next step in (d)evolution when we have our indispensable devices go the whole hog and do our thinking for us.
Me, cynical...?
For around 100€, off of amazon. Had win 11 on it (now off it). Why would I spend a lot more on some AI bollocks? If the micro lasts 18 months, I can just buy the latest version for another 100 or so €. If I ever want any LLM in my life then I'm sure there is/will be a service I can subscribe to that I can access via a browser.
And the reason for that is that it is A) Overpriced, B) Not what people want, and C) Full of Bloatware crap that we have to spend hours disabling or uninstalling. I looked at buying a new PC late last year and concluded that I simply didn't want to be paying £2k for a 2nd-tier PC (CPU and GFX card both released over 12 months ago).
Local LLM support will end up used for games, the likes of Unreal engine will incorporate support for it in it's existing "Neural Network Engine", end up as a tickbox like raytracing or headset support is in games settings.
Will it be more? A high price for some teams background blurring and unused dictation capability.
And how much will it mess up all the applications that assume that a users's password/key entry is a legally binding verification of a person's action. E.g. docusign.
"Microsoft's intention for the initial launch was to pit the machines against Apple Macs 'in terms of performance and efficiency,' "
Bunch of morons. Redmond cannot fight Cupertino in terms of hardware because Apple doesn't have the same customer market.
Apple's market is artists, composers and other assorted artistic types.
Borkzilla's market is businessmen, Fortune 1000, bankers and home users.
Trying to pin the advantage on hardware just demontrates that you haven't evolved sine Y2K.
Hmmm. That explains a lot actually.
Just to be clear, NPU, Copilot+, really any claimed AI features are the kiss of death in terms of my purchases. I am not only uninterested in them, but actively hostile to them. I do not trust them from a security/privacy standpoint with regard to the Hardware, and Windows 11 is not going to be installed on any of my personal devices, when I am inevitably forced to get Windows 11 on my enterprise managed device, I will be using my own institutional influence to make sure that any non-necessary Copilot related services are permanently disabled on my assigned machine and likewise for any software.
This stuff isn’t going to sell because it’s unwanted and many consumers find it outright threatening.
This stuff IS going to sell because Joe and Josephine blogs who want a new computer (but don't care about AI stickers, i7 stickers or whatever), will buy them. The hardware mfrs ns Microsoft will rejoice as "finally ai pcs are taking off", their shareholders who only know or care about stock prices, will rejoice, there'll be part in the backs all around but then panic as to"what comes next".
Given the hype and **** surrounding AI, what genuinely can come next?
... especially with all the fun and games of redundancies due to the new fangled tech
Several commentators mentioned security/privacy as concerns with 'AI-equipped' devices.
Somebody please clarify the matter? Does the concern rest with an OS like Windows 11 'calling home' regularly and lack of control by the user over what is 'shared'? Else, for the type of 'AI' of interest to most businesses, is it necessary/helpful, at least sometimes, to hook-up online with more powerful AI configurations from independent commercial entities?
The fears appear to be that the NPU or software that uses it will be designed to do things that violate the user's privacy, for example the Recall software which collects a lot of sensitive information without asking and then stores it in such a way that it becomes a juicy target to anyone with local access. They may also fear that Microsoft will start copying that to their own servers, which the software does not currently do.
Attaching those fears to an NPU is not really useful. All the unnecessary data collection in Recall is done on the CPU. The NPU just performs parallel calculations. If you mistrust Microsoft's intentions with an NPU, then you should have no more trust in their software on an environment without one. It is possible that an NPU may have a vulnerability in it, but to some extent, it is less likely than a CPU is because an NPU's interfaces are quite simple and restrictive in comparison.
I am not particularly concerned about privacy with an NPU, but I also don't have any software that would benefit by using one. Like many coprocessors that were once optional extras and are now considered required components, it's possible that a lot of software figures out a way to speed something up by using an NPU and they become standard for that reason. The Copilot mark for computers appears to be an attempt to do this the other way round, namely to convince people to buy an NPU in the hope that something will eventually do something useful with it. Admittedly, the more people buy one, the more programmers will try to optimize for it, but I don't care about the speed of adoption if it turns out to be as useful as predicted.
These are not good people, and they are not doing good things. These are evil people, doing evil things, directed to do so by other evil people. Their goal is to destroy you, to enrich themselves. It's evil, on evil, on evil, doing evil, and there is no way out. You don't have a choice. They will force you to use it to get a job, work, and to live, just like the "smart" phone was the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. You simply don't have a choice. You will join, or die.
They are very successful at targeting the people who control your life. Your life is not your own. Your information is not your own. Your thoughts do not belong to you. You will join and welcome them into your lives, or cease to be able to function and live.
The war is lost. Big brother won.
I know in my case, I can allow myself to go insane rocking back and forth screaming "robots! robots! AI! Computers!" until they put me in a nursing home to face a robot care taker, or join the fascist regime. There is no way out, and many young people see it the same. They are very eager to join the new nazi youth. It was social media that destroyed humanity. Hearts and minds have been virtualized. Welcome to the matrix. It might be time to swallow the pill, and ignore the world around me.Nothing matters but the machine now.
All this AI BS seems to me like we've reached the point where we have so much computing power and we simply don't know what to do with it. All the features have already been crammed into operating systems, office tools, CAD products, etc., so now we are attempting to branch out but have run out of ideas.
"Businesses want to move to AI PCs but not pay a premium as there are no compelling business cases," said Ranjit Atwal, research director for Gartner's Quantitative Innovation Team.
Bollocks. If there's no compelling business case, why would businesses even want the upheaval of moving. Gartner continue to bullshit as usual, even when there are some reasonable points buried in the garbage (e.g. users can't be arsed, don't see the point, no compelling business case).
People don't want or need an AI PC. Nobody has come up with a useful AI feature that users want or need.
This is all just pumped-up hype whose goal is to a) inflate said companies stock prices b) force another upgrade cycle for no reason other than to squeeze cash out of consumers' pockets.
You can lead horses to water.... The Hi-Fi shops floggng this are missing the point. People don't need it. Some enterprises have had AI related leaks, there are assumptions made that should never have been made. Hide it. If it helps with battery longevity, and core/process scheduling, maybe.
In any case for the last 10 years we have tried to make as much as possible optional to get the price down. No optical drive, 2 USB ports, No ethernet, SIM support as an option, soldered RAM. Why pay more for something still at proof of concept stage?
That’s a good point: there’s no real good reason that a desktop or laptop PC needs NPU processing, especially if the LLMs are running in the cloud. But, data centers are expensive, both botnets and SETI@home solved that problem years ago: get your consumers to pay for the electricity and processing power you need by using their machine’s “downtime” to offload data processing, even if it’s got nothing to do with their needs: they’re just unwilling and unknowing sources of power and compute in the matrix… and, just in case anyone else gets any ideas of stealing their capacity, make sure every PC has TPM, so that only Microsoft’s bonnet can run on your NPU Windows 12 PC…
...the problem is literally the price point...there is nothing these Copilot+ PCs can do that any other high performance PC can't when it comes to running AI models.
When we start seeing NPUs in triple digit TOPS, it might be worth the premium...until then, while the NPUs are basically the same as a cheap SBC with an NPU equipped ARM CPU, the premium doesn't make sense.
There's nothing new here other than Microsoft trying to get in early and flogging underpowered kit. We've seen it before many times, just this time it's AI. Usually, Microsoft would be doing the same thing, but later.
These AI features are not remotely useful, other than being a search alternative.
I get they can generate a template for code, but it still needs tweaking and was probably available of GitHub (whose IP BTW?).
Also for written correspondence and business plans needing specificity, it is absolutely hopeless and just wastes people time.
I my opinion, using CoPilot for detailed writing reduces productivity by about 40%. A desire to use CoPilot or ChatGPT in my mind is a sign of low IQ.
Interesting to see so many CEOs hoodwinked by it.
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