What’s so great about these new Copilot+ laptops and why are they worth your money? Updated: Jun 20, 2024 4:39 pm WePC is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more Table of Contents Table of Contents So you may have heard about the new range of Copilot+ PCs hitting the market, but what improvements does this new laptop tech bring exactly? Are these new mobile devices worth your hard-earned cash? The short answer is: yes, absolutely, but if you want a bit more detail before browsing our list of the best Copilot+ PCs, below we’ve laid out five good reasons why you should consider buying one. Microsoft Surface Laptop (15″, 7th Edition) CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Display: 15-inch, 2496 x 1664, 120Hz RAM: 16GB DDR5 Storage: 256GB / 512GB / 1TB SSD Touchscreen?: No Ports: 2 x USB-C, 1 x USB-A 3.1, microSD card reader; Headphone jack Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x (14.5″, 3K OLED) CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Display: 14.5-inch, 2944 x 1840, 90Hz, OLED RAM: 16GB DDR5 Storage: 512GB Touchscreen?: Yes Ports: 3 x USB-C HP OmniBook X 14 (14″, 2.2K) CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Display: 14-inch, 2240 x 1400, 60Hz RAM: 16GB DDR5 Storage: 1TB SSSD Touchscreen?: Yes Ports: 1 x USB-C 4 2.0, 1 x USB-C 3.2, 1 x USB-A 3.1, Headphone jack Dell XPS 13 (9345) (13.4″ OLED) CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Display: 13.4-inch, 2880 x 1800, 60Hz OLED RAM: 16GB DDR5 Storage: 512GB SSD Touchscreen?: Yes Ports: 2 x USB-C Dell Inspiron 14 Plus CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus Display: 14-inch, 2560 x 1600, 60Hz RAM: 16GB DDR5 Storage: 512GB Touchscreen?: Yes Ports: 2 x USB-C, 1 x USB-A 3.2, microSD card reader; Headphone jack Microsoft Surface Pro (13″, 11th Edition) CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus / Snapdragon X Elite Display: 13-inch, 2880 x 1920, LCD/OLED RAM: 16GB / 32GB DDR5 Storage: 256GB / 512GB / 1TB SSD Touchscreen?: Yes Ports: 2 x USB-C, 1 x USB-A 3.1, microSD card reader SPONSORED PIECE 1. Improved processor performance (raw & real) The most obvious benefit to picking up a Copilot+ PC is that it will be very fast indeed. At their 2024 Surface AI event conference, Microsoft laid out the (claimed) performance enhancements their Copilot+ standard machines would be capable of. Of course it’s always important to take such stats with a pinch of salt until independent third-party testing can take place, but we can assume that they will at least be fairly accurate. In terms of ‘raw performance’ i.e. how the new devices will perform in synthetnic tests, Microsoft say that their new range of Copilot+ devices will be ‘58% faster than a MacBook Air M3’ in multithreaded scenarios, which is quite some markup. In ‘real performance’ scenarios this will apparently translate into a 21% reduction in the time taken to encode a 4K video file (as measured by HandBrake ToS) compared to an Apple M3 chip. 2. Greatly improved battery life Probably the biggest win for Windows laptop users is that the new Copilot+ compliant chipsets from Qualcomm can finally compete with the M-series chipsets utilised by Apple in terms of power efficiency, meaning a massive boost to laptop battery duration. In the two battery tests conducted by Microsoft, the Snapdragon X Elite powered Surface Laptop outperformed the MacBook Air M3 chipset. The first of these tests, using a script to simulate general web browsing use, showed a moderate improvement of 1 hour 31 minutes over the 15 hours and 25 minutes achieved by the MacBook Air (i.e. 16 hours 56 mins in total), which is nevertheless very impressive and a great deal higher than what previous Windows laptops have been capable of. The second test measured battery life during a video playback test, which reportedly showed a massive 20% increase to the battery duration for the Qualcomm chip over the M3. 3. First-party AI applications from Microsoft The following are some of the initial Copilot+ AI-driven applications and processes that will be implemented at an operating system level into these news laptops. Some of them in particular promise to revolutionize productivity through making tasks and processes that much easier. Recall image source: Windows.com Although it will no longer be shipped alongside the first Copilot+ PCs and will instead come as a later optional update, first and foremost among the AI processes is ‘Recall’. This is an enhanced search feature that works through remembering your recent device usage, enabling you to seach for virtually anything you were previously looking at, whether it be a web page, a section of a document saved on your computer, or an image file, using even the most vague description of it. For example, if you were looking at an image of a piece of art and couldn’t remember the name of it, but typed in ‘painting of man holding flowers’ then the AI should be able to find it for you. There have been concerns about data privacy that have been raised about having the computer effectively record/remember your activities, so in response Microsoft has added additional layers of data protection, and also made Recall something you have to opt ‘into’ (not ‘out of’ as it was previously) before it activates, so if this bothers you, you can still pick up a Copilot+ PC and decide not to turn it on. Finally, the company came to the decision that Recall will be held back from the laptops’ introduction on June 18th whilst they do further work on some of the security concerns. Cocreator image source: Windows.com ‘Cocreator’ is an AI tool that uses a sketches made by the user in Microsoft Paint and/or a text description to generate its own polished looking image. This image can then be manipulated further by the user and transformed to be in line with particular styles. Live Captions image source: Microsoft ‘Live Captions’ is a feature that can be used across a whole host of applications, where it gives real-time translations from 44 languages (into English) for any video or audio call. This should make any international communication a great deal easier for businesses and personal users. Automatic Super Resolution (ASR) image source: Microsoft ASR works in a similar fashion to existing graphical upscaling/super resolution tech like Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, or Arc’s XeSS; except where these technologies use the GPU to essentially shortcut rendering images at higher resolutions (thus requiring less processing power) ASR uses the NPU. We look forward to seeing exactly how much this improves gaming performance, but it should be a boon to laptop gamers. 4. AI applications from Third-Party companies Besides Microsoft’s own applications of AI tech, other companies are leveraging the Copilot+ technology to enhance their existing software’s performance and functionality, or come up with entirely new applications. It’s early days so we don’t have details on much of this as of yet, but you can expect a massive amount to appear over the coming years, particularly since Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows, supported by their new AI Hub. Some of the ones Microsoft has shown off include accessibility apps like Cephable can use this AI tech to allow for commands to be made through the detectable head movements of the user, which is great for consumers with physical disabilities. Besides this the app just showed a boost to performance and power efficiency when using the new Copilot+ standard NPUs. djay Pro, a music app, now has a NeuralMix feature that can find and isolate different tracks within a song more easily as well as improve queuing for the DJ. Almost the whole Adobe creative suite including Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom and Express will gain additional functionality and performance boosts from NPU use. DaVinci Resolve will also see similar improvements. 5. All the above is available on a Windows machine Whilst MacOS is undoubtedly a user-friendly operating system with several advantages over Windows, it still does not have anywhere near the same level of support as Windows for a whole host of applications. Just to take the most obvious one – gaming – although there are games you can play on Mac the number is tiny compared to those available solely on Windows, and even those games will not perform as well on Mac devices with the same level of processing and graphical hardware power as a Windows machine as they are just less well optimised to the former OS. The fact all the above Copilot+ improvements effectively remove most of the advantages MacBooks had over Windows laptops is great, because now you can enjoy a similar level of performance but on a much more widely supported OS.
