To go along with its redesigned Surface Pro, at its event today, Microsoft gave the tablet's keyboard a makeover too by adding improved stability, better haptics and even a bold font option for added readability. However, starting at $350, it won't come cheap.
Available for pre-order today alongside Microsoft's revamped
We knew more computers were coming that would feature a native version of Microsoft's AI Copilot toolset, but we didn't quite know how many were set to be announced. It's practically an AI avalanche. Companies like Dell, Acer and HP have all just announced computers that have adopted Microsoft's AI software and NVIDIA's AI hardware. The age of the AI PC is upon us.
These Copilot PCs could really change how we interact with computers, bringing natural language nuance to a bevy of everyday tasks. The PCs all feature a dedicated key to bring up Copilot and are stuffed with Arm-based Snapdragon X CPUs, which include powerful onboard neural processing units (NPUs) for AI tasks. While similar in some ways, each of the following computers bring their own ideas to the AI table. Sorry Apple fans. These are all Windows 11 PCs. Let's get to it.
Microsoft just couldn't wait until its Build developer conference properly starts tomorrow to drop some knowledge bombs. The company held a pre-Build event on Monday that wasn't livestreamed for the public, but it made some major announcements on the AI and Surface fronts.
Its vision for so-called AI PCs is taking shape with Copilot PCs, which are designed to run many generative AI processes locally instead of in the cloud. Along with its own Surface systems that will adopt this format, several other manufacturers are making Copilot PCs too. Microsoft also detailed some of the upcoming AI features for Windows 11.
Copilot PCs
The big news coming out of this event is Microsoft's vision for AI-centric PCs. Microsoft's take on this is the Copilot PC.
To qualify as a Copilot PC, a system will need to have neural processing unit (NPU) performance of at least 40 TOPs (trillions of operations per second) and have 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage at minimum. This is so the PC can run generative AI processes locally rather than via the cloud. That's a strategy we've seen in some recent flagship smartphones, such as Google Pixel devices.
Microsoft says it has completely reimagined the Win
We've been hearing rumblings for months now that Microsoft was working on so-called "AI PCs." At a pre-Build event, the company spelled out its vision.
Microsoft is calling its version Copilot PCs, which CEO Satya Nadella described as a "new class of Windows PCs." These contain hardware designed to handle more generative AI Copilot processes locally, rather than relying on the cloud. Doing so requires a chipset with a neural processing unit (NPU), and manufacturers such as Qualcomm have been laying the groundwork with chips like the Snapdragon X Elite.
Microsoft is taking a partner-first approach to making Copilot PCs. Along with chipmakers like AMD, Intel and Qualcomm, major OEMs including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo are on board.
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft EVP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, said during the event that the company has completely reimagined what a Windows PC is. He claimed that Copilot PCs are the most powerful PCs ever (we'll need to see if that assertion holds up in real-world testing). Despite that, Mehdi said, the first generation of laptops are "unbelievably thin, light and beautiful."
Microsoft is also calling these the Surface Pro 11th Edition and the Surface Laptop 7th Edition.
Both the Surface Pro and the Surface Laptop are the consumer versions of the Surface Pro 10 for Business and the Surface Laptop 6 for Business, which debuted in March. Those chips included more conventional Core Ultra chips inside.
The two new Surfaces use the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, a chip licensed from Arm. Nine PC makers signed on to use the Snapdragon X Elite chip, including heavyweights like Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft. The X Elite has already proven to be extremely fast and even the new Snapdragon X Plus derivative still outperforms a Core Ultra, Qualcomm claims. Battery life was always the Snapdragon's strong suit. Now Windows on Arm PCs have an opportunity to combine long battery life with competitive performance.
And what does this new Windows on Arm generation mean? For one thing, Arm executives are claiming that the days of laggy, incompatible Windows on Arm apps are basical
Acer just announced a new laptop that takes full advantage of Microsoft's Copilot AI technology, the Swift 14 AI. This is one of the first PCs with Copilot built directly into the system, so you can expect some serious AI bells and whistles.
To that end, there are plenty of new system-wide tools that could radically change how we interact with personal computers. The Recall tool is an amplified search function that lets users find missing files via natural conversation. It's sort of like an AI Sherlock Holmes, only for misplaced Word documents and the like. You describe any clues you remember about the file and Recall starts sleuthing. That certainly beats typing in the first letter and hoping autocorrect does the rest.
That isn't the only new way to find stuff. The Swift 14 AI features an
And that's not all. The Dell Latitude 7455 uses the Snapdragon X Elite, and the slower, slightly less powerful Snapdragon X Plus will ship as part of the Latitude 7455, too, as well as the Latitude 5455, Inspiron 14 and Inspiron 14 Plus.
We knew that Dell had signed up to use the Snapdragon X Elite as early as last October, when nine PC makers committed to supporting Qualcomm's new X Elite processor. We didn't know as much about the Snapdragon X Plus, which uses a cut-down version of the Elite without the turbo boost options. But it seems that Dell is even more committed to the X Plus than the X Elite.
Presumably, these will be Copilot PCs, offering the AI benefits of features that Microsoft announced Monday Those include Recall, which will allow you to hunt down information on an explorable timeline; Live Captions with AI-generated captions of streamed audio; Auto Super Resolution; and Cocreator, the AI art generator within Microsoft Paint. All have Copilot keys.
Dell XPS 13 9345
The Dell XPS 13 9345 goes on sale today, but will ship "later this year," Dell says, for a starting price of $1,299.
On paper, Dell's Snapdragon-powered XPS 13 is very similar to the existing
You'd be forgiven for being skeptical, though. Since the launch of Windows RT-powered Surface in 2012, Microsoft has proven it can't be trusted to deliver a decent OS experience on Arm. That device couldn't run legacy x86 apps (who would want to do that in Windows, right?), and it was far slower than PCs with Intel and AMD CPUs. Windows on Arm slowly improved over the years, to the point where it had serviceable emulation on the Surface Pro 9 5G. But that slate still couldn't keep up with its Intel-equipped sibling, especially when it struggled to emulate popular apps like Chrome.
Microsoft says it reworked Windows 11 schedulers to take advantage of Arm capabilities and AI workloads. There's also a new driver compute model that recognizes neural engines more like how Windows sees CPUs and GPUs, as well as AI APIs built directly into the OS. Basically, Arm hardware should no longer feel like an afterthought and developers should be able to tap into AI capabilities more easily.
While Microsoft is pushing the availability of more native Arm apps for Windows 11, it's hard to deny the importance of supporting older software. That's where the Prism emulator comes in. Microsoft claims it's around 20 percent faster than its previous emulator, and it also worked to impr
As part of Microsoft's big push into AI, Lenovo is releasing two new Windows 11 laptops featuring Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip. First up is the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, which is essentially Lenovo's most popular enterprise notebook with an Arm-based chip with a beefy NPU instead of an x86 processor from Intel or AMD. But the more interesting of the two is the Yoga Slim 7x, which features an all-new chassis that's designed to take better advantage of the X Elite's blend of performance and power efficiency. And while Lenovo won't say it outright, the latter is basically the company's attempt at making a MacBook Air rival for Windows.
Before we get too deep into the specifics, it's important to note that I tried out a pre-production version of the Slim 7x that didn't have any of Microsoft's new Copilot features, so this is strictly an early look at the laptop's hardware. But from what I saw, there's a lot to like.
Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
The laptop's highlight features are its 14-inch 3K 90Hz OLED display and its sleek aluminum chassis. The screen features a color gamut that covers 100 percent of DCI-P3 while delivering up to 500 nits of brightness. Above the display, there's Lenovo's signature communication tab, which allows the Slim 7x to support an FHD webcam plus IR sensors for Windows Hello along with quad mics, but without needing to have super thick bezels.
Lenovo has announced it's joining Microsoft and Qualcomm's foray into AI-based computing with a new lineup of laptops specifically tuned for the Snapdragon X Elite architecture. For the same price as Lenovo's other laptops, you get to be the first to foray into the world with an ARM-based chip tuned specifically for…
