A Short History of Microsoft

The saying goes that if you try too hard, you’ll do too little. And that’s what’s happening to the first Copilot+ laptops, which perhaps should have saved that label for later. The reason is simple: the promise of Copilot+ is currently unfulfilled. We were able to see this recently at the presentation of Lenovo’s Copilot+ laptops. The devices look spectacular, but despite all their virtues, the AI ​​functions seemed to want to steal the show.

A Short History of Microsoft

They didn’t succeed. Not at all. At least based on the time I spent with these devices testing these features. Granted, it was barely an hour, but the few demos they had prepared made it clear that these types of features are disappointing today.

This AI doesn’t excite

To start, there’s Cocreator. Microsoft’s tool theoretically allows its AI to generate fantastic images with a quick little sketch and a text prompt. However, our tests were a disappointment.

In my case, I drew an eye and asked Cocreator to generate an image of an angry-looking eye. What it generated didn’t even look like an eye. Maybe I was asking too much. I changed the prompt to “a blue eye.” Cocreator just generated a blue brush stroke, but that had nothing to do with what I was looking for. What if I added a kind of tear and said “a crying eye”? Once again, as if nothing happened.

There is indeed a “Creativity” bar available in the tool that allows you to take that base sketch and let the AI ​​imagine everything else, but as soon as you raise that bar, the result looks very little like the sketch and includes many details and elements that were not even there.

In this case, the images are more striking, but in reality, the sketch would not even be necessary for that: it seems that the prompt is the only thing that is taken into account for the generation of these images.

I was also not impressed by the Studio Effects features, a series of filters that we can activate during a video conference and that, for example, allow us to apply blur to the background or some light effects to our face so that it has a certain “watercolor” finish, for example.

The results are identical to those we could get, for example, with the background blur that video conferencing tools already offer, and here Microsoft argues that we are offloading these tasks from the CPU and GPU, which are now handled by the NPU. The option may be interesting if we want to leave more room for maneuver to the rest of the components, but it is still not particularly noticeable.

And what could excites is delayed

The only option that seems worthwhile, Microsoft Recall, won’t even be available on these new machines initially. Here I was able to test Recall on one of Lenovo’s machines. Some of the team members had been using the laptop for a couple of days, which allowed them to at least minimally test the feature.

The interface is unique: most of the screen is occupied by a panel where the captures recorded by Recall during the activity are previewed. At the top is the time bar that we can scroll through, and as we do so, these captures will change to show precisely the evolution of our work sessions.

In Recall, we can not only search using the time bar, but also through a search field that allows us to use any term. If Recall has registered and tagged that term in the database, it will appear in the search results as thumbnails of the screenshots related to the searched term.

The feature proved effective and powerful in those brief tests, and it certainly suggests a different way of working — if Microsoft can convince users that there’s no threat to privacy.

That is precisely the major drawback of Recall, which was released too quickly. This was demonstrated by the fact that shortly after it became available, serious security problems were revealed that called into question Microsoft’s privacy guarantees.

The company had to backtrack and make a difficult but wise decision: not to include Recall in Copilot+ laptops for the time being. The feature will be available to install by members of the Windows Insider program, and their feedback will help make the future global rollout much more reasonable.

But we are looking at the most promising laptops in years.

Problems with the rollout of AI features are clouding the launch of devices that in almost every other way offer truly fantastic advantages. The promises of the Snapdragon X Elite chips are there, and it might be a good idea to focus on the present and what those chips offer, and not so much on a hypothetical future in which AI could be useful (or not).

Certainly, the first independent analyses, make it clear that the battery life of these devices is truly remarkable and practically doubles that of their predecessors.

But there is also good news in the overall performance of both native applications compiled for ARM and x86 applications that run with emulation almost as if they were the real thing. Although it depends on the scenario and the application, it is normal to not notice at all that an application is native or emulated.

The only major drawback for many users will be the lack of video games that run natively on this SoC. The tests that have appeared in analyses such as that of PC Gamer make it clear that the GPUs of the Snapdragon X Elite are modest here and it is important to insist: that computers with these chips are not gaming laptops.

It will therefore be interesting to be able to analyze these devices to confirm all these impressions and put them to the test, but as of today one thing is clear: even without the much-vaunted AI functions – which for the moment are what they are – it seems that we are facing the most promising batch of laptops in recent years.

By win12

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