I’ve spent 48 hours with a Copilot Plus PC and I’m already worried

I was very excited when my Surface Laptop pre-order arrived two days ago, because I’ve been looking forward to trying out these Arm-based, Snapdragon X (or whatever you want to call them) Copilot Plus PCs for the chipset. was first announced in late 2023. Taking the battery-saving, AI-enabled, and ultra-connected benefits of best-in-class smartphones and combining them with performance that rivals best-in-class laptops sounds too good to be true. Unfortunately, after just 48 hours with the new Surface Laptop, I’m starting to think that might be accurate.

I have to caveat this by stating that the office use element of the Copilot Plus PC experience is perfectly fine, if not great. It’s working flawlessly as I write this article, and the battery stats say I’ve gotten two hours and 36 minutes of screen time since it was last charged, with 76 percent still to go. The battery life on this device seems pretty solid, so that’s at least a promise checked off the list.

That said, several hiccups over the past 48 hours undoubtedly pivot my possible review in a more negative direction. Namely, app emulation is hit or miss, and I don’t really see what the fuss is about, given that Recall is on hiatus until later in the year.

But before we get to that, let’s wrestle with this whole running Windows on Arm issue. Yes, the battery life benefits seem to be there (although more testing will tell), and the performance of native Arm apps is sublime if you can find them. And that’s the problem: I rely heavily on Microsoft’s Prism emulator layer to run x64 applications that aren’t yet natively designed for Arm processors. Honestly, I’m surprised how few apps I use daily don’t have a native version. Libre Office, Lightroom Classic, Discord, Asana, and any Steam game (of course) all rely on emulation. I knew that my more specialized applications from smaller developers, including Feishin and Jellyfin for media, would rely on emulation, but it’s surprising that so few large projects aren’t integrated at this point. It’s not like Windows on Arm is new.

As for native support, I’ve used Photoshop, Slack, Spotify, Zoom, and the big three web browsers. The latter is where Microsoft gets its “90% of usage minutes run on native Arm” nonsense, but it all works just fine. Still, I’ve encountered a number of black screen issues when running GPU-intensive pages in Edge with an external monitor that doesn’t appear with Firefox. It seems that even native applications are not immune to problems.

Let’s be generous and say I have a 50/50 split of Arm and x64 apps installed. The problem remains that the emulation performance seems so hit or miss. For example, Lightroom Classic (just update it, Adobe!) works great when editing photos, but exporting JPEGs can bring it and other apps to its knees. On the other hand, Asana and Discord work like an egg-and-spoon race: stop, start, pause, and load. This is where Prism’s performance is disappointing; UI elements can freeze temporarily, sometimes system-wide, and music playback has even been interrupted for a split second. These issues don’t occur very often, but when they do, you’re instantly reminded that you’re not getting the best Windows experience available.

But that is not the cardinal sin. No, the fact that most VPN apps don’t work because they don’t yet have native versions of Arm could be an absolute deal breaker for some. I often need a VPN to view regional website versions and luckily I can still do this in my browser. However, many others have stricter requirements, especially in the business sector. Fortunately, VPNs are the only apps I’ve encountered that flat out refuse to work.

Now, I would give Microsoft and developers a bit of a break if Windows on Arm was a brand new initiative, but Windows on Arm and Microsoft’s emulator have been around for seven years, and we’ve had commercial products for six of them. them. How do we still discuss the app development and emulation problems that Apple eliminated in half the time? This borders on ridiculous.

OK, enough emulator bashing – the Snapdragon X Elite is powerful enough to power its way through (most) minor issues. Let’s talk about AI: after all, it is the key marketing support for these Copilot Plus PCs. So what is all the fuss about Plus? It’s a little difficult to say. Windows Recall seemed to be the flagship feature, but that’s being pushed to the side while Microsoft fixes some very justified privacy concerns.

Without recall, Copilot takes center stage as the most obvious user-facing AI feature, but the experience is much the same as on regular PCs. Yes, the dedicated Copilot button to display a web app window is a good idea (if you use AI a lot), but I still don’t trust Copilot (or any other text generator) for anything either beyond mundane questions or to reformat the strange. paragraph. With the Copilot icons displayed on the Edge toolbar and browser, I probably pressed the physical key three or four times in a few days. It’s hardly worth sacrificing good old straight control.

Other AI features are built in, but they are more specialized. I’ve yet to find a use for the admittedly impressive Live Captions feature, and asking Cocreator to draw something with people in it is often awful. Still, I found Studio Effects more useful for a few Discord calls. Eye Contact looks a little scary, but the auto-framing and portrait bokeh feature work great. That said, almost all conferencing apps have built-in background options without the need for an NPU, so this hardly seems new and exciting.

The other AI feature I encountered was purely by accident. While benchmarking some AAA games, I noticed a pop-up in a few titles informing me that AI Super Resolution was enabled. If you can live with a measly 1152×768 resolution, AI upscaling bumps several sub-30fps games to a much more comfortable 50-60fps. The Snapdragon Again, though, the list of supported titles is far from comprehensive, and the settings menu for manually configuring .exe files is well out of reach.

And I think that sums up my entire experience with this Copilit Plus PC so far: it doesn’t feel finished. Are incomplete AI features and imperfect emulation acceptable trade-offs for above-average battery life? I’m not so sure at prices well over $1,000. I feel like my possible criticism is summarized here.

Yet we may be at the tipping point in this chicken-and-egg scenario: More powerful and interesting laptops mean developers are paying attention, releasing more native versions of Arm, and the the entire ecosystem is improving rapidly. I hope so, but that’s no consolation for the bitter taste of disappointment I’m feeling right now. The last two days don’t seem so different from the last seven years of trying to justify compromise.