Microsoft has a new line of PC laptops that are just now arriving. They’re called Copilot+ PCs, and small business owners have good reasons to be excited about them. But not all of the marketing hype around these new machines is worth paying attention to — at least not yet. Here’s what to know.
What Are Copilot+ PCs?
Copilot+ PCs are Microsoft’s second-generation AI PCs, specially built with both hardware and software designs to take advantage of Microsoft's latest AI tools. They have a neural processing unit (NPU) that runs separately from the main processor and graphics chips, and there’s a dedicated Copilot key on the keyboard that instantly launches the Copilot AI assistant (Microsoft’s integrated answer to generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini).
Most importantly, Copilot+ PCs are the first Windows PCs to feature high-performing Arm-based processors.
Why does that matter? We’ll try to keep the geek speak to a minimum here, but this is a really big deal: you may remember a few years ago when Apple switched to its own custom processors in its Mac lineup. (These were also Arm-based processors.) All of a sudden, even entry-level Macs had insane battery life and performance that ran circles around most equivalent PCs.
Copilot+ PCs are the first non-Apple computers built using a similar type of Arm chip. These laptops are capable of competing with MacBooks in terms of battery life and performance. The performance differences are notable enough that businesses who make the switch will likely notice an immediate difference in day-to-day computing, and a marked difference in resource-intensive tasks.
Copilot+ PCs Boast Wide Compatibility
One of the reasons it’s taken a little while for the PC market to take this evolutionary step is that switching from an Intel-based to an Arm-based architecture creates compatibility issues. They are different enough that software written for one type doesn’t always operate correctly on the other.
Obviously, in the business market, compatibility is deeply important. No business would want to switch to a new, faster type of PC if it can’t actually run any of the software they need to do business.
Most major business and productivity apps already went through the trouble of rebuilding Arm-based versions for Mac users, and it’s a relatively light lift to adapt those for PC/Windows.
But what about more obscure apps for which there will never be a version built for Arm? Apple solved this through emulation, and Microsoft is doing the same. Copilot+ PCs can run most Intel based apps via emulation, though performance is not as strong when doing so.
One area to watch out for if it matters to you is gaming: emulation (and the performance hit it brings) doesn’t always work well for games. But in the business market, this is usually not a significant factor.
New Capabilities, But Some Delayed
This new generation of PCs will be capable of quite a lot in the coming days, but for now there isn’t all that much in terms of new features. The big exclusive feature, Recall, is supposed to allow users to find anything they’ve ever worked on at any point in time by searching with natural language. But it’s delayed, possibly for a long time, due to significant security concerns that cropped up late in development.
Other new features that take advantage of the NPU hardware in these PCs include:
- Microsoft Paint Cocreator enhances your drawings as you draw them
- Restyle Image in the Photos app uses AI to, well, restyle your images
- Image Creator generates AI-created images based on your prompts
- Live Captions for real-time transcription and translation of any audio source
- Better studio effects for your webcam
Of these, most business users won’t get a lot out of the first three, but the last two could be really helpful. And bear in mind that these are only the capabilities Microsoft is shipping at launch. As third-party software makers start designing with this hardware in mind, expect them to take advantage of the hardware capabilities in increasingly innovative ways.