I’ve spent 48 hours with the Copilot Plus computer and I’m already worried

When my Surface Laptop pre-order arrived two days ago, I was very excited because I wanted to try out these Arm, Snapdragon X, and Copilot Plus (or whatever you call them) based computers. was first announced at the end of 2023. Taking advantage of the best battery-friendly, AI-ready, ultra-connectivity smartphones and pairing it with performance that rivals best-in-class laptops sounds too good to be true. Unfortunately, after only 48 hours with the new Surface Laptop, I’m starting to feel like that might be accurate.

I should preface this by saying that the office use element of the Copilot Plus PC is perfectly fine, even great. It’s working flawlessly for me as of this writing and the battery stats say I’ve enjoyed two hours and 36 minutes of screen-on time since the last charge and I still have 76% left. Battery life on this thing seems pretty solid, so that’s at least one promise ticked off the list.

That said, a few hiccups over the past 48 hours undoubtedly skew my eventual review in a more negative direction. Specifically, app emulation is a success and I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about AI considering Recall is on hiatus until the end of the year.

But before we get to that, let’s deal with all this running Windows on Arm malarky. Yes, the battery life benefits seem to be there (although more testing will tell), and the performance of native Arm apps is amazing 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 built natively for Arm processors yet. Frankly, I’m surprised how few apps I use on a daily basis don’t have native versions. Libre Office, Lightroom Classic, Discord, Asana, and any game on Steam (obviously) rely on emulation. I knew that my more niche apps from smaller developers, including Feishin and Jellyfin for media, would rely on emulation, but it’s surprising that so few big projects aren’t on board at this stage. It’s not like Windows on Arm is new.

In terms of native support, I’ve used Photoshop, Slack, Spotify, Zoom, and the three major web browsers. This is where Microsoft gets their “90% of a user’s minutes running on native Arm” nonsense, but they all run great. However, I’ve been suffering from a number of black screen glitches when running GPU-intensive sites in Edge with an external monitor that doesn’t show up in Firefox. It seems that even native apps are not immune to problems.

Let’s be generous and say I have a 50/50 split of Arm and x64 applications installed. The problem remains that the emulation performance seems to be so bad. For example, Lightroom Classic (just update it already, Adobe!) runs flawlessly when editing photos, but exporting JPEGs can bring it and other apps to their knees. Asana and Discord, on the other hand, run like an egg-and-a-spoon race—stopping, starting, stopping, and loading. Here, Prism’s performance is disappointing; UI elements can freeze temporarily, sometimes system-wide, and I even had my music play cut out for a split second. These issues don’t happen very often, but when they do, it’s an immediate reminder that you’re not getting the best Windows experience.

But that is not the cardinal sin. No, the fact that most VPN apps don’t work because they don’t yet have native Arm versions can be an absolute deal breaker for some. I often need a VPN to look at regional versions of websites, and luckily I can still do that in my browser. However, many others have steeper requirements, including those in the enterprise space. Fortunately, VPNs are the only apps I’ve encountered that outright refuse to work.

Now, I’d cut Microsoft and the developers some slack if Windows on Arm was a brand new initiative, but Windows on Arm and Microsoft’s emulator have been around for seven damn years, and we’ve had commercial products for six of them. How are we still debating app development and emulation issues that Apple has removed in about half that time? It’s borderline ridiculous.

OK, enough hacking of the emulator – the Snapdragon X Elite is powerful enough to brute force its way through (most) minor issues. Let’s talk about AI – it is, after all, the key marketing material of these Copilot Plus computers. So what’s all the fuss about Plus? It’s a little hard to say. Windows Recall felt like a flagship, but that’s on hold while Microsoft irons out some very legitimate privacy concerns.

Without Recall, Copilot takes center stage as the most obvious user-oriented AI feature, but the experience is essentially the same as on regular computers. Yes, the dedicated Copilot button to bring up a web app window is a nice touch (if you use AI a lot), but I still don’t trust Copilot (or any other text generator) for anything beyond mundane questions or reformatting. paragraph. With the Copilot icons stuck to the toolbar and the Edge browser, I probably hit the physical key three or four times in a few days. It hardly seems worth sacrificing the good old proper ctrl.

Other AI features are on board, but are more specialized. I’ve yet to find a use for the admittedly impressive live caption feature (yet), and asking Cocreator to draw anything with people in it is often terrifying. Still, I found Studio Effects to be more useful for a few Discord calls. Eye Contact looks a little creepy, but the auto-framing and bokeh portrait functions work very well. That said, almost all conferencing apps have background capabilities baked in without needing an NPU, so it hardly seems new and exciting.

Another AI feature I encountered was purely random. While benchmarking some AAA games, I noticed a pop-up in a few titles informing me that AI Super Resolution had been activated. If you can live with the paltry 1152×768 resolution, AI upscaling will push a few games from sub-30fps to a much more comfortable 50-60fps. The Snapdragon X’s ability to play AAA PC games is surprisingly not terrible, and is probably the best example of the built-in NPU meaningfully enhancing the user experience. Again, however, the list of supported titles is far from complete, and the settings menu for manual .exe configuration is hidden out of reach.

And I think that sums up my whole experience with this Copilit Plus computer so far – it doesn’t feel like it’s finished. Are incomplete AI features and unpolished emulation acceptable trade-offs for better-than-average battery life? For prices well over $1000, I’m not so sure. I feel like that sums up my eventual review.

Still, we may be at an inflection point in this chicken-and-egg scenario: more powerful and interesting laptops mean developers will pay attention, boot more native Arm builds, and the entire ecosystem will improve quickly. There’s hope here, but that’s no consolation for the bitter taste of disappointment I’m experiencing right now. The last two days are no different from the last seven years of trying to justify compromises.