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, as I’ve been eager to try out these Arm-based, Snapdragon X-powered, Copilot Plus PCs (or whatever you want to call them) since the chipset was first announced in late 2023. It sounds too good to be true to combine the battery-friendly, AI-ready and ultra-connected benefits of the best smartphones with performance that rivals the best laptops in their class. Unfortunately, after just 48 hours with the new Surface Laptop, I’m starting to feel like this might be true.

I must emphasize this by saying that the office use element of the Copilot Plus PC experience is fine, great even. I’m doing a flawless job of writing this article, and the battery stats indicate that I’ve enjoyed two hours and 36 minutes of screen-on time since the last charge, and I still have 76% to go. The battery life on this thing seems pretty solid, so at least that’s one promise checked off the list.

That said, several hiccups over the past 48 hours have undoubtedly tilted my final review in a more negative direction. In fact, app emulation is hit and miss, and I don’t really understand what all the AI ​​fuss is about since Recall is on hiatus until later in the year.

But first, let’s wrestle with this whole 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 applications is sublime when 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 built for Arm processors. Frankly, I’m surprised by how few of the apps I use every day don’t have native versions. Libre Office, Lightroom Classic, Discord, Asana, and every Steam game (of course) all rely on emulation. I knew my more niche apps from smaller developers, including Feishin and Jellyfin for media, would rely on emulation, but it’s surprising that so few major projects are still on board at this stage. It’s not that Windows on Arm is new.

As for native support, I’ve used Photoshop, Slack, Spotify, Zoom, and the three major web browsers. The latter is where Microsoft gets its “90% of user minutes running on Arm natively” nonsense, but they all work fine. Still, I’ve encountered some black screen issues when running GPU-heavy pages in Edge with an external monitor not showing up in Firefox. Even native apps aren’t immune to problems, it seems.

Let’s be generous and say I installed a 50/50 split of Arm and x64 apps. The problem remains that the emulation performance feels so inconsistent. For example, Lightroom Classic (just update it already, Adobe!) works flawlessly for photo editing, but exporting JPEGs can bring this and other applications to their knees. On the other hand, Asana and Discord run like a race of eggs and spoons: stop, start, pause and load. This is where Prism’s performance is a letdown; UI elements could temporarily freeze, sometimes system-wide, and music playback would even pause for a split second. These issues don’t happen often, but when they do, you’re immediately reminded that you’re not getting the best Windows experience out there.

But that is not the cardinal sin. No, the fact that most VPN apps don’t work because they don’t have native Arm versions yet could be an absolute dealbreaker for some. I often need a VPN to view regional website versions, and luckily I can still do that in my browser. However, many others have stricter requirements, including those in the commercial space. Fortunately, VPNs are the only apps I’ve come across 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 years, and we’ve had commercial products for six of those. How are we still discussing app development and emulation issues that Apple eliminated in about half that time? It’s borderline ridiculous.

Okay, enough of the emulator bashing: the Snapdragon X Elite is powerful enough to brute force its way through (most) minor issues. Let’s talk AI: After all, it’s the key marketing material with these Copilot Plus PCs. So what is the Plus fuss about? It’s a little hard to say. Windows Recall felt like the flagship, but that’s being put on hold while Microsoft addresses some very legitimate privacy concerns.

Without Recall, Copilot takes center stage as the most obvious AI feature for the user, but the experience feels much the same as on regular PCs. Yes, the dedicated Copilot button to open 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 other than everyday queries or re-reading formatting the foreign paragraph. With Copilot icons on the toolbar and the Edge browser, I probably pressed the physical key three or four times in a few days. It hardly seems worth sacrificing good old right ctrl.

Other AI features are present, but these are more niche. I haven’t found a use for the admittedly impressive Live Captions feature (yet), and it’s often gruesome to ask Cocreator to draw something with people in it. Still, I found Studio Effects more useful for a few Discord calls. Eye contact looks a bit creepy, but auto-framing and the bokeh portrait function work very well. That said, pretty much all conferencing apps have built-in background options without the need for an NPU, so it hardly feels new and exciting.

The other AI feature I came across was purely by accident. While I was comparing some AAA games, I noticed a pop-up appear in a number of titles informing me that AI Super Resolution had been activated. If you can live with a measly 1,152 x 768 resolution, AI upscaling pushes several games from sub-30fps to a much more comfortable 50-60fps. Snapdragon Again, the list of supported titles is far from complete, and the settings menu to manually configure .exes is tucked away far out of reach.

And I think this sums up my entire experience with this Copilit Plus PC so far: it feels unfinished. Are incomplete AI features and unpolished emulation acceptable tradeoffs for better-than-average battery life? I’m not so sure prices are above $1,000. I feel like that sums up my final review right there.

Still, we may be at the tipping point in this chicken-and-egg scenario: more powerful and interesting laptops make developers pay attention, spurring more native Arm builds, and the entire ecosystem improves rapidly. I hope so, but that is no consolation for the bitter taste of disappointment I am currently experiencing. The last two days don’t feel all that different from the last seven years of trying to justify the compromises.