Microsoft held two major events this week, with the biggest of the bunch taking place on Monday, May 20th. The company, alongside Qualcomm and a number of hardware partners, introduced the first wave of true AI PCs with Copilot+. In a single day, all at the same time, 14 new laptops were announced, with most of them becoming available to pre-order that same day. Outside of events like CES, that's kind of unprecedented, at least in recent history.

But it's easy to see why it was this way. With Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors hitting the market and enabling a new breadth of AI capabilities, this new wave of laptops is the most excited I've ever been for new laptop hardware. And it could truly change what we expect out of our laptops.

The biggest shakeup since the Surface line

It's going to be a dramatic shift

At 28 years old, and having only followed the computing industry very closely since around 2013, I'm not going to pretend I was there to live every moment in the history of laptops and truly feel the impact of each new generation. But looking back through some of the landmark moments in the industry, there isn't one specific moment when you can really say the paradigm shifted significantly across the industry. Of course, in the early days of portable computers, they weren't really laptops, so when that became a possibility, it was a big deal (though most of these non-laptops predate Windows as a mainstream operating system). And laptops naturally kept getting smaller, more powerful, and looking better as technology advanced. But did a single event set a new standard the same way we're seeing this week?

To my knowledge, the closest we've come to something like that was the introduction of Windows 8 and the Surface line. Of course, Windows 8 failed miserably, but this entire era was Microsoft trying to redefine the PC. Windows 8 was built from the ground up for tablet PCs, and Microsoft wanted to lead the charge and show what other PCs should be able to do with the Surface Pro line and (to some extent) Surface RT. Sure, tablet PCs existed before, but was anyone really using them outside of some specific business scenarios? Microsoft wanted tablets to be the new standard, and we got some really cool ideas, whether they were tablets with detachable keyboards or 2-in-1 laptops with hinges that could rotate all around. Convertibles are still my favorite form factor for a laptop to this day, so I have a special appreciation for what Microsoft kickstarted in the Windows 8 era and the early years of Surface.

Of course, I was also a lot younger and less jaded back then, so I think my feelings were more unbridled than they are today. That makes my excitement for this new era of Windows laptops on Snapdragon all the more remarkable.

I no longer have to be jealous of MacBooks

Give me that all-day battery life, please

For all of its flaws, I love Windows. I grew up with it and have used it all my life, and using it is usually second nature to me. I've never really considered buying a PC that didn't run Windows... until 2020 came around.

In 2020, Apple delivered on the long-rumored plans of transitioning away from Intel and onto its own custom silicon based on the Arm architecture. Apple Silicon, as it was called, made its debut in MacBooks on October 2020, with the Apple M1 chip powering the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, as well as the Mac Mini. These laptops redefined what you can expect out of a laptop. All-day battery life and instant wake were now real and didn't come with huge compromises. Everyone looked at the MacBook as the new gold standard for what laptops should be able to do, and that only got more real as Apple introduced new Apple Silicon chips that were more powerful yet still incredibly efficient.

And as a Windows fan, all you could really do was look over the fence and see how everyone was blown away by what these processors have to offer. I have no doubt that the coolness of it all was exaggerated by the general population in a way that typically happens with Apple, but some things you just can't deny. 20+ hours of battery life have never been close to a possibility on Windows. Even breaking past 10 hours is extremely difficult in real-life scenarios. Plus, we were seeing fanless PCs that still performed well, something totally inconceivable on a Windows laptop.

I never bought into the Apple ecosystem, but for the past three years and a half, I have been tempted on multiple occasions. But I just knew I wouldn't like using macOS, so I kept waiting while Microsoft just kind of seemed to pretend it cared about Arm. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 was a good step compared to its predecessors, but it was nothing next to what Apple was putting out, and everyone knew it. We took what we got.

But now things are different. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite are top-of-the-line chips designed from the ground-up for Windows PCs to take on Apple Silicon, and they seem to be delivering. Performance on these chips can actually outpace Intel or AMD's processors, all while using less power. Maybe it's not quite on the same level as Apple Silicon (after all, Apple has been refining its silicon for four generations now), but for Windows PCs, it's a major breakthrough, and it will be close enough to a MacBook that I don't have to second-guess if using Windows is the right choice.

And of course, what's great about the Windows space is that there's so much variety of hardware. I can get those same great benefits without being locked to whatever form factor Apple thinks I should use. I want a 2-in-1, so I can get a Surface Pro 11, or I can wait until a proper convertible model comes from another company. Heck, since I like mini PCs so much, maybe I can even get a Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows. There are lots more options, and there will be even more in the near future. I'm counting the days until I can get my hands on one of these Snapdragon PCs.

AI is finally starting to take shape

It's more than a chatbot now

The AI buzz that started in early 2023 is something that's really passed me by. Conceptually, it's kind of cool, but most of the uses of AI you usually see mentioned are more troublesome than useful to me. What's the point of Copilot if asking it a question takes about as much work as using Google, and even then I probably have to use Google to make sure it isn't spouting nonsense? And AI-generated images or videos, while they have their place, I can't see most use cases as much more than a way to try and devalue human artistry and creativity, on top of raising concerns about deepfakes.

But now, with true AI PCs kickstarted by these Snapdragon devices (though Intel and AMD will follow suit, to be fair), Copilot+ is introducing things that are actually useful and help you in the flow of what you're doing, which is what AI should do. The biggest feature is Recall, which saves snapshots of everything you've done on your PC and can bring it up at any time so you can quickly get back to it. More than that, you can search for what you doing using natural language. Ask about that document you wrote about penguins, and Recall will find any document you wrote with the word "penguin" in it.

Live captions with translation are a big deal, too. It's not entirely new, as I believe Android was doing something similar a while ago, but on Windows, until now, Live captions could only caption the audio or video in the same language. Now, they can not only caption it but translate the captions in real-time, and it all runs locally on your PC. This is a huge deal for accessibility, and hopefully it doesn't work just in English, because I can see these being so useful for so many people.

This is the kind of stuff AI needs to be able to do. It needs to be woven into the experience in a way that allows it to help naturally, and Microsoft is finally finding ways to do just that. And perhaps more importantly, with AI being built into every layer of Windows and the company opening the APIs up for developers, the community can find that many more uses for it. This is just the beginning, and I'm sure we'll see some really cool stuff in the future.

Bring on those Snapdragon PCs

Needless to say, I really want one of these PCs on my desk as soon as possible. I'm not even overly concerned with the brand it comes from, as long as I can try this new hardware from Qualcomm and the new AI features in Windows. Bring them on!