Microsoft ushered in what the company billed as the future of computing this year, as 2024 witnessed the introduction of the Copilot+ PC, the hardware side of its huge bet on AI that began with the Copilot AI itself (formerly Bing Chat). Those AI laptops were a highlight for Microsoft this year, make no mistake – although the software giant did make quite a few mistakes elsewhere, sadly. Notably with Windows 11 and that controversial Recall feature, alongside a stream of unfortunate bugs that plagued the OS.
Join us for an in-depth look at the software woes, and hardware highs, that Microsoft experienced in 2024. Copilot+ PCs finally took off After hearing about how AI-powered laptops represent a ‘new era’ of Windows PCs for quite some time, as Microsoft relentlessly banged the hype drums for these machines, Copilot+ PCs finally arrived in June 2024 . In case you somehow missed this, one of the key aspects of a Copilot+ PC is that it must have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) powerful enough to seriously accelerate AI tasks.
When these machines first launched in June, the only chips that qualified for a Copilot+ laptop were the Qualcomm Snapdragon X range, which had a catch – they’re Arm -based CPUs. Arm is an alternative type of processor built on an entirely different architecture to traditional (x86) chips for Windows laptops. That means Arm PCs have to jump through hoops to run software or games via an emulation layer (Microsoft’s Prism) – which doesn’t alw.
