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It’s not every day that a new processor player enters the PC arena. It’s also not every day that Microsoft launches an entirely new platform of PCs. The two in sync happening today, June 18th, led us to Best Buy in Manhattan for a brief walkthrough of how these new PCs, dubbed Copilot+, powered by these new processors, the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus series, will look to the outside world.Now technically these Snapdragon chips’ maker, Qualcomm, is not a completely new face in PC processors. But the launch today of its Snapdragon X chips is by far its largest foray into the laptop market. It has been ramping up since last fall with the announcement of the X Elite (see our initial deep dive with X Elite) and the tease of the X Plus earlier this year. Up until this point, we’ve only seen Qualcomm-commissioned Snapdragon X reference systems operating on these new Arm-based processors, along with some OEM systems that weren’t powered up or were nestled behind glass. Now, Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus systems are available online and in retail. We took up Qualcomm on its offer to walk us through the retail displays at Best Buy’s big branch at 23rd Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan on launch day.
(Credit: John Burek)
A Copilot+ Takeover in BeigeThe Copilot+ setup was freshly assembled this morning, and showed a large takeover of the retail laptop section of the store. The branding was dominated by Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI PC initiative, as opposed to the new chips in these new PCs. With Copilot+, laptops equipped with an adequate NPU, or neural processing unit, are able to tap into certain AI-powered features run locally on the device. In the systems on display, the two big Copilot+ features highlighted were Co-creator, demonstrated as an easy-access option inside the familiar Windows Paint tool, and Windows Studio Effects.
(Credit: John Burek)
Co-creator here allowed you to make rough sketches of an art concept, type a prompt, and have the onboard AI cook up a polished version of your vision. (We experimented with crudely drawn trees and rabbits to impressive effect.) Windows Studio Effects, demonstrated a bunch of times in recent months as a poster child of NPU-optimized tasks, showed background blurring, facial smoothing, and other on-the-fly effects applied to a live camera-video stream.
(Credit: John Burek)
The big third feature, which clearly was expected until the last minute to be on display, was the much vaunted (and subsequently controversial) Windows Recall. Indeed banners were ready-made, and were on display, and marketing collateral had been printed, with Recall hyped up as one of the primary features of Copilot+ PCs. But Recall itself was subject to an, um, recall of its own a few days back, due to privacy concerns and, likely public grumbling about the nature of its recording PC activity. Recall will launch later on through Windows Update with different default behaviors than originally intended.
(Credit: John Burek)
But enough about what wasn’t to be. The Copilot+ branding, as we mentioned, was primary, but Qualcomm was prominent in the onscreen videos promoted on the various OEM systems and on keyboard-deck stickers.
(Credit: John Burek)
Best Buy itself is applying its own layer of Copilot+ PC product info and identification on the in-store systems, with a truncated infobar up top, and an expandable screen that shows various Best Buy offers and basic specs around the systems. Depending on the OEM, from the instore display you can get a more detailed spec breakout, sometimes detailing the very specific X Elite or X Plus processor in the machine (though sometimes not).
(Credit: John Burek)
That CPU detail is a key thing to know. At launch, the initial wave of Snapdragon X PCs will employ one of four Snapdragon X processors in a given model. But there are only two top-level Qualcomm CPU brands: the Snapdragon X Elite, and the Snapdragon X Plus. There are three versions of the 12-core X Elite, varying by processor clock, and a single 10-core Snapdragon X Plus SKU, as we detail in our Snapdragon X explainer from a few months back.Qualcomm counts 22 discrete models of Snapdragon X system at the initial launch, not counting its own desktop dev kit. Some of these SKUs are commercial-versus-business variants of the same system. But the OEMs launching Snapdragon X systems today are a who’s who of the big players in the PC market: Microsoft itself with its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop PCs, Lenovo with a ThinkPad and a Yoga Slim, Acer with a Swift 14 AI model, Samsung with a Galaxy Book4, Dell with an XPS 13 and an Inspiron, and Asus with a VivoBook S 15, as well as HP with a new Omnibook, resurrecting a familiar laptop brand line from years back in another momentous move today.
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Look for the Rainbow DesktopThis particular Best Buy branch had most of the major OEM models on display and for sale (Acer’s and Asus’ excepted), with an interesting visual twist: The machines that employ the Snapdragon X CPUs and that comply with the Copilot+ program were arrayed on top of colorful placemats that mirror the new default Windows Desktop used on Copilot+ PCs. The new Desktop contrasts with the usual Windows 11 Desktop, which is dominated by a blue swirl. This multicolor visual indicator is meant to pick out the Copilot+ PCs from a crowd on retail shelves.
(Credit: John Burek)
As reported earlier, Qualcomm will have the Copilot+ PC space to itself likely for some months. AMD, with its Ryzen AI 300 processors coming to systems this summer (July should see the first ones), says it will add Copilot+ as a Windows Update feature after the fact, meaning that even when these upcoming laptops launch, they won’t technically be Copilot+ machines right away. Intel, meanwhile, detailed its “Lunar Lake” next-gen mobile processors at Computex 2024. Check out our report on these mobile chips, slated to hit the PC market sometime in Q3 and equipped with a hopped-up NPU that will make them Copilot+-ready. (That means likely by the end of September, though we gamble on later in that quarter, given the relative lack of Lunar Lake PCs shown at Computex earlier this month.)
(Credit: John Burek)
For now, in retail, if you’re looking at a Copilot+ PC, it’s going to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor. Those machines are just starting to get into the hands of curious and daring early adopters, with base models starting at $999. They’re also just starting to show up in the hands of tech media; we received our first Snapdragon X-powered machines today and will be putting them through their paces this week into the next. Stay tuned for performance numbers, as well as our first hands-on impressions of these first initial Windows 11 on Arm machines out in the wild. They have looked great on paper and in controlled demos; let’s see how they fare under the microscope.
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