The Six Five team discusses Our First Personal Impressions On Copilot+ PC.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Our first personal impressions on Copilot+ PCs. So Dan, you and I were both in Las Vegas last week as people were getting shipments of their systems. I had my shipment of system, and the problem was it was sitting in my office being unboxed. So here we go. So first off, we are doing this broadcast from our Copilot+ PCs, I’m on a Surface and Dan is on his Lenovo Yoga. First of all, if you want performance data benchmarks, battery life, thermal scans, the data, hit the Signal65 website.
Signal65 was the first company to come out with any validated benchmarks that didn’t come from a manufacturer. I’m glad to say those benchmarks are holding up with the benchmarking community. So my use case is going to be office, and it’s a high performance. So next week or this weekend, I’m going to be diving into the battery life. But what I did, is I had a four-year-old, the highest performance, most expensive desktop that you could get. You can imagine how many threads that might’ve had, it had $1,000 graphics card in it. But four years ago it was the highest performance desktop.
So what I did is I essentially changed it out, and I bought a power USB-C adapter. I have four cameras, sorry, four displays, combination of 3K and 4K displays, external USB camera, external USB mic, RJ45 network. Now, my use cases were very productivity-centric, I’m not doing gaming, I’m not doing workstation, and I’m not doing video editing, even though I think this would be a great video editing machine. It feels just as fast as my giant desktop. Now, people might be saying, “Well, yeah, but you didn’t load up the threads.” I get it, just the fact that I don’t feel any difference between the two to me is absolutely amazing. Now, look at the applications that I’m using, and this whole, is it compatible? Pretty much every application, nearly every application is ARM64 native, and that essentially means it’s going to be more efficient on an ARM-based platform.
It’s funny, the biggest power hog in my first couple days was iCloud, and that was an x64 or x66 app, and it was syncing my video library with Apple Photos, so it was kind of ironic. The only application I think that I’m using that should be ARM that’s not native is Adobe Acrobat, at any time I open up a PDF. But Edge, Outlook, Slack, OneNote, Teams, Zoom, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, WhatsApp and Microsoft Photos, all native ARM application. So you might be asking, “Hey, Pat, how was your AI experience?” Well, to be honest, I want Recall, and we all know the story about Recall that we have. But I used Image Creator, which definitely hits the NPU. I haven’t found the need to use transcriptions yet, because I haven’t been doing an international conference call or something like that.
And because I have an external camera, I’m not using Studio Effects. So I really haven’t hit the A… I did download LM Studio, and I’m hearing in a couple weeks you can download the best models from Microsoft, Meta, and you can do on-device AI. You can do it today, but it’s not hitting the NPU, I’m told in a couple of weeks it will support the NPU. So I’m pretty excited, I can’t believe the performance that I’m getting out of this. And what can I say? Qualcomm, Microsoft, HP and Lenovo are delivering here. Why am I excluding Dell? I have not received my unit yet, the XPS, so I can’t comment on that. Dan, how’s your experience been?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I mean, you hit a lot of the things. Look, I got hit a lot in… I shared a picture of me eating my new Yoga, and got a lot of DMs, people asking me, “Hey, can’t wait. When are you going to review it?” By the way, I don’t write reviews, so I won’t be reviewing it, this is my review for everybody out there that was waiting for my review. I’ll be talking about it pervasively, because that’s the world we live in. I’ll be TikToking and Instagramming, go over and follow me on TikTok, I’m big over there.
That’s a joke, you won’t find me on TikTok. I use the China version of TikTok to get better at calculus, that’s the version I use. But anyways, look, I did get hit up a lot. I got hit up by some CEOs from some of the actual companies in this space asking for that initial impression. It was funny, because I started hitting them back with some of the data specs. And one of them came back to me and said, “Look, I don’t care about that stuff, we have that stuff.” He’s like, “Give me the layman’s response, how does this thing work for you?” And so let me tell you how I qualified it in that conversation.
I basically said, “I have an M4 iPad Pro.” I said, “It’s got the same sort of on-off feel to me, it’s got instant on, it fires right up, I can get right into my apps, the latency feels very low, the user experience feels very frictionless.” That’s my initial impression of the Snapdragon X Elite on this Lenovo Yoga battery life. I’m still playing with it, Pat. I don’t code, I don’t game, I’m really not any fun. I just sort of endlessly doom scroll, read, and then comment on X. By the way, I take a lot of selfies, apparently, I’ve been criticized for that. But it turns out that there’s more value in the selfie than the actual analysis, because that’s what people engage with is the picture. And if anybody watched the debate last night and doesn’t believe that we’ve gotten stupider as a society, you’re not paying much attention, which would make sense based on what I just said.
But the overall impression that I have, Pat, is I haven’t charged it in three or four days since I opened it. So I’m literally trying to use it the way I am in an event. So I’m bouncing between the iPad, my phone, this device, opening it up, doing some emails, jumping on a Zoom call, closing it back down, throwing it in the bag, and again, not charging it. And three or four days now… And let me just pull this up right now of using it this way. I’m still at 72% battery life, that’s totally different. And I have a Surface device that runs on a different architecture, there’s no need to call it out here. But let’s just say if I close that thing down and put it to sleep in my bag and don’t charge, it’s not uncommon it’ll come back dead if I don’t truly power it down.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And by the way, your Surface has the largest battery you can get on any Surface.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. And I mean, I like it, I’ve used it for a couple of years. And if you actually see the screen, it’s embarrassing how dirty it is. But that’s more of an artifact of me, I don’t carry a glass cleaner like my bestie does around with me and a little spray bottle, and a rubber band, and a container inside of –
Patrick Moorhead: I don’t do that either. Dude, you look like you vomited on your display, it literally makes me sick when I’m sitting next to you on an airplane.
Daniel Newman: There’s a lot of great work being done over there, and sometimes it doesn’t leave a lot of time for cleaning. But let me just say the early impressions are that this thing has met some of the objectives. If the objective was to create a better experience than what we’ve had historically, I think so far so good. I guess without Recall, the only thing I’ll say is I’m kind of sad, because that’s the one feature I was really sort of eager to use. Because I can’t tell you how often I can’t find stuff on my devices, because the traditional sort of file search systems do not work really well. Based on like, “Hey, remember that one doc we were working on where we were talking about this thing the other week and I was here?” And that’s how I remember things, I can’t remember how I named it or if I named it.
So let’s get that out there, okay people? Because that’s the one thing. The other thing we do need to do, Pat, is I need to get some models run locally on here. And basically what I’m trying to parse on that topic, and I know we got to move on here, but is, do I need to do that? When am I going to… Because like I said, I run Perplexity, Gemini, I’m running OpenAI, I’m doing them all. The latency, I have good connectivity almost everywhere now, so I’m trying to still figure out that running on device, is it a latency thing? Is it a power thing? Because obviously that’s been a sell point, but I think when you’re being realistic, the question I got about the practical everyday user, we got to make them care or they’re not going to buy it. So let’s get Recall out there. But so far, battery, instant on, frictionless, lightweight, and they look great. So I’d give it a… I’m into giving B pluses right now.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Buddy, I’m on a search too, I want RAG, on-device RAG, I can’t believe it’s not integrated already into Windows Explorer, that’s where you would expect it. I mean, you can do stuff like… Well, actually, I haven’t seen any Copilot capability with RAG at all. Google just lit theirs up for me inside of Workspace yesterday, and I can’t do any RAG across all my files. Sure, I can pick this file, this file, this file, and because it’s web-based it’s difficult. But there’s got to be more to come, and this stuff has got to come out fast otherwise people are going to lose interest in it.
Daniel Newman: And maybe we can do it in Vertex. We’ll talk about that later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
