The News: On May 20, Microsoft announced Copilot+ PCs, including the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, but on June 18 at 6am PT, Copilot+ PCs became generally available to customers around the world from Surface and other OEMs, including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung. All should be officially available for purchase at the Microsoft Store on microsoft.com and other major retailers. In support of this announcement, the latest cumulative update to Windows 11 started rolling out to users over the weekend (6/15).
The Copilot+ PC Disruption Is Here: What Happens Now?
Analyst Take: Per Microsoft, Copilot+ versions of the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs on the market. Aside from the obvious benefits of vertical integration (OS and hardware), Microsoft’s first Copilot+ PCs ship with the following features: sleek design, all-day battery life, powerful NPUs, Surface Pro Flex Keyboard (built with extra carbon fiber layers for stability and a larger, customizable haptic touchpad), and AI-powered experiences. Among them, Cocreator in Paint (exclusive to Copilot+ PCs) will simplify image creation and photo editing with easy text prompts and natural inking.
For Users, Performance Improvements May Trump AI UX At First
For me, the two immediate standout upgrades that Copilot+ PCs bring to the PC segment are the most powerful Neural Processing Units (NPUs) in the PC category today, with over 45 trillion of operations per second (TOPS), and the massive forward leap in battery life, thanks in part to the Snapdragon X platform’s impressive performance per watt characteristics.
On-device AI use cases are still very much in early stages. So for me, the value along that particular value proposition axis is simply that these PCs are designed for AI workloads and applications in mind. Thus, making the switch to Copilot+ PCs now, even before the full menu of on-device AI applications becomes clear, let alone available, is the smartest way to future-proof your workspace (or your organization) for AI. I suspect that some of the most useful on-device AI features for the foreseeable future will be the integration of agent layers in most of the productivity tools PC users already use – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, browsers, mail, and so on. These agents will, through a combination of prompts, generative AI, and intelligent automation, shorten and simplify what have traditionally been tedious or otherwise time-consuming tasks.
Until the first wave of on-device AI-powered killer app turns up, I will be happy for my Copilot+ PC to help me turn hours of work into mere minutes. Productivity wise, that’s my killer app for now. What Copilot+ PC users choose to do with that reclaimed time – use that reclaimed time to be more productive/competitive, just spend less time working, or some mix of both – is up to them. The point though is that Copilot+ PCs will give them that choice, and that, in my view, is well worth the investment.
Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs: The Best of Both Worlds?
Looking back on the demos I participated in at Microsoft’s Copilot+ announcement several weeks ago in Redmond, almost all of the competitive positioning focus was on pitting Surface Copilot+ PCs against Apple’s M3 version of the MacBook Air (against which the 15” Copilot+ laptop Surface excelled). Looking beyond Microsoft’s overall competitive strategy, which seems rather clear to me, the message to PC users is simple: If you have ever wanted all of the performance advantages of a MacBook Air (powerful processing, long battery life, a lap-friendly thermal envelope, silent operation, thin and lightweight form factors) but in a Windows PC configuration, now you can have it, and with a touch-screen. For a particular segment of PC users, that is a powerful and exciting value proposition.
This best-of-both-worlds promise is additionally stacked with the Copilot+ PC’s on-chip AI accelerated features, which MacBook Air PCs currently don’t offer. (This may help explain why Apple’s partnership with OpenAI was met with mixed reviews from the tech analyst space earlier this month.) Copilot+ PCs can certainly take full advantage of Cloud-based AI solutions, just like Macs, but also complement them with powerful on-device AI capabilities regardless of network accessibility. This allows them to deliver AI features anytime, anywhere, with little-to-no awkward lags in assistant interactions (less back and forth with the cloud), improved data security (keeping AI prompts and workloads on-device rather than pushing them out to the cloud limits their vulnerability to hostile actors), and hardware capable of supporting the coming tide of apps built to take full advantage of these new AI-enabled system capabilities.
Insights About Copilot+ PCs: Consumer Segment VS Commercial Segment Considerations
Two tracks to think of with regard to key market segments: Consumer and Commercial. On the ‘Consumer’ side of the sales channel, I think that the combination of Apple-like performance, multi-day battery life, extremely portable form factors, on-device AI, and significantly improved UX will give consumers looking to upgrade their laptops a decent bucket of reasons to do so. How well (or rather how quickly) the transition from pre-AI PCs to Copilot+ PCs happens will depend mostly on how effectively Microsoft and its PC OEM partners communicate the value proposition of these new PCs to the market. For consumers especially, I see the Snapdragon X platform as a no-brainer for most users.
Same with the ‘Commercial’ segment, but with some caveats:
1) Enterprise and midmarket IT departments are going to spend the next few months ensuring that some of the software compatibility challenges in previous attempts at delivering enterprise-ready Windows-on-Arm PCs have been solved by Microsoft. (In my view, they have.) This may push back adoption of Copilot+ PCs a few months while these evaluations and pilot programs run their course.
2) Copilot+ PCs are currently a Snapdragon X exclusive, but Microsoft and PC OEMs have confirmed that AMD and Intel versions will be coming as well. Without drilling too deep into “silicon diversity” discussions, we can safely expect that a year from now, the PC refresh cycle in the commercial segment will drive momentum for both X86 (AMD and Intel) and Arm64 versions of Copilot+ PCs. What percentage of the commercial PC segment is actually up for grabs, thanks to Copilot+ disruption, is a core question we are working on answering. However, I expect that how Intel, AMD and Qualcomm articulate their individual value propositions within the Copilot+ ecosystem will be a primary deciding factor.
As I have already suggested in previous pieces, AMD seems to have already picked a lane that has traditionally worked: battery life is secondary to maximum horsepower. This means that for PCs used primarily for gaming and professional media editing, AMD might have the more attractive implementation.
Qualcomm’s lane so far seems to hinge on Apple-like performance in a Windows machine (best of both worlds for Windows users), outstanding battery life, quiet operation, and a thermally comfortable base.
While Intel has yet to release their next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which Intel-powered Copilot+ PCs will be built on, I suspect that Intel’s approach will fall somewhere between AMD and Qualcomm, playing on the safety and time-tested predictability of the X86 platform as well as economies of scale to help PC OEMs deliver competitively-priced Intel-based Copilot+ PCs at scale for general enterprise and midmarket use. Intel will of course work to also bring their version of a flagship Copilot+ PC to market, but I suspect that achieving scale in the commercial segment and holding on to as much market share as possible will be Intel’s two primary objectives in 2025.
3) What I am already looking for as I think about 2025 is whether or not Qualcomm will disrupt the PC segment again with a significant improvement to its current X Elite platform. Should that happen, Intel could find itself a full year or more behind its new rival in the PC space, giving Qualcomm an opportunity to capture additional market share. This is pure speculation at this point. However, the on-device-AI/Snapdragon X/Copilot+ disruption of the PC industry has opened the door to a reshuffling of the PC market-share deck in the commercial segment over the next 3-6 years, and Intel, for all its incumbent advantages, is playing defense more than offense right now. Keep an eye on how those market dynamics evolve through the next 12-24 months, as they will inform how much Qualcomm can penetrate the commercial PC segment and broaden its footprint there. (Look for how Apple has managed to eat into Intel’s market share in the commercial PC segment for insight into Intel’s vulnerabilities there.)
For now though, the first wave of Copilot+ (AI) PCs, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X PC platform, became available for purchase on June 18, and is expected to be widely tested in enterprise environments for the next few months. Look for more updates here.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
The PC Segment’s AI Inflection Point: Your 2024-2025 Copilot+ PC Cheat Sheet
New Snapdragon-Powered Copilot+ Windows PCs Redefine the PC Market
Inside the X Elite: Unpacking Qualcomm’s Next-Gen Performance and Features – Six Five On The Road
Author Information
Olivier Blanchard has extensive experience managing product innovation, technology adoption, digital integration, and change management for industry leaders in the B2B, B2C, B2G sectors, and the IT channel. His passion is helping decision-makers and their organizations understand the many risks and opportunities of technology-driven disruption, and leverage innovation to build stronger, better, more competitive companies.
