I have spent 48 hours with a Copilot Plus PC and am already worried

I was very excited when my Surface Laptop pre-order arrived two days ago, as I’ve been dying to try out these Arm-based, Snapdragon X-powered Copilot Plus PCs (or whatever you want to call them) since the chipset was first announced in late 2023. Combining the battery-saving, AI-enabled, and ultra-connected benefits of the best smartphones and combining them with performance that rivals the best laptops in their class sounds too good to be true. Unfortunately, after just 48 hours with the new Surface Laptop, I have a feeling that might be true.

I should qualify this by stating that the experience of using the Copilot Plus PC in the office is perfectly fine, great even. It’s running perfectly fine as I write this article with me, and the battery stats say I’ve enjoyed two hours and 36 minutes of screen time since the last charge, with 76% left. The battery life on this thing seems pretty solid, so at least that’s a promise I can cross off the list.

However, a few issues over the last 48 hours will no doubt push my final review in a more negative direction. App emulation is a gamble, and I don’t really understand what all the fuss is about with AI, as Recall is on hiatus until later in the year.

But before we get to that, let’s get to the whole nonsense of running Windows on Arm. Yes, the battery life benefits seem to be there (but more testing will tell), and the performance of native Arm apps is great if you can find them. And that’s the problem: I rely heavily on Microsoft’s Prism emulator layer to run x64 apps that aren’t yet natively designed for Arm processors. Frankly, I’m surprised at how few of the apps I use on a daily basis don’t have native versions. Libre Office, Lightroom Classic, Discord, Asana, and (of course) every Steam game are all emulation-based. I knew my niche apps from smaller developers, including Feishin and Jellyfin for media, would be emulation-based, but it’s surprising that so few major projects are on board at this point. It’s not like Windows on Arm is new.

As for native support, I’ve used Photoshop, Slack, Spotify, Zoom, and the three major web browsers. The latter is where Microsoft’s “90% of user minutes run natively on Arm” nonsense comes from, but they all run great. That said, I’ve had a number of black screen glitches when running GPU-heavy pages in Edge with an external monitor, which Firefox doesn’t display. Even native apps don’t seem to be immune to issues.

Let’s be generous and say I have a 50/50 split of Arm and x64 apps installed. The problem remains that emulation performance is so inconsistent. For example, Lightroom Classic (do update it already, Adobe!) runs fine when editing photos, but exporting JPEGs can bring it and other applications to their knees. On the other hand, Asana and Discord run like an egg-and-spoon race—stopping, starting, pausing, and loading. Here, Prism’s performance is a disappointment; UI elements can freeze momentarily, sometimes system-wide, and I even had music playback pause for a split second. These issues don’t happen very often, but when they do, you’re immediately reminded that you’re not getting the best Windows experience out there.

But that’s not the cardinal sin. No, the fact that most VPN apps don’t work because they don’t have native Arm versions yet might be a total deal breaker for some. I often need a VPN to check regional website versions, and luckily I can still do that in my browser. However, many others have more stringent requirements, including those in the enterprise space. Thankfully, VPNs are the only apps I know of that simply refuse to work.

I’d give Microsoft and the developers some leeway if Windows on Arm was a brand new initiative, but Windows on Arm and Microsoft’s emulator have been around for seven damn years, and we’ve had commercial products for six. How can we still discuss app development and emulation problems that Apple has eliminated in about half that time? It’s almost ridiculous.

OK, enough of the emulator bashing – the Snapdragon X Elite is powerful enough to solve (most) minor issues with brute force. Let’s talk about AI – it’s the main marketing material of these Copilot Plus PCs, after all. So what’s all the fuss about the Plus? That’s a bit hard to say. Windows Recall felt like the flagship feature, but that’s been put on hold while Microsoft irons out some very valid privacy concerns.

Without Recall, Copilot takes center stage as the most obvious AI feature for the user, but the experience feels similar to what you get on regular PCs. Yes, the dedicated Copilot button to open a web application window is a nice touch (if you use AI a lot), but I still don’t trust Copilot (or any other text generator) for anything beyond mundane queries or reformatting individual paragraphs. With Copilot icons scattered across the toolbar and Edge browser, I’ve probably pressed the physical button three or four times in a few days. It hardly seems worthwhile to sacrifice good old right Ctrl for that.

Other AI features are on board, but they’re fairly niche features. I haven’t found a use for the admittedly impressive live caption feature (yet), and asking Cocreator to draw anything with humans in it is often cringe-inducing. Still, I found Studio Effects more useful for a few Discord calls. Eye Contact looks a bit creepy, but auto-framing and the bokeh portrait feature work very well. However, pretty much all conferencing apps have built-in background options without the need for an NPU, so it hardly feels new and exciting.

The other AI feature I came across was purely by accident. While benchmarking some AAA games, I noticed a pop-up on some titles informing me that AI Super Resolution was enabled. If you can live with a measly 1,152 x 768 resolution, AI upscaling will bring several games from sub-30fps to a much more comfortable 50-60fps. The Snapdragon X’s ability to play AAA PC games is surprisingly not bad, and is probably the best example of the integrated NPU significantly improving the user experience. However, again, the list of supported titles is far from complete, and the settings menu for manually configuring EXE files is way out of reach.

And I think that sums up my entire experience with this Copilit Plus PC so far – it doesn’t feel finished. Are incomplete AI features and half-baked emulation acceptable trade-offs for better-than-average battery life? At prices well over $1,000, I’m not so sure. I feel like that sums up my final review.

Still, we may be at a tipping point in this chicken-and-egg scenario: More powerful and interesting laptops mean developers are taking notice, more native Arm builds are being spurred, and the entire ecosystem is rapidly improving. While that’s to be hoped, it’s no consolation for the bitter taste of disappointment I’m currently experiencing. The last two days don’t feel much different than the last seven years of trying to justify the trade-offs.