I spent an entire day using the various Copilot+ AI programs available on the HP EliteBook Ultra to answer one of my biggest questions about new AI PCs: Are they worth it?
The Copilot+ Snapdragon laptops benefit from increased performance and battery life. However, the other key selling point is the AI capabilities onboard thanks to the Qualcomm Hexagon processor.
But what features do Copilot+ laptops actually offer?
Since Microsoft has recalled the Recall feature, which allowed capturing snapshots of a user’s laptop activity, we’re left with the AI Cocreate program in Windows Paint, live captions with AI language translation, improved Studio camera effects, and the Copilot AI assistant.
All other AI features on a Copilot+ laptop require third-party apps that aren’t pre-installed on your machine, like enhanced generative AI in Adobe Photoshop or gesture controls via Cephable.
Improved AI features aren’t as effective as they seem
Cocreate in Windows Paint lets you draw your own images, but it mostly works like any other text-to-image image generation tool using Stable Diffusion, which you can easily get from Open AI’s Dall-E 2, Figma, Adobe Firefly, Pixlr, and even through Microsoft’s Copilot assistant. And in my general day-to-day life, I have no reason to use image generation.
Copilot+’s live captioning feature is perhaps the most interesting to me, and it works best in a quieter environment than a crowded demo room. But even then, you can get better translations via YouTube or even most video chat apps, and Copilot+’s live captioning software struggles with accents and language identification, plus it has a pretty significant lag when translating slang.
I really enjoyed reciting a few sentences in Japanese, mistaking the system for a Dante recitation. Hell in Italian, and see if I could translate it accurately while standing away from the laptop. But again, this is not a feature I need to use frequently.
Perhaps the most interesting feature for me is Copilot+’s live captions feature, which works better in a quieter environment than in a crowded demo room.
Improved background blur effects are also easy to find in almost every video chat feature. From Google Meet to Zoom, background blur is not a new technology.
Sure, the NPU can allow background blur features to be a little smarter to blur objects in the background or hide people who may be walking through the frame, but that’s not exactly something you need right now.
And while the Copilot assistant is handy, it’s not exclusive to Copilot+ PCs. You can install Microsoft’s new chatbot on your iPhone if you want.
You can’t argue with the increased performance and battery life
The performance of most Copilot+ PCs, and the HP EliteBook Ultra in particular, is certainly impressive.
The EliteBook easily competes with the Apple MacBook Air 13 M3 and even outperformed the MacBook on some benchmarks.
The EliteBook’s average battery life of 16 hours and 1 minute is also more than capable of rivaling that of the MacBook Air.
So the Copilot+ program isn’t a failure, but the AI features aren’t a good reason to upgrade to a new laptop, just yet.
