- This might be the biggest
update for Windows ever. So there's a lot to talk about here. Not only a brand new
lineup of the Surface Pro, as well as the Surface
Laptop, but on top of that, a huge update to not
only the software side but also what you can do with Windows. So there's a few things that
we're gonna talk about today. Copilot+ PCs are a big one. But beyond that, it is a
fundamental sort of rewrite of Windows and what you
can do with Windows. It is a brand-new chip,
with the Snapdragon X Elite, and on top of that, a lot
of very cool new features. Now, I'll be honest with
you, going into this event, I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to really try to
wrap my head around things, and there was clearly a
big AI sort of reckoning coming to Windows, and
that sounds nefarious, but there's a lot of cool
features that could have come. And what we've seen here is something that's a little
bit more thoughtful, maybe, than I had originally expected. And a lot of very cool
features that are being enabled by not only the Snapdragon X Elite silicon but also the way that
Windows is sort of evolving because, I think, a lot
of rumors going into today where that we're gonna see, "Oh, Windows 12 and this and that," and that's not what we're seeing, right? This is Windows 11, but it
is a much, much bigger update than it might look like on the Surface. Get it? I made a Surface pun.
There are a lot of takeaways, but one of the biggest
things to understand is the new name, Copilot+ PCs. Thankfully, it's a really
clear, easy-to-understand name that definitely won't confuse
anyone. (clearing throat) Except, like, everyone who
already bought a Copilot PC. That doesn't count anymore, need Copilot+. But here's the thing, this
is a new class of laptops that you're gonna be hearing a lot about in the coming months. So the Copilot and the AI stuff is absolutely a big
component of everything. But as far as I'm concerned, an equally big part is what enables it: The Snapdragon X Elite. Now, Qualcomm has been
making chips for Windows for a few years now. They haven't been all that great. You know, the promise is good. You know, all-day battery
life, 5G built-in, good performance. Except that the good performance
really wasn't very good. Now, part of this is down to
the fact that the 8cx line from before just was kind
of generally underpowered. An equally big issue,
though, was with apps. Probably the biggest difference with Snapdragon chips is the architecture. Unlike the x86 backbone that Intel and AMD have been using for
decades, Snapdragon uses ARM, which is the standard on
Macs, phones, and tablets, but it hasn't really
gained traction on the PC. That app support really
is the big problem. Every Windows app, since the dawn of time, has been made with x86 in mind. And unlike Apple, who had the luxury of just
announcing to the world that the Mac was switching
to Apple silicon, and if you wanted to stay on
Mac, you had to figure it out. Well, in the end, Microsoft still have
to support everything. Qualcomm is not replacing Intel or AMD, they are all going to coexist. So Microsoft approaching this in two ways: One is just to encourage developers to support ARM processors,
such as the Snapdragon X Elite. Now, this is the ideal setup
to get the most performance, and it does seem like they
made some decent headway here. A lot of major apps, such as
Chrome, Photoshop, and Resolve, and many, many more, either
have already added support or are currently working on it. Now, Microsoft made a very
interesting claim to me that 90% of average use
minutes would be native. That sounds great depending
on what kind of user you are. Because apps that are not optimized include basically every game ever and years and years of older apps that either just aren't
ever going to be updated or maybe they just have
too small of a team to deal with ARM just yet. So for that, there is the Prism emulator. Now, this is very similar in
nature to the Rosetta 2 layer that Apple use to do the exact
same thing on the Mac side, emulating older Intel
apps on Apple silicon. And in fact, Microsoft actually
claimed that performance is essentially the same as Rosetta. So what this does is essentially emulate pretty much any older app on
a Snapdragon-powered device. Now, this isn't strictly
a brand-new thing. x86 and x64 emulation for ARM has been a thing for a little while, but it's been a significantly
worse experience. This is for a couple of reasons. The emulation left a little bit
of performance on the table, and the previous chips
were, well, kind of slow. Both of these things have been improved, meaning that, according
to Microsoft, at least, thanks to the raw power of X
Elite and improved emulation, unoptimized apps should
perform roughly on par with a last-generation Core i7. Now, of course, I definitely wanna spend some hands-on time for myself
because I'm almost positive that there'll be some weird edge cases or apps that will work or whatever. But in theory, as long as
apps run pretty quickly, it'll be essentially
seamless to the end user. And when you happen to be
running an optimized app, which more and more are
coming online every day, they'll be just that much quicker. All of this is a lot of work,
but the upside is significant. You should be getting the performance but also 5G built into some devices and importantly, significantly
better battery life. So I'm here with the Surface Pro, and let me give you a little demo of some of the AI features. So there are three main
ones to talk about. The first and probably the
most impressive is Recall. Now, Recall requires a
little bit of explanation. So the way that recall works is that using the power of the NPU, it is always paying attention
to what you're doing, is going to help you find stuff that you've done in the past. Now, that sounds reasonable enough. Maybe a little bit creepy. But
let me show you how it works, and I'll show you how you don't have to be too concerned, (laughs) hopefully. So, this is Recall. So, this is the basic page,
so I can scroll through. And the neat part is, as I scroll back, I can see pretty much
everything I've done. Now, this is obviously not
my device, this is a demo, but you can see I can
go back to yesterday, I can go back to the day
before, the day before. This will save for as long as you want, provided that you have
the storage space for it. So, the way this works is that the NPU is taking a screenshot of
whatever's on your screen every little while. So it's smart, so it's going to be able to only take a screenshot
when it detects motion. But what it does is it can determine whatever I am looking at. So, this is inside of
an Excel spreadsheet. So if I wanted to, I'd copy
any text or whatever over, or I can just automatically
open it up using this button, and it will pull that exact file up. So the way to think about this
is the computer's constantly keeping a record of what you're doing, and say I want to go back and find something I did
two or three days ago or a week or a month ago,
theoretically, it will do it. So, say I want to go look for bread. I know that I was looking at some photos of bread
last week or whatever. Well, you can see just
how fast it shows up. So, I have a couple of different matches. I have text match, so I could
pull up any of these things, and the word "bread" was listed. So you can see here it
automatically highlights that, so I can find that. It'll also give visual matches. So, if I go right here, I can see that it can tell
that this is a photo of bread. Now, this, I don't
probably need to tell you, is a really cool idea. Because it is constantly
taking screenshots of your actual system,
you can do this for chats, you can do this for websites,
you can do this for apps. Pretty much anything that
Windows can take a screenshot of, it can save here. Now, probably big question you have is, "Yikes, that's kind of creepy." Now, there's certainly some
privacy concerns with this, but let me explain to you
the way I understand it, and maybe it might make you
feel better, or maybe it won't. When you come up here,
to the options menu, you can go into the settings. So it's actually built into
your privacy and security. There are a number of settings
that you have to play with. So, first of all, you can
just turn this feature off. Now, this is going to be
only on Copilot+ devices with the NPU. So the reason for that is that this is all
happening locally on device. So, none of this goes up to the internet, Microsoft can't see
it, it's all encrypted. You can imagine a lot of privacy concerns if that was not the case. So, first of all, you
can just turn this off. Second of all, you have the
ability for the storage, and you can change that. So right now, with the last
two weeks, or whatever, it's only taking about 56 megabytes. And the reason for that, it is not doing a constant
video recording of your screen. It takes a screenshot every little while. It's not always taking screenshots. So the way it works is when it determines that there's
some new text on screen, that there's enough
pixels that have changed, it'll take a quick
screenshot and save that. But if you want, you can set the maximum
storage for your snapshots. I was told that 25 gigs, depending on how much you use your system, could be several months
of content, which is cool. But you can change that
to be whatever you want, so you can go up to 150 gigs if you want. On top of that, you can also
delete anything you want. So, say you were just doing
something on your system, you don't wanna keep the snapshot, well you can delete the
last hour, last day, last month, whatever you wanna do. And importantly, and something I would 100%
do, is set some filters. So you can say, "Hey, don't
take snapshots of Edge. "I don't want you to see
what I'm doing on Edge "because if you see that I'm watching "hours and hours of Denki videos, "then I don't want anyone to know that." So, I'm gonna go ahead and block out Edge. Don't take any screenshots. On top of that, if you wanna
be a little bit more specific, you can add specific websites. So, I'm gonna add YouTube. Don't keep track of my
YouTube search history. Thank you very much. And as long as you're using
a browser that's supported, it will not do that. This is a big feature. Honestly, one of the bigger
features that this enables. And I understand that
there's probably gonna be a lot of people who are
concerned about this from a privacy perspective. The way I understand it is
happening 100% on-device. At no point does any of this
information go to the cloud. So it is encrypted for
you on your local device. On top of that, you can use it as much or as little as you want. We will see how robust the system is. I would be completely lying to you if I said that I was
1,000% confident in it, at day one, right? But this is a feature that, I think, has a lot of practical benefits. If I wanna go back
through and find an email that I was working on
a couple of weeks ago. If I want to find a screenshot. Or I just literally wanna
type in the word "car," 'cause I know I watched a
car video three weeks ago, and it will find that, like, that's a really powerful feature. Paint is not the most
exciting app in the world, however, it's actually
got a major new feature in Cocreator. So the way this works is really neat. So, again, this is
running locally on device. So if I want to, I can just say, "Car in a tunnel at sunset." So, normally, and you've been
able to do this in the past, you can just put in a prompt like that, and you'll get something spit out. But the way this works instead
is it actually uses that in addition to what you want to draw. So if I start drawing this... I'm gonna have a lot of
confidence in my drawing ability. Okay. So, if I give that just a second, what you'll see here is that my scribble is obviously terrible, but on this side, this
is actually not bad. The idea here is that not only
is this being done in device, so this is using the NPU of the system. The only reason you actually need an internet connection for
this is a kind of silly one. They wanna make sure that you're not doing any nefarious-ness with this. So what happens is when
you give it the prompt, it goes out to the server to make sure that you're
not asking it to do anything too nefarious, but shall we say? So you do actually need an
internet connection for this, but all the actual processing
is happening on device. So if I turn that creativity back up, you can see that the image
that I'm getting here, even though this is a terrible scribble, look at that, that looks sick! That is incredibly cool! So if I actually click
it, boom, there we go. Live captions is a Windows-level feature that, again, leveraging the power of the NPU on board of the system, allows you to caption anything
that Windows can hear. So, let me actually
show you how this works. So, I'm going to turn on microphone audio, and if you look at top here, you will now tell you what I'm saying. So, hello, my name is Austin,
and this is what it looks like as you see the live captions being put onto the screen at this time. The cool part about this is that not only does it
work with my microphone, it obviously will work with
anything that I'm listening to. Junk that's refurbished
that also doesn't work. So the way this works is really cool, is able to use that, and importantly, it will
do live translation. So we got a demo earlier of someone who fluently has moved
between English and Spanish, it pauses, like, 1/2 a second, and immediately started
translating that Spanish. These are just some of the
things that are made possible with an NPU. You gonna hear that so much. But the idea that you
have real AI horsepower running locally on-device
at super low power. So, if I actually pull up Task Manager, you can actually see how
little power it takes. So my CPU, my GPU are essentially not
even being used, right? So I've got 4% on my CPU, 1% of my GPU, and the NPU is doing what, 3%, 4%? It's almost nothing to
be able to do something as you'd think complex as doing live captions and translation. So these are just some of the AI features that are being built in. But importantly, these are just the ones that are built into Windows on day one. Because the NPU is now a
first-class citizen in Windows, there are so many more things that I'm sure will be
coming down the pipeline, and, of course, so many third-party apps that can leverage this kind of tech to do all kinds of stuff
with almost no latency, and to be able to do it with theoretically quite a lot of security. As a baseline, Microsoft is branding and spending a lot of money to promote these as the gold standard of PCs. To get the Copilot+ branding, you'll need a couple of things: 40 TOPS or more on your NPU
and 16 gigabytes of RAM. Which, of course, you'll find
on the new Surface models, as well as a number of other
OEMs who are also taking part. Now, as of right now, this basically means that the
system needs to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite device, but soon, there will be other
Snapdragon and AMD options, as well as Intel coming
a little later this year. Now, if 40 TOPS on your NPU
doesn't mean much to you, well, you're probably not alone. Honestly, it's probably worth
me making an entire video breaking down TOPS and,
neural processors, and why you're gonna be
hearing these phrases everywhere going forward. But the short answer is this: Just like how, in the past,
when you're shopping for a PC, two of your biggest considerations when it comes to performance
are your CPU and your GPU, well, it's time to add
the NPU to that list. So, when it comes to hardware,
there is a lot to go over. So, let's start with these
brand-new Surface devices. So, we have two. We have the brand new Surface Pro. Technically, this is
just the new Surface Pro, although it is really the 11th gen, as well as we have the new Surface Laptop, which is the seventh generation. So, there is a much more
substantial redesign of the Laptop. So, it now has a much
larger screen-to-body ratio. You can see just how
small these bezels are. And I'll be honest with
you, the 13.8-inch version looks sick. 'Cause I've always liked
the Surface Laptop, but it's kind of been a little bit big and chunky, but now... This is the 15. But even the 15 is significantly smaller. Now, what's really interesting
about both of these devices is that they are Snapdragon only. In the past, there was a
little bit of a mix between. You could have AMD on
certain options, Intel, there was the 8cx before,
all of that is gone. It is just Snapdragon X across the board. Now, both these devices
start with the Plus, although, if you upgrade,
you do get the Elite, which is basically the same
chip, 10-core versus 12-core, a little bit of extra performance. Now, that, I think, is very telling when it comes to how
strongly Microsoft feel, not only about the Copilot+ initiative but also just about what they're getting with Qualcomm and Snapdragon. Because you can think
about the the conversations that are being had with
some of the other partners, such as AMD and Intel. And while there, of course,
will be additional Copilot+ PCs, Snapdragon and Qualcomm, I
think, should be very happy that they're getting this sort of shine because there's a lot of emphasis on the Surfaces going Snapdragon first, at least with these devices. So, let me break it down. I'll go over the actual Pro itself. So you have a few options here. So there's an improved webcam. You also now have an OLED if you upgrade. So, the base model still is an LCD, but if you go up to the Elite
model, you do get an OLED. There's also the actual
keyboard, which has been changed. So this version is the
slightly higher-end version, which has, if I can carefully take it off without knocking it over, it
actually works wirelessly now. So, there's actually three keyboards, which is slightly confusing. There's the base keyboard, there's the keyboard with the pen storage, and then there's this, which will allow you to
not only use it via Bluetooth, but it also folds up nice and neat here. It's a cool feature, although it's a little
bit on the pricey side. And I'll continue to state forever that I wish that every Surface came with the keyboard in the box because I can't imagine who would buy this without a keyboard. Now, outside of that,
the hardware's actually relatively similar looking on the Surface. It is still with a fan inside. It's actively cooled, even when you've got
the Snapdragon silicon. But it makes sense, right? This one, straightforward. The Laptop, I think, is a
little bit more interesting. So you've got a really
nice port selection. So you've got a couple of
USB4, you've got USB-A, AUX. Thank you for keeping the AUX. As well, as you've got
yourself the Surface Connector. And on the 15, you've
got yourself a microSD. That alone is great. It also does have the upgraded touchpad, as does the high-end
keyboard on the Surface Pro. You've got a quite nice
keyboard, I will say. On the Laptop, it feels pretty good. And the display. So it's 120Hz display. I'll be honest with you,
when I first saw it, I was like, "Oh, man,
that OLED looks great." And then they told me, "Nope, it's LCD." I am legitimately surprised. It is a very nice-looking
display, very bright. If I crank up this brightness, it is going to probably
clip the camera real hard. Like, it is properly bright. Now, a big reason why this
is LCD, I think, is price. Both the Surface Pro, as well
as the Laptop, start at 999. And that's not some, like,
super basic configuration. They come with these Snapdragon X Plus and importantly, 16 gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigs of storage. One of my traditionally biggest issues with the Surface lineup has
been that the base models were next to useless
because eight gigs of RAM is just not enough for anybody, especially when it comes to Windows. So both of these models
come with 16 gigs, 256. Honestly, a very usable spec. Of course, it'll be a
little bit more expensive once you start upgrading the SSDs and you go up to the OLED
and blah, blah, blah. But, like, you're not gonna be able to get either of these configurations in any kind of, like, terrible
unusable state, right? And I think that is
something to be applauded, even though upgrade pricing
could be a little bit cheaper. Something else I think is
really worth mentioning is upgradeability and repairability. So, the Surface Pro still
has a little upgrade door for the SSD, which is nice. Now, the Surface Laptop has no such door. It does have an upgradeable SSD that will void your warranty. But you can actually get at it, of course, by voiding your warranty, so you should do it 366 days later. The feet are actually magnetic. So instead of using, like,
glue to keep the feet on, they're actually magnetic. They come off, and then
the screw's underneath, and you pop off that back panel. One of the only things
I've actually removed is a little bit of a weird one. It no longer supports the
pen on the Surface Laptop. Now, I think a big reason for that is that you actually had to have these little tiny wires across
the screen for the actual pen for the capacitive touch and whatnot. It's still touchscreen, mind you, but it is no longer
compatible with the pen. So it's just a small note. Of course, if you really
wanna use the pen, you should be using the
actual Surface Pro 9. "9?" 11. Yikes, I'm a couple years behind. Now, the last thing I wanna talk about when it comes to hardware
is the actual breadth and depth of the ecosystem. Yeah. So, on top of these Surface devices, which, of course, we're
getting an early hands-on of, there are going to be
a number of other OEMs, including Samsung,
including Lenovo and Dell, and all kinds of people, ASUS, who are gonna be announcing devices probably around the time
this video goes live. The only one I could personally speak to is the Lenovo Yoga 7X. Now, hypothetically, I may have been able to
spend some time with this before the embargo, and this is also a
Snapdragon-powered device. Now, my sample is very, very, very early, so I'm gonna not speak on it a lot. Besides the fact that a
lot of these same features, a lot of these same sort of advantages, in using the Snapdragon
silicon, do come across to that. So even though these Surfaces
look very impressive. And I will say that the price point is worth really reiterating, right? I think they're being very aggressive with $1,000 configurations of laptops that are actually good, unlike previously, where you had to spend
$1,300, $1,400, $1,500 to get something usable. But I will say that that
Yoga 7X, stay tuned. I'm gonna be taking a look at that once it's not quite so
(laughs) in such beta form. But the time that I've spent
using the Snapdragon X Elite, it's the real deal. I think that's kind of
sort of my general thought. That there's a lot of performance there. You have obviously all the
cool Windows AI features. But on top of that, it
just feels snappy and fluid in a way that typically you only get when you're running with, you
know, a big beefy CPU and GPU, and yada, yada, yada, right? Like, what you're getting
here is performance. You're getting a lot of
really cool features. And importantly, devices that the fans are almost never kicking on. A battery that is actually
legitimately all day. So when Apple Silicon dropped in 2020, it was an absolute game changer. It wasn't just about the performance leap, which is really substantial, it was also about the
incredible battery life, paired with the fact that
you got full performance even when you're unplugged. As much as you may or may
not wanna actually use a Mac, since 2020, MacBooks really
have set a new benchmark. Now, are these Snapdragon-powered systems going to give us that same leap? Well, in all honesty, probably
not, at least, immediately. My understanding is that you'll still see some power management from Windows when you're running on battery, which will cut performance
a bit when you're unplugged. But this is a massive step forward. The competition between
Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Apple is an arms race where we, the consumers, are the real winners. In the past few years, we've seen more improvements
to laptop performance and battery life than in the
entire decade beforehand. And believe me, when I say that Microsoft didn't rebuild
huge chunks of Windows just for a few random Snapdragon laptops. It really does seem like
ARM-powered Windows devices are the future, and we'll
likely see everyone from NVIDIA to AMD join the party
before too much longer. I mean, who doesn't want a laptop with performance and battery life? Now, are there concerns? Absolutely. My hands-on time with the X Elite has been limited by very
unfinished software and hardware. So, while my initial impressions
are really promising, we absolutely have to wait
for the final products before I can make a definitive judgment. There are a lot of questions, and there's also a lot
of legitimate concerns, specifically when it comes to
the emulated app performance and really how quickly developers actually want to embrace ARM. Not to mention, there's probably
gonna be a lot of hesitancy with a lot of, I don't wanna
say, like, average consumers, but, like, a lot of people
are used to buying laptops with an Intel or an AMD sticker on it, and as soon as you drop
a Snapdragon badge, well, that doesn't necessarily mean a lot to a lot of people. So, my expectation is that it might be a little bit of a
slow ramp on these things. But here's the thing, Microsoft
is betting big on ARM, and they're really the last holdouts. Mobile and Mac have been
switched over for a while, and it seems natural that Windows is the last domino to fall here. Now, I'm not saying you
should drop everything and toss your existing laptop
in the garbage just yet, especially because Intel and AMD are not only improving
things at an impressive rate, but they also will have
their own Copilot+ PCs that have all the AI goodies
that you ever hoped for. But here's the thing, this is a big deal that is really worth keeping an eye on because things are moving at
an incredibly rapid rate. So that, my friends, is
a look at what you've got with these brand-new Copilot+ PCs. If you really break it
down, it's very simple: These devices are going to have significantly
better battery life, they're more efficient, they're going to run cooler, quieter, and there's still gonna be tons and tons of performance on tap. On top of that, there's also
a huge amount of new features when it comes to the Windows AI stuff. So, you know, you think
about some of the stuff, you know, this is sort
of the one of, right? Like, we're gonna see more and more apps take advantage of the NPU. We're also going to see more
and more features in Windows to take advantage of this sort of overall architecture change. You know, there's a lot to sort of wrap your head around here, but sort of at a core level, this is a very big moment for Windows. It's a very big moment for Microsoft. And while I'm sure there
are gonna be people who are like, "Hey, why
wasn't it Windows 12?" I think the main reason for
that is that you kind of do need this NPU to enable these features. And I can't imagine Microsoft
bringing out Windows 12, and it only works on these
brand-new systems, right? So I think that's the reason
why we've seen this first step. But you gotta assume that the
next major version of Windows is gonna take all of this for granted and add a ton of additional features. So let me know what you
think in the comments below. I'm very curious. Make sure to subscribe to the channel and ringling the dingling button. But until next time, my friends, I'm gonna go creatively
borrow some devices. You know, it's fair game if I
want to do an extended test, and I'll see you back at the office when I am, you know,
able to (clears throat) give you a full review of the devices that I'm gonna give back, eventually.
