Hands-On Windows 190 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take another look at Copilot plus PC and where it's at here as we head into mid-2026. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat and this week we're going to take another look at Copilot Plus PCs. Right. This is that superset of Windows 11 where the underlying hardware has to meet certain specifications. So I brought up this page from Microsoft that explains that.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:39]:
And the short version is that it has to have an MPU that's at least 40 tops. This is a measurement of performance for local AI acceleration. The initial copilot plus PCs were Snapdragon X based Windows 11 on ARM PCs. I think most of those had a 40 or 45 tops MPU. And then later, this was two years ago. And then later that year, intel and AMD both released chipsets that made those, met those specifications, meaning the mpu essentially. And so newer AMD and newer intel chips, not all of them. This is the problem.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:20]:
So on the Snapdragon side, if you have a Snapdragon X or X2, which is the latest version, all of Those will be copilot plus species. On the other systems x64 intel or AMD, you have to get specific processors. So in the intel side, it's Intel Core Ultra, but not H series. Those are Arrow Lake, but this is Lunar Lake and Panther Lake, right? Yes. And anything amd Zen 5 Ryzen AI processes will meet that spec as well. These computers always come with at least 16 gigabytes of RAM. They come with two, at least 256 gigs of storage. That's actually kind of unusual these days.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:59]:
But 512 is probably more common, even with all the component shortages we have now. And it will be running whatever. The latest version of Windows 11, this is 24H2, but that was what it was at the time. Today most of them are 25H2. The next episode we'll get on to whatever the next version is, but for now that's where those things are at. So the primary selling point of a Copilot plus PC, oddly, was this local AI capability. We looked at local AI a little bit in the last episode, but this is very specifically local AI that runs against the mpu. And the point of that is that an MPU is incredibly efficient, like dramatically more efficient than a CPU or a gpu.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:44]:
So if you can offload that stuff, it does not Impact battery life for the most part, and it the overall performance is much better. The problem is that it's kind of hard to find features that are very specifically MPU based. If you use any creative apps like the Adobe Creative Cloud apps or Affinity or whatever it might be, video editors especially, they will typically have certain features that run against the mpu. But you don't really know that it's happening. So it's kind of one of those things that's happening in the background. You don't really, you know, there's nothing advertising that it's happening. To me, the reasons you buy a Copilot Plus PC, especially if it's based on Snapdragon, meaning a Windows 11 on ARM PC, is that they tend to be dramatically more efficient and reliable. The performance is incredible.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:31]:
The one thing you don't get is really top level gaming performance because they don't really have the GPUs, just aren't there and they have to emulate those things. But for standard productivity work or creator type tasks, whether it's, you know, graphics, video, whatever, the Snapdragon XF is just amazing. They also tend to get much better battery life. Even the intel and AMD based laptops could be in the 7 to maybe 11 or 12 hour range. Snapdragon tends to be somewhere above that. But they're very, very good overall. So we've talked about different Copilot plus PC features over time. I'm going to go through the list now just to kind of catch us up to where it's at today.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:13]:
And I'll start with the things that Microsoft announced two years ago. Right. The initial set of features, the first and most infamous is this thing here, recall. It's opening on the other screen here. So let me get through that little guy. It's a little slow going to bring it over here so you can see it. So I've only been, I don't typically use this feature myself. I, I started this on this computer earlier today, so at least there would be something here.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:43]:
But you can see the types of things I've been doing here. If you were following along with this podcast, you've seen these things. So this is a timeline view that's not going to be too extensive because I've only been using it today. But you get the idea. Here's where we are at the start of the show. The point of recall is that it uses screenshots to record what you're doing so that you can later go back and search. So if I go back to home Here, for example, and I type in Copilot because we just did that. One of the things that AI is very good at and the reason it uses screenshots is the image to text capabilities are just instantaneous, right? And so you can see if you look at each of these things, the word copilot is somewhere in there, you know, and that's because even though it's an image, it can see the words in the image and it brings it up really quick.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:37]:
There have been some controversies around Recall, which are completely unwarranted. But the security subsystem, which we'll talk about in a bit, that's built into all these copilot plus PCs is rather incredible. And well, you didn't see it, but I had a difficult time just signing in to see this in the first place. I mean, that's the point. They actually do protect this stuff very effectively, Microsoft does. And it's also stored locally, it's in a secure enclave, et cetera, et cetera. But depending on who you are and what you need or the way you think, if you're visual, I think this is a really neat way to find things that you did. And there are controls for this in settings and so forth for like storage space and all that.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:16]:
But it's really not that egregious. There's a couple of sort of legacy features that also have been pulled into the Copilot plus PC sphere. Live captions have been around for a while. It supports real time translation capabilities. You could bring up a YouTube video which may or may not even have that built in. But if it doesn't, live Captions in Windows 11 will translate that on the fly, which is really cool. So for English, it supports over 25 other languages translating into English, but it supports, I think a total of 40 or more languages. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:47]:
So you can go back and forth. Windows Studio effects. That one I could probably show. This is a dicey. Yeah, so this is the, I'm recording on a camera here. This is the, the primary camera in the laptop. Right. So I'm just going to move this over so I can see it.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:03]:
But this is the Windows Studio effects control. And this is where you can do all the goofy kind of, well, effects. Right. Some of these are horrible. Actually that one's terrible. I'm not going to do that. But automatic framing. So, you know, if I, if the camera supports it, it will kind of pan with me.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:20]:
This one I guess doesn't. But yeah, I kind of look like a Pixar cartoon there. But you can do different things, you know, depending on the capabilities. The camera do all that stuff there. And that's pretty good. And then I mentioned the security features. Right. So this is Windows hello Enhanced sign in Security.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:37]:
If you look at the Settings app, you go down to sign in options. By default every Copilot plus PC has this capability. You can get this on other non copilot plus PCs. But you can see here this sort of is what he's saying. So if you're using anything that's a pin, a fingerprint reader, I don't think this computer really doesn't say, yeah, it doesn't support it or facial recognitions. It's using Windows low ess, so super secure. That's great. So that was basically what they announced at launch.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:09]:
That was two years ago. But they've added a bunch of new features since. Right, We've talked about some of this stuff, but. Well actually I'm sure we talked about all of this stuff. If you bring up something like Paint for example. Actually let me just load a, an image in here. I'll take a screenshot from a game and then I will make that so you can see it. So you get this Copilot menu which probably is going to go away, at least the icon.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:36]:
But this is the most features you'll see in this menu if you have a Copilot plus PC. If you have a Copilot plus PC running on Snapdragon, you get features that are not available in other Windows 11 PCs. So for example, I can use Restyle. I could say I want this to. I want to take this image, but turn it into an oil painting style of image and it will take a little while. This is running locally, so you download a model the first time you run this. So using the language from last episode, this is an slm, a local AI model. It's not running against the cloud.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:11]:
And you can see this here, which is actually really cool. And then there's different styles of course. Right. And so maybe we'll try like pixel art or something and generate. I think Restyle might be. That's good. That's awesome. I think this one might actually be Snapdragon only.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:29]:
But most of those other options will be on every Copilot plus PC and then some of them are on just every PC. But for the best experience on this app, you want to get the, you know, the Snapdragon 1 photos we don't have to spend too much time on. But we've gone through that as well and run it on this app. So on this PC. So God knows what it's going to do here. But okay, so here's some photos from some time ago, but that's fine. And if we go into Edit but won't let me go and edit. Why is that? I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:01]:
But anyway you get all the AI editing features, etc. Notepad is one of those apps that is changing on this computer. It has changed. So I asked it. I, I used their, the writing tools earlier to write a, a description of AI and all the different terminology. And that's what this is. What you see here, this used to be a Copilot menu. They're starting to get rid of the Copilot options but the, I'm sorry, the Copilot icons.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:28]:
But the options are still there. All the AI writing tools and on a Copilot plus PC you have the opportunity to say I don't want to use the cloud for this, I want to use the local model instead. And you know, with the pluses and minuses that go along with that and if you're offline, you're on a plane, whatever, you could still generate text, summarize text, you know, make it shorter, make it longer, set, change the tone, all that kind of stuff. So very, very cool. Let me bring that page back up. Click to do to me is the single best feature for Copilot plus vcs. In the beginning Microsoft was very heavily marketing that recall feature. But to me this is the big one.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:07]:
You hold down the Windows key and click with the mouse. It highlights all the things you can do something with. In this case it's all text and when you select it, it gives you the options that you can do. So copy is just the standard clipboard thing. You can open this in a different app, et cetera, search the web. This used to be, you know, search with Bing. It's kind of interesting. It's actually changed summarize so you get like text related options, right.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:33]:
And so you could do something here where you're rewriting this text to make it in this case more casual. And once it finishes with this, you can copy that to the clipboard and paste it somewhere else. Right. It has similar options for images, right. And so basically anything you can see on screen you can then interact with. And there are features like Copilot Vision that let you go in there and kind of describe what you want to do and then share part of the screen with the Copilot app. If you want to do. There's a whole kind of a.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:06]:
But as Far as like Copilot plus PC specific to me, the click to do stuff is just astonishing. If you bring up the settings app on a co Pilot plus PC you get additional features based that are running on local AI. In this case it's actually a settings agent. So they've trained an AI agent that runs locally to understand all of the settings that are available in Windows. So if you don't know the exact name of something, you could just use whatever your natural language is. And this is where you type something like, you know, I want to make the screen dark or I guess light because it is dark. And this is where you know it understands, you know this. The feature that does this is.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:51]:
And actually in this case it's. That's kind of a weird. It's doing brightness. Not what I would like, but I want to like use dark mode. Maybe it's trying to think through what it is you're trying to do. Now it knows that I'm using dark mode and it provides this kind of inline control where I can switch back and forth. I don't actually have to go to the thing. And I think this is the most AI thing in the world when you think about it, because AI at a very high level, it should be saving you time and money and getting rid of Rigamarole.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:25]:
And I guess you could become an expert in this app. And I guess I sort of am. I write books about Windows, etc. But I know, for example I can go into personalization and there it is, that's the setting. But most people might not know that and they might have to look at the screen and think about it. If you can just type what you want and then control it from there, who cares where it is. This is a new way to do things. This is very powerful.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:53]:
This capability is available also in search, which is not that, which is this. It's available in File Explorer right through the search box. It's the same thing. You know, I have a file somewhere on my computer or in OneDrive or in some other provider. I know that it's something to do with like a green sweater or whatever the term is. I don't know the name of the file, I don't know where it is. And you can just do that same kind of natural language search, right? And then past this or whatever third party apps, you know, I use affinity for graphics. For example, there are video editors like I think DaVinci Resolve that will use the MPU in a copilot plus PC if you have it.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:39]:
So you know it's been two years and the availability of apps that run against the MPU in a Copilot plus PC has expanded pretty dramatically. You can go in here and there's an AI hub. And this is a little confusing because this is actually a mix of local and cloud based AI. But you can see some of the AI apps that are available through the store through this kind of dedicated point. And I feel like this should be a Copilot plus PC specific area of apps, but I don't see that. But you know, Cap Cut is an example of an app that has local AI features, Photoshop absolutely does, et cetera. So you can find some of that stuff in the store. So the question though, it's.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:22]:
It's 2026 and we're starting to see the next generation of chips from Qualcomm, AMD and Intel are starting to appear more powerful MPUs also obviously more powerful GPUs and CPUs. But we, we have this notion of AI PCs, which Copilot Plus PC is, but it's an AI PC with a more powerful MPU. And then we of course just have PCs. And intel and AMD especially are still shipping chips that don't have powerful MPUs. So a lot of people buying computers today still are getting computers that can't run a lot of those things I just showed you. And I guess the question is whether or not Copilot plus PC continues as a brand. Do they start moving this stuff down? Do they make it available to computers that have GPUs, which I think would make sense. It's kind of hard to say.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:10]:
This year we've talked about how Microsoft is focusing on quality and addressing the pain points in Windows. One of those things is like getting rid of Copilot icons, but that doesn't mean it's getting rid of Copilot plus PC capabilities. And just as we record this, we're starting to see the first Copilot Plus PCs based on the second gen Snapdragon X2 platform, which is actually very exciting. And it's a big enough of a topic that I will talk about that specifically next week. So we'll keep going with this. Thank you so much for watching. Hopefully you found this useful. You can find out more about Hands on Windows on the Twit website at Twitt TV hr.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:51]:
We have a new episode every Thursday. Thank you for watching again, especially to our Club Twit members. If you're not a Club Twit member, you can learn more about that program at TWiT TV Club. Club TWiT. Thank you. See you next week.