AI PCs are here and they are cheaper than you may have expected – the Microsoft Surface Laptop starts at $1,000 and comes in two sizes (13.8” and 15”) and it is a thin, light, portable and yet powerful device that showcases all of Windows 11 AI smarts (as well as third-party AI features). Microsoft has a whole blog post introducing the new brand of “Copilot+ PCs”.
These are AI-focused devices that have at least 40 TOPS on tap, so that they can run many AI tasks locally (good for latency and, of course, privacy). Redmond has partnered with Samsung , Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo, all of which have introduced their takes on a Copilot+ PC – laptops, all of them, and all powered by the Snapdragon X chip from Qualcomm. The new Microsoft Surface Laptop with a Snapdragon X chipset The Surface Laptop is powered by either the Snapdragon X Elite or the Snapdragon X Plus .
The former has a 12-core CPU, the former 10-core. However, both chips deliver 45 TOPS of AI compute power, earning them the Copilot+ badge. The $1,000 model is the 13.
8” version with the X Plus chip, of course. We will talk about prices in more detail at the end of this post, but let’s just say that switching to the X Elite chip is a $400 upgrade. Well, $200, actually, because of how memory configurations work out.
The $1,000 X Plus laptop comes with 16GB of RAM and 256GB storage, a 16/512GB X Plus laptop is $1,200. The X Elite version has 16/512GB configuration as minimum, so only half of the $400 p.
