AI PCs have been trickling out since CES 2024, where Intel and AMD kind of unleashed AI-capable laptop processors onto the world. Since then, there's been this tacit understanding that a second generation would be hitting the market, that would integrate AI features directly into Windows 11, and, well, with Microsoft Copilot+ . That time is now.

To be clear, Microsoft Copilot has been around for a while, driving Microsoft's nascent push into AI technology, but Copilot+ brings a lot of the computation that was being done in the cloud directly to your laptop. That requires special hardware to handle, of course, but luckily, this announcement was paired with new hardware from basically every company that makes laptops – hardware that is specially designed to tackle the heavy-duty computing of AI workloads without being housed in a massive chassis that will literally weigh you down. The Tensor cores in Nvidia's graphics cards have made hardware-accelerated AI possible on a consumer PC for a while.

But with the new Snapdragon X Elite platform and the just-announced Intel Lunar Lake processors , you can get powerful AI capabilities in a device as thin and light as the new Surface Laptop. Because Microsoft is trying to declare a whole new class of laptop with Copilot+, there's of course a ton of new laptops pouring out onto the market right now. And that's on top of the new Surface devices that'll get more of a spotlight at Microsoft Build on May 21.

Dell is putting all of its egg.