Windows has a major AI problem, and it's pushing me closer to Apple

Digital Trends

3 hours ago

Just over a year ago, Apple Intelligence was announced. It continues to be somewhat of a 'meh' affair compared to other rival products like Microsoft's Copilot and Google's Gemini. What was not 'meh' was the support for Apple's generative AI bundle, which extended all the way back to the M1 silicon introduced in 2020.
Even the fresh batch of AI features — such as live translations and intelligent Shortcuts — are fully supported on the machines that will soon be five generations old. I can't say the same about Windows and its AI-powered rebirth with the Copilot package. Before confusion ensues, let me clear things up.
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Copilot is a suite of AI features, just like Gemini or Apple Intelligence. Then we have Copilot+ machines, which is a branding for PCs that meet certain hardware-level requirements to enable AI-powered features on Windows laptops and PCs. Here's the weird part. A healthy bunch of Intel silicon launched in 2025 — even those in the powerful 'H' class — don't meet those AI processing requirements.
All of it has created a weird kind of divide in the Windows ecosystem where certain advanced AI features are locked to a handful of cheaper machines, even if you paid a much higher price to get a laptop with a far more powerful processor. Oddly, it's not just the hardware, but the software experience that now feels different.
Copilot+ is not merely AI hype
Before we get into the hardware limitations, let's break down the features. Copilot+ machines require a powerful hardware chip for AI acceleration to enable certain features, down to the OS level. For example, in the Settings app, Microsoft is pushing its own Mu small language model (SML) that runs entirely on the NPU.
The NPU on a chip, however, must meet a certain performance baseline, something not even Intel and AMD silicon launched in 2025 fulfill universally. Let's start with the AI-powered Settings app interactions. It can now understand natural language queries and make suggestions so that users can directly take action with a click.
If you type something like 'My screen doesn't feel smooth,' the Settings app will show a dialog box underneath the search bar, where you get an actionable button to increase the refresh rate and make the interactions smoother. Apple is chasing something similar and has implemented it within the Spotlight system in macOS Tahoe.
Next, we have Recall. It's like a time machine system that takes snapshots of your PC activity in the background and analyzes them contextually. In the future, if you seek to revisit or find something, you can simply type a natural language query and find a record of the activity, complete with a link to the webpage or app you were working with. It almost feels magical, and you can read more about my experience here.
The crucial benefit is that a healthy bunch of Copilot+ AI features will run on-device, which means they won't require an internet connection. That's convenient, but in hindsight, it's a huge sigh of relief that all user activity remains locked to your device and nothing is sent to servers.
Copilot+ hardware also enables a bunch of creative features such as Cocreator and Generative Fill in Paint, Super Resolution, Image Creator, and Restyle in the native Photos app. But there are a few that are meaningful for day-to-day PC usage. With Click to Do in the Snipping Tool, the AI analyzes the text and image on the screen, somewhat like Google Lens and Apple Intelligence.
You can select text, look it up on the web with a single click, send email, open a website, summarize, rewrite, and take a wide range of image actions such as copy, share, visual search in Bing, erase objects, remove background, and do more — without ever opening another app.
On the more practical side of things, we have translated Live Captions that cover over 40 languages. The translation and captioning happen in real-time and work during video calls and video watching, too. Finally, we have Windows Studio Effects, which can perform chores such as automatic frame adjustment, portrait lighting tweaks, switch background effects, minimize noise, and even make gaze adjustment.
The Copilot+ hardware wall
Even if you splurge $4,899 on a Razer Blade 18 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and Nvidia's top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 5090 graphics, your beastly gaming laptop still won't be able to run the Copilot+ features in Windows 11. That's because the NPU on this processor can only manage 13 TOPS, but a pint-sized $800 Microsoft tablet with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor can handle all the exclusive Copilot+ features just fine.
It's disheartening, because the Copilot+ experiences in Windows 11 are meaningful OS advancements. Most of them, at least. I have used a few of them extensively, and they feel like a practical evolution. Yet, depriving machines that merely miss out on a powerful NPU, despite packing plenty of compute and graphics processing power, is simply unfortunate.
Microsoft has laid out tight hardware requirements for machines that can bear the Copilot+ badge — 256GB of storage, 16GB DDR5 RAM, and a processor with a dedicated AI accelerator chip that can output a minimum of 40 TOPS performance. That's a bottleneck from both ends.
First, there are still a healthy bunch of machines that ship with 8GB of RAM, and that too, the DDR4 type memory. Take, for example, the Asus Vivobook 17, which costs $700 and ships with 8GB of DDR4 memory on the entry-point configuration, even with the variant that packs a 13th-generation Intel processor.
Let's say you pay up to reach 16GB of RAM. Despite that added stress on your wallet, you are still limited by the RAM type and won't be able to run Copilot+ tools on the machine. It's worth mentioning that there are a LOT of Windows machines that still pack 8GB of RAM, and even when they go up to 16GB capacity, they still rely on the DDR4-type memory.
Now, it's time to address the elephant in the room. The silicon situation. The latest from Intel is the Ultra 200 series processor family, which is bifurcated across Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake lines. These Ultra 200 series processors are available in four formats: V-series, U-series, H-series, HX-series, and H-series.
Out of the four brackets, only the V-series processors support Copilot+ experiences on Windows 11. Even the enthusiast-class H and HX series processors don't meet the NPU requirements, and as such, they are devoid of the Copilot+ AI features. As perplexing as the situation remains with Intel Core 200 series silicon, the situation with AMD and its Copilot+ readiness isn't too different.
At the moment, only AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series processors fall under the Copilot+ bracket. That means if you invested in a top-shelf AMD silicon in the past few years, or even aim to build an AMD gaming rig this year, you either lose out on Copilot+ perks or must pick from the Ryzen AI 300 series line-up.
Even older Macs do better
The situation with Copilot+ is weird because it has created fault lines in the Windows 11 experience that don't make sense, neither from a price perspective, nor from a firepower angle. It even makes one feel bad about spending a fortune on a top-tier Intel processor, only to find it locked beyond next-gen AI features in Windows 11 because the NPU isn't up to the task.
The only other option is to pick a Qualcomm Snapdragon X-series processor. But in doing so, you run into the compatibility hurdles that come with Windows on Arm. Plus, the GPU limitations rule out gaming or other demanding tasks where you need a powerful GPU. Right now, it seems like Copilot+ is a bag of serious caveats.
And as Microsoft's team comes with more AI-first experiences, the gulf within Windows 11 is only going to widen. An $800 Copilot+ machine will run native AI experiences that even a powerful desktop won't be able to handle in the near future. The situation within the Apple ecosystem is just the opposite.
Even if you have a nearly five-year-old M1 MacBook Air, you can run all the Apple Intelligence features just fine. Now, one can argue that AI is not the deciding factor for picking up a laptop. But as companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google deeply integrate AI packages such as Copilot, Siri, and Gemini across their OS at the native level, these AI features will essentially serve as a key computing evolution.
Google has already given us a glimpse of how tightly interweaving Gemini across its Workspace tools can flesh out, and somewhat similar is the progress of Apple Intelligence within maCOS. But when it comes to the OS-level AI progress, it's Microsoft that finds itself in an odd place where a huge chunk of Windows 11 users are going to feel left out, while macOS users will move forward just fine even on aging hardware.